158 071 the hiheritance of the Mental mid Moral Characters in Man 
in the motions of non-living than of living things. You may call a man who 
would link up the motion of living to non-living things a materialist. But the 
materialist in no way lessens the endless mystery of the universe. He knows not 
what matter is, why it moves, or how he comes to be conscious of its motion. He 
is but fulfilling the task of science, the linking of mystery to mystery, by bringing 
them under one common wider conception of the ultimately inexplicable. So it is 
when we pass from the lower living forms to man. If we see that his physical 
development is closely allied to brute development, we link mystery to mystery in 
a common description — a law if you like — but it removes no grain of the ultimate 
mystery of why life is there, and why it develops. Lastly, turning to the psychical 
character of man, to some the greatest of all mysteries, we link it up to the 
physical. We see the man, not only physically, but morally and mentally, the 
product of a long line of ancestry. We realise that evolution and selection play 
no greater, and play no less a part in the production of the psychical character 
than in the production of the physique of man. Once fully realise that the psychic 
is inherited in the same way as the physical, and there is no room left to 
differentiate one from the other in the evolution of man. Realise all this, and two 
mysteries have been linked into one mystery, but the total mystery is no less in 
magnitude, and no more explicable than it was before. We know not why living 
forms vary, nor why either physical or psychical characters are inherited, nor 
wherefore the existence at all of living forms, and their subjection to the great 
principle of selective evolution. We have learnt only a law common to the 
physical and the psychical; we have not raised the one or debased the other, because 
in a world where the ultimate source of change is utterly inexplicable, whether you 
strive to perceive it through matter like a physicist, through the lower living forms 
like the biologist, or through man like the anthropologist, all terminology like 
higher and lower is futile. Where the mystery is absolute in all cases, there can 
be no question of grade. 
But I would not leave you with a mere general declaration that all is mystery, 
that scientific ignorance of the ultimate is profound. Rather I would emphasise 
what I have endeavoured to show you to-night, that the mission of science is not 
to explain but to bring all things, as far as we are able, under a common law. Science 
gives no real explanation, but provides comprehensive description. In the narrower 
field it has to study how its general conceptions bear on the comfort and happiness 
of man. Herein, I think, lies especially the coming function of anthropology. 
Anthropology has in the first place to study man, to discover the sequence of his 
evolution from his present comparative stages and from his past history. But it 
cannot halt here; it must suggest how those laws can be applied to render our own 
human society both more stable and more efficient. In this function it becomes 
at least the handmaiden of statecraft, if indeed it were not truer to call it the 
preceptor of statesmen. 
If the conclusion we have reached to-night be substantially a true one, and for 
my part I cannot for a moment doubt that it is so, then what is its lesson for us as 
