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BULLETIN OF THE NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY. 
scientific understanding of nature — implies an equal advance in 
higher mental development, and consequently in the direction of- 
our monistic religion.” 
The President remarked that while it was not impossible to 
conceive matter progressing from one stage to another until it is 
arranged in subtle and highly nervous form, it seems to be almost 
impossible to conceive of its inert masses becoming endowed with 
the capacity, through an evolving process, to think, to hope, to 
aspire, to imagine itself in fellowship with the Almighty and to 
plan for its continuance in some form for an immortal, a never- 
ending existence. 
In fact while we might argue that there is practically no dif- 
ference, except in degree, between the consciousness of the animal 
creation and the consciousness of man in all matters where experi- 
ence exists; while it might be mentioned that at some time in the 
evolutionary process consciousness emerged — even though we 
are unable to say from what or whence it emerged — we are bound 
to take note of the imaginative capacity, which is not in any way 
based upon our human experiences, of those prodigous projec- 
tions of the intellect into conceptions of a future of which we 
have no experiences or sensations, of those marvellous flights of 
fancy in which man displays his own creative faculty independ- 
ent entirely of and beyond the ordinary concerns of the life 
in which he exists. The scientific man, by close observation, by 
patient investigation, is able to unravel some of the secrets of 
nature, to grasp the physical facts connected with the life of 
our world and applying his generalization of the past to his obser- 
vation of the present create anew the earth. In this he is only 
— effective as is the work, and correctly as it may be done — giv- 
ing the results of recorded observations and determined facts, but 
when the human intellect, invading the realms of fancy, creates 
new worlds, conceives new conditions of life which are outside 
and beyond all human experience, and independent of any actual 
knowledge, it passes beyond the limitations of matter in any of 
its forms, and, it seemed to him, “ threw doubt, very great doubt, 
upon the theory that all consciousness is but a quality of highly 
organized matter. Perhaps, too, it would not be improper here 
to say that it is no easy task which the extreme evolutionist has 
