38 PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 
It is clearly true that our bodies constitute the normal means of 
manifesting ourselves to each other while on the planet; and that if 
the physiological mechanism whereby we accomplish material acts is 
injured, the conveyance of our meaning and the display of our personality 
inevitably and correspondingly suffer. 
So conspicuously is this the case that it has been possible to suppose 
that the communicating mechanism, formed and worked by us, is the 
whole of our existence: and that we are essentially nothing but the 
machinery by which we are known. We find the machinery utilising 
nothing but well-known forms of energy, and subject to all the laws of 
chemistry and physics,—it would be strange if it were not so,—and from 
that fact we try to draw valid deductions as to our nature, and as to the 
impossibility of our existing apart from and independent of these 
temporary modes of material activity and manifestation. We so 
uniformly employ them, in our present circumstances, that we should 
be on our guard against deception due to this very uniformity. Material 
bodies are all that we have any control over, are all that we are experi- 
mentally aware of; anything that we can do with these is open to us; 
any conclusions we can draw about them may be legitimate and true. 
But to step outside their province and to deny the existence of any other 
region because we have no sense organ for its appreciation, or because 
(like the Ether) it is too uniformly omnipresent for our ken, is to wrest 
our advantages and privileges from their proper use and apply them to 
our own misdirection. 
But if we have learnt from science that Evolution is real, we have 
learnt a great deal. I must not venture to philosophise, but certainly 
from the point of view of science Evolution is a great reality. Surely 
evolution is not an illusion; surely the universe progresses in time. 
Time and Space and Matter are abstractions, but are none the less 
real: they are data given by experience; and Time is the keystone of 
evolution. ‘Thy centuries follow each other, perfecting a small wild 
flower.’ 
We abstract from living moving Reality a certain static aspect, and 
we call it Matter; we abstract the element of progressiveness, and we 
call it Time. When these two abstractions combine, co-operate, 
interact, we get reality again. It is like Poynting’s theorem. 
The only way to refute or confuse the theory of Evolution is to 
introduce the subjectivity of time. That theory involves the reality 
of time, and it is in this sense that Prof. Bergson uses the great phrase 
“Creative Evolution.’ 
I see the whole of material existence as a steady passage from past 
to future, only the single instant which we call the present being actual. 
The past is not non-existent however, it is stored in our memories, there 
