14 THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 



at the height of its vertebrate development reason is there as well as 

 instinct. Yet in both one outcome seems to be the welding ol individuals 

 into societies on a scale of organisation otherwise unattained. The 

 greatest social animal is man ; the powers that make him so are mental — 

 language, tradition, instinct for the preservation of the community, as 

 well as for the preservation of the individual; reason actuated by 

 emotion and sentiment and controlling and welding egoistic and 

 altruistic instincts into one broadly harmonious, instinctive-rational 

 behaviour. Just as the organisation of the cell-colony into an animal 

 individual receives its highest contribution from the nervous system, so 

 the further combining of animal individuals into a multi-individual 

 organism, a social community, merging the interests of the individual 

 in the interests of the group, is due to the nervous system's crowning 

 attributes, the mental. That this integration is still in process, still 

 developing, is obvious from the whole course of human pre-history and 

 history. The biolo'gical study of it is essentially psychological ; it is the 

 scope and ambit of social psychology. Not the least important forai 

 of social psychology is that relatively new one, of which the President 

 of the Psychology Section at this meeting is a foremost authority and 

 exponent, namely, that dealing with the stresses and demands that 

 organised industry makes upon the individual as a unit in the com- 

 munity of our day, and with the readjustments it asks from that 

 community. 



To resume, then, we may, I think, conclude that in some of its 

 aspects animal life presents to us mechanism the how of which, despite 

 many gaps in our knowledge, is fairly explicable. Of not a few of 

 the processes of the. living body, such as muscular contraction, the 

 circulation of the blood, the respiratory intake and output by the 

 lungs, the nervous impulse and its journeyings, we may fairly feel 

 from what we know of them already that further application of physics 

 and chemistry will furnish a competent key. We may suppose that 

 in the same sense as we can claim to-day that the principles of 

 working of a gas-engine or an electro-motor are comprehensible to 

 us, so will the bodily working in such mechanisms be understood 

 by us, and indeed are largely so already. It may well be possible 

 to understand the principle of a mechanism which we have not 

 the means or skill ourselves to construct. "We cannot construct the 

 atoms of a gas-engine. But, turning to other aspects of animal 

 mechanism, such as the shaping of the animal body, the conspiring of its 

 structural units to compass later functional ends, the predetemiination 

 of specific gi'owth from egg to adult, the predetermined natural term 

 of existence, these, and their intimate mechanism, we are, it seems 

 to me, despite many brilhant inquiries and inquirers, still at a loss 

 to understand. The steps of the results are known, but the springs 



