THE 516th OKDINAEY GENEEAL MEETING 



WAS HELD IN 



THE LECTURE HALL OF THE EOYAL SOCIETY OF 

 ARTS, BY KIND PERMISSION, ON MONDAY, 3rd APRIL, 

 1911, AT 4.30 P.M. 



The Veneeable the Archdeacon of London took the 



Chaie. 



The Minutes of the preceding meeting were read and confirmed. The 

 names of two Associates, Major Henry Pelhara Burn and Wilson 

 Edwards Leslie, Esq., elected by the Council this day, were announced. 



The Rev. Canon Girdlestone was then invited to read his paper. 



INDICATIONS OF A SCHEME IN THE UNIVERSE, 

 By the Eev. Canon E. B. Girdlestone, M.A. 



THE universe is practically infinite and eternal. To know it 

 you must study things material and immaterial ; things 

 past, present, and future ; things below and above ; things good 

 and evil. If a philosopher could live a million years and were 

 in a position to estimate all movements physical and spiritual, 

 and if he understood the bearing of each part on the whole, he 

 would have taken a step in the direction of the scheme of the 

 universe ; but he w^ould have even then to say. Who is sufficient 

 for these things ? Meanwhile undeterred by difficulties, 

 astronomers are photographing the heavens and studying the 

 ways of some hundreds of thousands of stars ; physicists are 

 forming theories to account for the minutim of material existence; 

 and biologists are probing the beginnings of life, animal and 

 vegetable. These students of nature meet together {e.g., in the 

 British Association) and go over the border into one another's 

 domains ; they compare results, detect analogies, and as a 

 consequence they proclaim w^ith one voice the Unity of Nature. 



This is something. It testifies to the power of the human mind 

 to detect oneness of principle beneath the manifold presentations 

 of sense, and to get above the transient into the sphere of the 

 permanent — or at least the comparatively permanent. 



