The British Association for the Advancement of Science ordinarily meets within the limits of the British Isles. But occasionally, as this year, it flits to some other part of the British Empire to spread the gospel of science. Perhaps it does not shine with quite such brilliance as it did in its early days, the days of Tyndall and Huxley—above all of Huxley whose mission it was, as someone put it, to make soence respectable. That mission he certainly accornplished for, though scientific studies are still alluded to by the callow youth of the older universities in England as "stinks," they have risen to a higher position than that since the spacious days when science felt that there was little left to discover, in fact, that there was no more left for it to do than to extend the number of places of decimals of existent discoveries. 

Though the historic days of conflict like those between the shallow and self-confident "Soapy Sam" Wilberforce, at the time Bishop of Oxford, and his far more skilful adversary Huxley over the then illunderstood and ill-assimilated Darwinian controversy seem to have passed, there is one thing which by itself would render this annual occasion important, and that is the summaries of scientific work which the presidential address and the addresses in the various sections give to the world. It is to the consideration of these that a short notice may be devoted.

Prior to the war one of the poneifis of science told us that what it has taught us about nature enables us to "enjoy that happiness and prosperity which arises from the occurrence of the expected, the non-occurcrence of the unexpected, and the determination by ourselves within ever expanding limits of what shall occur." 

A pit-war declaration—chat is obvious, for among the lessons of that dreadful time is that which presents science as a two-edged weapon capable of kindly but also of most unkindly operations; so much so that some tremble lest this Frankenstein of civilizaton may not also be its destroyer. But of course it can be beneficent and that is the theme of more than one address at the meeting with which we are dealing. Curiously enough, en passant, doubtless quite without agreement, it is th~ strand of "life" which binds so many of the addresses together—perhaps a significant fact. 

Three at least of the addresses are ccncerned with science as the protector of life. The President of the Association, as might have been expected from one of his cminence in the bacteriological world, devoted his time to showing what great things science had accomplished since Pasteur first provided it with the key of its secret places. It is less than fifty years ago since the writer was a medical student, yet in his day bacteriology was an unknown subject. Today it and its sister serology loom larger in the medical mind than perhaps anything else. And with reason; for their triumphs have been stupendous. During the war between Great Britain and South Africa more persons died from typhoid fever than from the bullets of the enemy. During the great war that fever was almost a negligible quantity. Why? Not from climatic conditions nor those of sanitation, but from one cause alone. Sir Almroth Wright (a fellow student of the writer's) had in the interim discovered the serum prophylactic for that disease. The same story is to be told of tetanus, once an awful scourge; and in the field of peace practice, of diphtheria; of hydrophobia; of many another disease. 

All the bacterial diseases have not yet a place in that list., but that all will have, no one doubts. There may yet be an anti-cancer serum or perhaps it will be a toxin in this case, for in a second address its writer dealt with another class of microscopic enemies of mankind. Bacteria are little one-celled plants; but their cousins, the little one-celled animals or protozoa, are equally deadly as the organisms producing malaria, sleeping-sickness and other diseases—perhaps, as hinted, cancer.

The first are combated by anti-toxic scra or fluids on the lines originally utilized, though quite empirically, by Jenner when he first started vaccination, and afterwards scientifically elucidated by Pasteur. The second have to be destroyed by actual toxic substances—poisons—introduced into rke veins of the patient suffering from the effects of the prowwon and the problem is to discover something which will kill the protozoon and at the sante time will not put an end to the patient. These problems science has tackled with extraordinary success and may feel legitimate pride in its conquests. 

A third address touched upon the effects of various parasites on growing things in the vegetable kingdom—the rusts and ergots which do so much damage to grain, for example—-and here again science has shown the agriculturist many a remedy or preventive for scourges of this kind which formerly often nearly mined him. All these arc interesting matters, but we must pass to the point of fundamental importance which emerges from some of these addresses. It has already been mentioned that the addresses show the position of science at the moment on the great problems of the day, and a study of the discourses over a series cf years will show how scientific opinion fluctu.. ates and how the needle of its compass points in succession to every quarter.  

