230 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
In all these cases a psychology that ignores the all-pervading purposive- 
ness of human life is of no use; for, if it is consistent, important words 
that are essential to the intelligent discussion of human affairs (such words 
as motive, intention, desire, will, responsibility, aspiration, ideal, striving, 
effort, interest) are of no meaning for it; or, if they are used, are used 
with a meaning so thin and so different from that of ordinary discourse, 
that profitable converse with the practical man is impossible. 
I leave that large topic with these few words and pass to my third 
consideration in support of the policy of boldness. Thirty to forty years 
ago, when I began to study science, considerable moral courage would 
have been required to insist upon the purposive nature of man. For at 
that time the great wave of scientific materialism was still but little past 
its climax. It was the day of Spencer and Huxley, of Clifford and Tyndal, 
of Lange and Weismann, of Verworn and Bain. The world and all the 
living things in it were presented to us with so much prestige and confidence, 
as one vast system of mechanistic determination, that one seemed to be 
placed before two acutely opposed alternatives: on the one hand, science 
and universal mechanism; on the other hand, humanism, religion, 
mysticism and superstition. 
But to-day how different is the situation! Even at the date I speak of, 
a few great physicists warned us against regarding the principles of physical 
science as adequate to the interpretation of human life. And to-day those 
few voices have swelled to a chorus which even the deafest biologist can 
hardly ignore. Einstein and Eddington and Soddy and a score of others 
repeat the warnings of Maxwell and Kelvin and Poynting and Rayleigh. 
And the physical universe of eternal hard atoms and universal elastic 
ether, the realm of pure mechanics, has become a welter of entities and 
activities which change and develop and disappear like the figures of the 
kaleidoscope. The psychologist who would believe in the efficiency of 
human effort no longer needs to fling himself in vain against the problem— 
How can Mind deflect an atom from its predetermined course ? For the 
atoms are gone; matter has resolved itself into energy ; and what energy 
is no man can tell, beyond saying—It is the possibility of change, of further 
evolution. 
In physiology the mechanistic confidence of the nineteenth century is 
fading away, as the complexity of the living organism is more fully realised, 
as its powers of compensation, self-regulation, reproduction and repair are 
more fully explored. 
In general biology the mechanistic Neo-Darwinism is bankrupt before 
the problems of evolution, the origin of variations and mutations, the 
differentiation and specialisation of instincts, the increasing réle of intelli- 
gent adaptation, the predominance of mind in the later stages of the evolu- 
tionary process, the indications of purposive striving at even the lowest 
levels, the combination of marvellous persistency of type with indefinite 
plasticity which pervades the realm of life and which finds its only analogue 
in the steadfast purposive adaptive striving of a resolute personality. 
All these considerations, I say, should encourage us to claim autonomy 
for psychology, the right to choose, shape, and refine its own fundamental 
conceptions. We should now easily find the courage to be anthropo- 
morphic in describing man. Instead of accepting the abstract conceptions 
of physical science and attempting to build up from them a plausible 
