12 THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 
only the revolution now taking place in thought could bring them together 
again. I believe, however, their reunion is coming fast. We have seen 
matter and life indefinitely approaching each other in the ultimate 
constituents of the world. We have seen that matter is fundamentally a 
configuration or organisation of space-time; and we have seen that life 
is a principle of organisation whereby the space-time patterns are arranged 
into organic unities. The next step is to show that mind is an even more 
potent embodiment of the organising whole-making principle, and that 
this embodiment has found expression in a rising series, which begins 
practically on the lowest levels of life, and rises ultimately to the conscious 
mind which alone Descartes had in view in his classification. I have no 
time to follow up the matter here beyond making a few remarks. 
Mind is admittedly an active, conative, organising principle. It is for 
ever busy constructing new patterns of things, thoughts or principles out 
of the material of its experience. Mind, even more than life, is a principle 
of whole-making. It differentiates, discriminates and selects from its 
vague experience, and fashions and correlates the resulting features into 
more or less stable, enduring wholes. Beginning as mere blind tropisms, 
reflexes and conditioned reflexes, mind in ‘organic nature has advanced 
‘step by step in its creative march until i man it has become nature’s 
supreme organ of understanding, endeavour and control—not merely a 
subjective human organ, but nature’s own power of self-illumination and 
self-mastery : ‘ The eye with which the universe beholds itself and knows 
itself divine.’ 
The free creativeness of mind is possible because, as we have seen, the 
world ultimately consists, not of material stuff, but of patterns, of organisa- 
tion, the evolution of which involves no absolute creation of an alien world 
of material from nothing. The purely structural character of reality thus 
helps to render possible and intelligible the free creativeness of life and 
mind, and accounts for the unlimited wealth of fresh patterns which mind 
freely creates on the basis of the existing physical patterns. 
The highest reach of this creative process is seen in the realm of values, 
which is the product of the human mind. Great as is the physical universe 
which confronts us as a given fact, no less great is our reading and evalua- 
tion of it in the world of values, as seen in language, literature, culture, 
civilisation, society and the state, law, architecture, art, science, morals 
and religion. Without this revelation of inner meaning and significance 
the external physical universe would be but an immense empty shell or 
crumpled surface. The brute fact here receives its meaning, and a new 
