WTLLIAM B. D WIGHT. 57 



the address lately delivered at Montreal, before the 

 British Association for the Advancement of Science, by 

 its eminent president, Lord Rayleigh. He says : "Many 

 excellent peojue are afraid of science, as tending towards 

 materialism. That such apprehension should exist is 

 not surprising ; for unfortunately there are writers speak 

 ing in the name of science who have set themselves 

 to foster it. It is true that among scientific men, as in 

 other classes, crude views are to be met with as to the 

 deeper things of nature ; but that the life-long belief of 

 Newton, of Faraday and of Maxwell are inconsistent 

 with the scientific habit of mind, is a proposition which 

 I need not pause to refute." 



To the above words I may add a few of my own. I 

 am fully convinced that only a minor portion of the so- 

 called " materialism " of science is due to the scientists 

 who designedly, in the words of Lord Rayleigh, "have 

 set themselves to foster" this spirit. I believe this 

 tendency to be chiefly due to an unfortunate habit into 

 which many scientists have fallen, who have no designed 

 sympathy with what is understood as "materialism." I 

 refer to the habit of confining the province of natural 

 science as a specialism too rigidly and absolutely to the 

 physical side of natural objects. In the main this is 

 quite proper. But in the many cases where the physical 

 and the psychical are so intimately co-ordinated that 

 one cannot be philosophically treated nor understood 

 without the other, this is insisting on unphilosophical 

 and injurious limits, to the inevitable falsi ty of the results. 



But the remedy for this pseudo-materialism is within 

 the progress of scientific thought itself. There are evi- 

 dent signs that the needed reaction has already set in. 

 This reaction is well illustrated in the remarkable paper 

 entitled "Catagenesis," read recently before the Ameri- 

 can Association for the Advancement of Science, by Prof. 

 Edward I). Cope. 



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