THE PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 
257 
could do her work far back in the past in a way different from 
that in which she has been accustomed to do it ever since, because 
the atmospheric conditions were different, are you not burdening 
your position with multiplied hypotheses'? Of course, you will 
admit that the atoms and their wonderful original adjustments in 
permanent mathematical proportions had a beginning — a Cause 
beyond themselves. Does it then seem to you an incredible thing 
that, after the play of atoms had progressed in beautiful Continuity, 
for myriads of years, till they reached the point of their evolution 
that would fit them to be the vehicle and instrument for the 
co-ordinated action of some higher and ^o^-physical increment, 
that, then, the Cause of the original atoms and their adjustments 
should originate that non- physical increment ? Would that action 
of introducing a wo/z-physical increment that henceforth, in a 
continuous line, is to perpetuate itself, substantially, or at all, 
affect the real Continuity of the physical conditions that were to 
serve as its vehicle and instrument? Nor is this question un- 
warranted by actual facts. For, if I may anticipate what I may 
say later on, is not Consciousness a wcw-physical factor which, 
some time in the long evolutionary progress of the material system, 
has been added as a correlative or concomitant to the physical 
order 1 Nor can I help reminding you that, though Determinism 
does prevail in Nature, yet somehow, at some point in the 
progression, Moral Freedom has emerged — certainly not from its 
contradictory, Determinism. I submit such considerations to your 
careful judgment, so that you may, at all events, see that I am not 
necessarily ignoring the true physical Continuity, when I confess my 
utter inability to see how the phenomena involved in the living 
organism can be alone explained, as to origin, by the molecular 
and chemical laws that operate in the inorganic system of things. 
In fact, I wish you, my dear friend, to understand that, taking 
into account all the facts which present themselves to my vision, 
such as the existence of a rigid physical order, of Life, of 
Consciousness, and of Moral Freedom — four distinct, ascending 
factors of the universe — I feel myself to be standing in the midst 
of a vast and mysterious system of things, in which factors of a 
very dissimilar type find scope for existence; and that, therefore, I 
can, on rational grounds, ascribe the beginning of each of these 
factors to a common original, without affecting the true Continuity 
which pertains to the evolution of each of these when once they 
