16 THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 
sealed, with the inevitable running down of the solar system. Life and 
mind, instead of being the natural flowering of the universe, are thus 
reduced to a very casual and inferior status in the cosmic order. A new 
meaning and a far deeper poignancy are given to Shakespeare’s immortal 
lines: 
‘We are such stuff 
As dreams are made of; and our little life 
Is rounded with a sleep.’ 
According to astronomy, life is indeed a lonely and pathetic thing in this 
physical universe—a transient and embarrassed phantom in an alien, if 
not hostile, universe. 
Such are some of the depressing speculations of recent astronomical 
theory. Butin some respects they have already been discounted in the 
foregoing. For even if life be merely a terrestrial phenomenon, itis by 
no means in an alien environment if, as we have seen reason to think, 
this is an essentially organic universe. In its organic aspects the universe 
is on the way to life and mind, even if the goal has been actually 
reached at only one insignificant point in the universe. The potencies 
of the universe are fundamentally of the same order as its actualities. 
The universe might say in the words of Rabbi Ben Ezra :— 
“All I could never be, 
All man ignored in me, 
This I was worth to God.’ 
Then again, the very possibility of perception, of knowledge and 
science depends on an intimate relation between mind and the physical 
universe. Only thus can the concepts of mind come to be a measure for 
the facts of the universe, and the laws of nature come to be revealed 
and interpreted by nature’s own organ of the human mind. Besides 
science we have other forms of this inner relation between the mind and 
the universe, such as poetry, music, art and religion. The human spirit is 
not a pathetic wandering phantom of the universe, but is at home, and meets 
with spiritual hospitality and response everywhere. Our deepest thoughts 
and emotions and endeavours are but responses to stimuli which come 
to us, not from an alien, but from an essentially friendly and kindred 
universe. So far from the cosmic status of life and mind being degraded 
by the newer astronomy and physics, I would suggest an alternative 
interpretation of the facts, more in accord with the trend of evolutionary 
science. We have seen a macroscopic universe born or revealed to 
