THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 17 
sonsciousness out of a prior microscopic order of a very different character. 
re we not, in the emergence of life and mind, witnessing the birth or 
revelation of a new world out of the macroscopic physical universe? [ 
3U ggest that at the present cosmic epoch we are the spectators of what is 
pe haps the grandest event in the immeasurable history of our universe, 
and that we must interpret the present phase of the universe as a mother 
and child universe, still joined together by a placenta which science, in 
its divorce from the other great values, has hitherto failed to unravel. 
Piecing together these clues and conclusions we arrive at a world- 
picture fuller of mystery than ever. Ina way it is closer to commonsense 
aod kinder to human nature than was the science of the nineteenth 
century. Materialism has practically disappeared, and the despotic rule 
of necessity has been greatly relaxed. In ever varying degree the universe 
is organic and holistic through and through. Not only organic concepts, 
but also, and even more so, psychological viewpoints are becoming neces- 
sary to elucidate the facts of science. And while the purely human concepts, 
such as emotion and value, purpose and will, do not apply in the natural 
sciences, they retain their unimpaired force in the human sciences. The 
ancient spiritual goods and heirlooms of our race need not be tuthlessly 
scrapped. The great values and ideals retain their unfading glory and 
derive new interest and force from a cosmic setting. But in other respects 
it is a strange new universe, impalpable, immaterial, consisting not of 
material or stuff, but of organisation, of patterns or wholes which are 
unceasingly being woven to more complex or to simpler designs. In the 
large it appears to be a decaying, simplifying universe which attained to 
ts perfection of organisation in the far-distant past and is now regressing 
© simpler forms—perhaps for good, perhaps only to restart another cycle 
f organisation. But inside this cosmic process of decline we notice a 
smaller but far more significant movement—a streaming, protoplasmic 
tendency ; an embryonic infant world emerging, throbbing with passionate 
ife, and striving towards rational and spiritual self-realisation. We see 
he mysterious creative rise of the higher out of the lower, the more from 
he less, the picture within its framework, the spiritual kernel inside the 
h enomenal integuments of the universe. Instead of the animistic, or 
he mechanistic, or the mathematical universe, we see the genetic, organic, 
listic universe, in which the decline of the earlier physical patterns 
rovides the opportunity for the emergence of the more advanced vital 
nd rational patterns. 
In this holistic universe man is in very truth the offspring of the 
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