160

Index of Names 175

General Index 177

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SCIENCE AND MORALS

I. SCIENCE AND MORALS

Sec. 1. THE GOSPEL OF SCIENCE

In the days before the war the Annual Address delivered by the President
of the British Association was wont to excite at least a mild interest
in the breasts of the reading public. It was a kind of Encyclical from
the reigning pontiff of science, and since that potentate changed every
year there was some uncertainty as to his subject and its treatment, and
there was this further piquant attraction, wanting in other and
better-known Encyclicals, that the address of one year might not merely
contradict but might even exhibit a lofty contempt for that or for those
which had immediately preceded it.

During the three years immediately preceding the war we had excellent
examples of all these things. In the first of them we were treated to a
somewhat belated utterance in opposition to Vitalism. Its arguments were
mostly based upon what even to the tyro in chemistry seemed to be rather
shaky foundations. Such indeed they proved to be, since the deductions
drawn from the behaviour of colloids and from Leduc's pretty toys were
promptly disclaimed by leading chemists in the course of the few days
after the delivery of the address.

Further, the President for the year 1914 in his address (Melbourne, p.
18)[1] told us that the problem of the origin of life, which, let us
remind ourselves, in the 1912 address was on the point of solution,
"still stands outside the range of scientific investigation," and that
when the spontaneous formation of formaldehyde is talked of as a first
step in that direction he is reminded of nothing so much as of Harry
Lauder, in the character of a schoolboy, "pulling his treasures from his
pocket--'That's a wassher--for makkin motor-cars!'" Nineteen hundred and
twelve pinned its faith on matter and nothing else; Nineteen hundred and
thirteen assured us that "occurrences now regarded as occult can be
examined and reduced to order by the methods of science carefully and
persistently applied."[2] Further, the examination of those facts had
convinced the deliverer of the address "that memory and affection are
not limited to that association with matter by which alone they can
manifest themselves here and now, and that pers