THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 1 5 



of action still lie hidden. Then, again, the How of the mind's connection 

 with its bodily place seems still utterly an enigma. Similarity or identity 

 in time-relations and in certain other ways between mental and nervous 

 processes does not enlighten us as to the actual nature of the 

 connection existent between the two. Advance in biological science does 

 but serve to stress further the strictness of the nexus between the two. 

 Great differences of difficulty therefore confront our understanding 

 of different aspects of animal life. Yet the living creature is funda- 

 mentally a unity. In trying to make the how of an animal existencn 

 intelligible to our imperfect knowledge we have for purposes of study 

 to separate its whole into part-aspects and pai-t-mechanisms, but that 

 separation is artificial. It is as a whole, a single entity, that the animal, 

 or for that matter the plant, has finally and essentially to be envisaged. 

 We cannot really understand its one part without its other. Can we 

 suppose a unified entity which is part mechanism and part not ? One 

 privilege open to the human intellect is to attempt to comprehend, 

 not leaving out of account any of its propei'ties, the how of the living 

 creature as a whole. The problem is ambitious, but its importance and 

 its reward are all the greater if we seize and we attempt the full width 

 of its scope. In the biological synthesis of the individual it regards 

 mind. It includes examination of man himself as acting undei-" a 

 biological trend and process which is combining individuals into a 

 nudti-individual organisation, a social organism surely new in the history 

 of the planet. For this biological trend and process is constructing 

 a. social organism whose cohesion depends mainly on a property 

 developed so specifically in man as to be, liroadly speaking, his alone — 

 namely, a mind actuated by instincts but instrumented with reason. 

 Man, often Nature's rebel, as Sir Eay Lankester has luminously said, 

 can, viewing this great supra-individual process, shape even as individual 

 his course conformably with it, feeling that in this instance to rebel 

 would be to sink lower rather than to continue his own evolution 

 upward. 



1922 



