2 THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 
these, physical science will—in view of its revolutionary discoveries in 
recent years—be a most important source. But no less important will 
be the contribution of the biological sciences with their clear revelation 
of organic structure and function as well as of organic evolution. And 
last, not least, the social and mental sciences will not only supply valuable 
material, but especially methods of interpretation, insights into meanings 
and values, without which the perspectives of our world-picture would be 
hopelessly wrong. 
Can we from some reunion or symposium of these sciences obtain a 
world-picture or synoptic view of the universe, based on observation and 
calculation, which are the instruments of science, but reaching beyond the 
particular phenomena which are its immediate field to a conception of the 
universe as a whole ? 
That was how science began—in the attempt to find some simple 
substances or elements to which the complex world of phenomena could 
in the last analysis be reduced. The century over which we now look 
back, with its wonderful advance in the methods and technique of exact 
observation, has been a period of specialisation or decentralisation. Have 
we now reached a point where science can again become universal in its 
ultimate outlook ? Has a scientific world-picture become possible ? 
Of course there can be no final picture at any one stage of culture. 
The canvas is as large as the universe, and the moving finger of humanity 
itself will fill it in from age to age. All the advances of knowledge, all 
the new insights gained from those advances will from time to time be 
blended into that picture. To the deeper insight of every era of our 
human advance there has been some such world-picture, however vague 
and faulty. It has been continually changing with the changing know- 
ledge and beliefs of man. Thus, there was the world of magic and animism, 
which was followed by that of the early nature gods. There was the 
geocentric world which still survives in the world of commonsense. 
There is the machine or mechanistic world-view dominant since the time 
of Galileo and Newton, and now, since the coming of Einstein, being 
replaced by the mathematician’s conception of the universe as a symbolic 
structure of which no mechanical model is possible. All these world-views 
have in turn obtained currency according as some well-defined aspect of 
our advancing knowledge has from time to time been dominant. My 
object to-night is to focus attention on the sort of world-picture which 
results from the advances of physical, biological and mental science during 
the period covered roughly by the activities of our Association. 
