Considerations like these, unless I have compressed them beyond the limits of intelligibility, do undoubtedly suggest a certain inevitable incoherence in any general scheme of thought which is built out of materials provided by natural science alone. Extend the boundaries of knowledge as you may; draw how you will the picture of the universe; reduce its infinite variety to the modes of a single space-filling ether; retrace its history to the birth of existing atoms; show how under the pressure of gravitation they became concentrated into nebula?, into suns, and all the host of heaven; how, at least in one small planet, they combined to form organic compounds; how organic compounds became living things; how living things, developing along many different lines, gave birth at last to one superior race; how from this race arose, after many ages, a learned handful, who looked round on the world which thus blindly brought them into being, and judged it, and knew it for what it was: perform (I say) all this, and though you may indeed have attained to science, in nowise will you have attained to a self-sufficing system of beliefs. One thing at least will remain, of which this long drawn sequence of causes and effects gives no satisfying explanation; and that is knowledge itself. Natural science must ever regard knowledge as the product of irrational conditions, for in the last resort it knows no others. It must always regard knowledge as rational, or else science itself disappears. In addition, therefore, to the difficulty of extracting from experience beliefs which experience contradicts, we are confronted with the difficulty of harmonizing the pedigree of our beliefs with their title to authority. The more successful we are in explaining their origin, the more doubt we cast on their validity. The more imposing seems the scheme of what we know, the more difficult it is to discover by what ultimate criteria we claim to know it.
Here, however, we touch the frontier beyond which physical science possesses no jurisdiction. If the obscure and difficult region which lies beyond is to be surveyed and made accessible, philosophy, not science, must undertake the task. It is no business of this society. We meet here to promote the cause of knowledge in one of its great divisions; we shall not help it by confusing the limits which usefully separate one division from another. It may perhaps be thought that I have disregarded my own precept; that I have wilfully overstepped the ample bounds within which the searchers into nature carry on their labors. If it be so, I can only beg your forgiveness. My first desire has been to rouse in those, who, like myself, are no specialists in physics, the same absorbing interest which I feel in what is surely the most far reaching speculation about the physical universe which has ever claimed experimental support; and if in so doing I have been tempted to hint my own personal opinion, that as natural science grows it leans more, not less, upon an idealistic interpretation of the universe, even those who least agree may perhaps be prepared to pardon.
