2 THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 



of toil and the joy of craftsmanship, declaring that spiritual better- 

 ment was necessary to balance the world. Then came the President 

 of the Royal Society, a supreme Biochemist, on the perils of a leisure 

 made by science for a world unready for it, and the necessity for 

 planning future adjustment in social reconstructions. Followed 

 the Astronomer, deploring man's lack of moral self-control ; in 

 knowledge man stands on the shoulders of his predecessor, whereas 

 in moral nature they are on the same ground. The wreck of civilisa- 

 tion is to be avoided by more and not by less science. Lastly, the 

 Geologist gloried in the greatest marvel of millions of centuries of 

 development, the brain of man, with a cost in time and energy that 

 shows us to be far from the end of a mighty purpose, and looking 

 forward confidently to that further advance which alone can justify 

 the design and skill lavished on such a task. So the Geologist 

 pleads then for scientific attention to man's mind. He has the 

 same faith in the permanence of man's mind through the infinite 

 range of years 



' Which oft hath swept this toiling race of men 

 And all its laboured monuments away,' 



that is shown at the Grand Canyon, where, at the point exposing, 

 in one single view, over a billion and a half years of the world's 

 geological history, a tablet is put to the memory of Stephen Tyng 

 Mather, the founder of the National Park Service, bearing what is 

 surely the most astonishing scientific expression of faith ever so 

 inscribed : 



' There will never come an end to the good that he has done.' 



We have been pleading then in turn for ethical values, for spiritual 

 betterment, for right leisure, for moral advance, and for mental 

 development, to co-ordinate change in man himself with every 

 degree of advance in natural science in such a harmony that we may 

 at last call it Progress. This extension of our deeper concern beyond 

 our main concern is not really new, but it has taken a new direction. 

 I find that exactly one hundred years ago there was a full discussion 

 of the moral aspects, a protest that physical science was not indeed, 

 as many alleged, taking up so much of the attention of the public as 

 to arrest its study of the mind, of literature and the arts ; and a 

 round declaration that by rescuing scientists from the narrowness 

 of mind which is the consequence of limiting themselves to the 

 details of a single science, the Association was rendering ' the pre- 

 vailing taste of the time more subservient to mental culture.' A 

 study of these early addresses shows that we are more diffident to- 

 day in displaying the emotions and ideals by which I do not 

 doubt we are all still really moved. But they also show that we 



