THE ANNUAL ADDRESS. 



RECONSTRUCTION AND RESTATEMENT 

 By Dr. Silvanus P. Thompson, F.RS. 



HOWEVER inadequate may be some of the arguments 

 employed by advocates of the school of philosophy 

 styling itself Monism, there is undoubtedly a bottom truth 

 underlying the idea that life is in its widest sense one. 

 Nature is not infinitely divorced from art ; matter is not 

 separable from form ; thought is not indefinitely remote from 

 energy ; nor is the gulf between religion and science incapable 

 of being bridged over. Faith and reason are not mutually 

 incompatible, however different may seem at first sight the 

 provinces in which each appears supreme. For neither is 

 the human being constructed with intellectual bulkheads 

 which prevent intercommunication between the faculties, nor 

 is man's nature so delimited off from the nature of other kinds 

 of organic life as to preclude the direct interaction of forces 

 whether physical or psychic. Man is in fact to an extent more 

 largely understood in recent times than of yore, a product of 

 his environment. Eeligion is a part of that environment, and 

 has had no small share in moulding man to that which 

 morally, socially, and intellectually he is to-day. He has been 

 slowly learning the laws of the physical part of his 

 environment ; he is also, but more slowly, learning those of the 

 spiritual part. If of late he has been beginning to understand 

 that the physical part of his environment, the world of things 

 and forces, is not so exclusively dominant as his teachers of 

 thirty years ago would have had him think ; and if he has 

 become more willing to admit the existence of moral and 

 spiritual things as a complement to the physical cosmos, he has 

 also had his eyes opened to see that in the world of moral and 

 spiritual forces there is a call for the play of his trained reason. 

 The widening of outlook on the physical side finds its counter- 

 part on the moral and religious side. The development which 

 has brought about the reconstitution of science involves in 

 fact a restatement of religion. 



Man cannot remain stationary in a state of arrested 

 development amidst the play of forces by which he is 

 surrounded. Evolution takes its course whether he is conscious 

 of it or not ; its operations are not dependent, save to a very 

 secondary degree, upon his will or his consciousness. The child 



B 2 



