264 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
physiologists of high standing to reject the mechanistic theory of life as 
unworkable, for I am not competent to discuss them, and they do not 
bear directly upon my argument. It will be both simpler and more to 
our purpose to raise, as William James did in the last chapter of his 
great treatise on psychology, the question of the higher esthetic, moral 
and intellectual qualities and achievements of man, and to ask how 
these are to be brought under the conceptions before us. To be fair 
we will not press the question how the emergence, say, of Beethoven’s 
Fifth Symphony is to be explained in terms of physics and chemistry ; 
for even the most stalwart mechanists hardly expect that it will actually 
be done; they only believe that conceivably it could be done. But it 
is both fair and necessary to ask how the things of which the symphony 
is typical can be accounted for on the principle of survival-value. 
James, facing this question with characteristic candour, felt bound to 
admit that they have ‘ no zoological utility.’ He concluded, therefore, 
that the powers and sensibilities which make them possible must be 
accidents—that is, collateral consequences of a brain-structure evolved 
with reference not to them but only to the struggle for material exist- 
ence. The premises granted, I do not see how the conclusion can be 
avoided; but surely it is extremely unacceptable. If, with Herbert 
Spencer, we could regard art merely as something wherewith to fill 
agreeably a leisure hour, we might be satisfied by the hypothesis that 
our sensibility to beauty in form, in colour and in sound, is an ‘ epi- 
phenomenon * having no significance in relation to the real business 
of life. But when we think of men whose art was in truth their life, 
and consider how eagerly the better part of mankind cherishes their 
memory and their works, it is next to impossible to be satisfied with 
that view. Or take the case of science. Votaries of pure science often 
seek to justify their ways to the outer world by the argument that dis- 
coveries which seemed at first to have only theoretical interest have 
often disclosed immense practical utility. It is a sound enough argu- 
ment to use to silence the Philistine, but would the pursuit of science 
lose any whit of its dignity and intrinsic value if it were untrue? For 
instance, would any member of this Association refuse his reverence 
to the great work of Albert Einstein even if it were certain that, in the 
words of the famous toast, it would never do anybody any good? I will 
not, lengthen the argument by extending it to the saints and the philoso- 
phers, for its point should be already sufficiently plain. The activities 
of ‘ our higher esthetic, intellectual and moral life’ have such intrinsic 
worth and importance that to regard their emergence as accidental and 
biologically meaningless is outrageously paradoxical. They must be 
at least of equal significance with anything else in man’s life, and may 
not unreasonably be held to contain the clue to life’s whole meaning. 
It may be helpful to put the conclusion in other language. Man’s 
life is a tissue of activities of which many are plainly conservative in 
nature. By this 1 mean that their function is directly or indirectly 
to maintain the existence of the race and the individual. Agriculture, 
industry, defence, medicine, are obvious instances of the type, and the 
list could easily be extended. But there are other activities—I have 
taken art and pure science as capital instances—whose character, in 