Let us take this very question of "life." What do we mean when we talk of living and not living thIngs? Do we imply a difference of kind or merely of degree? The whole question of vitalism is involved in that. Is there a difference of kind or only of degree between a sparrow and the stone which a boy throws at it? The ordinary man will at oncc reply—of kind. But that was not what science taught fifty years ago. When Huxley delivered his address in 1874 at a meeting of the Assodation with which we arc concerned, he told the members that in thc molecules of the primitive nebula of which the solar system once consIsted could be found everything which was that day discoverable in it; including of course die mind of man and all its wonderful and tcrrible doings. In a later address he went further and said that "the fundamental proposidon" of scientific physiology was that "the living body is a mcchanism"

Let us pause for a moment to consider what that fundamental proposition means. It means that since, cx hypothesi, there is no action good or bad of mankind which coid not, by one skilful enough, be set down in the t~rms of a chemical equation, or explained as a physical operation, there is no such thing as a science of biology nor is there any such thing as montity or sin—for how can either exist where rigid chemical operations dctennirue every action? That mechanist explanation was the dominant teaching of science for years, and the writer, who lived and worked through that period, can fully endorse the statement of Driesch, who has done so much to bring biology back into its present channel, when he speaks of the estimation in wbkh vitalists were held by mechanists and the curious apologies made by the latter for what they thought to be the vagaries of the former. "Things," he writes, "were not pleasant for the few who, when materialism was at its zenith, guarded the tradition of the old, is., of the vitalistic biology. People would have preferred to have locked them up in madhouses, had not 'senility' excised them up to a certain point." How could opinion be otherwise when we had BurdonSanderson, then the acknowledged head of the physiological world, dedaring that "for the future, the word 'vital' as distinctive of physiological processes, might be abandoned altogether' 

How hard it is, as Chesterton points out, to remcmbcr that the time at which we arc living is only £ day and not she day. That was the hcydzy of cockaurencas; this, as Sir Oliver Lodge told the As. ncixtion not long ago, is one of "profound ~ccptidsm" of sdentific truth bica entenda. Of all truth too, perhaps, like Bacon's Jesting Pilate. 

Sw that former day there has sprung up the ncw science, that was then undreamt of, called ExpczimcnWi Embryology, and the man who can grasp the meanlag of its discoveries and ytt who can rcnWn a mcdislit kas it — be cocfcmed, amostiliogicsl mental appara of mo uaail inn.

Take the findings of a fourth address—that in the Zoological Section—and we find the President of that section, a man of great distinction, telling his auditors that the study of life by the methods of thIs science shows that the egg and its parts, and the embryo and its parts, arc autonomous and capable of regulation. It is the direct apposite of the mechanist explanation. "Every egg a law unto itself," another sdentist once said half in joke, but there is profound truth in the saying, and the address to which we have been alludhag proceeds to state that after this study of the nature of the organization "it became [to many minds] a problem incapable of solution on the classic physicochemical hypothesis of the nineteenth cwtury. To an increasing number of biologists life becomes an ultimate natural category sharing, with matter and encrgy, our conception of the universe." The writer of the address is not singular iii this, for many another similar expression could be quoted in these later days, and it is now truc to say that the mechanist view is the "senile" as the reverse uscd to be tauntingly called forty years ago. 

Thc wheel has turned a full circuit and where has it stopped? That is a really significant fact, for It has stopped at the point where aLl the time Scholas.. ticism has been standing. The modem theory is that of St. Thomas 6oo years ago, and of Aristotic long before him—and thus, as in the case of the nature of the chemical elements, the conservation of matter and energy and other things, science has just arrived at the paint reached by pure thought centuries ago. 

Now of course, as already noted, ~ the mechanistic theory of life connoted a mechanistic explanation of psychology—to speak of a mcchardstic psychology seems to be a cowadicdon in terms—and that in fact is what was attempted and is attempted by those curious pcrsons, the Behaviourists, whose task sc~s to be that of enclosing the Atlantic Ocean ID a pint pot In a fifth address the President of the Section of Psychology, Professor McDougaU of Harvard, has some wise wards to say on this subject. He sums up the mecharxisdc view as "a bundle of mechanical re. flexes, a superior pcnny-in-thett machine, whose workings are mysteriously accompanied by nrious 'clements of consciousness."' And he proceeds to urge that no intelligent discussion of human affairs is possibic, without the use of such terms as motive, intention, dcsirc, will, responsibility, aspiration, ideal, striving, cffort~ intcrcst all of which involve the nodon of purposiveness. Let us pause for a moment and ask ourselves if that is not true. Could we get on without such wncept~ons as those cnincratcd? Clearly we could not But what possible place have any of them in a mechanist philosophy? Non whatever. The late Mr. MaIlo& summed It up in the words of his Professor Paul Darnicy in Positivism on an Used, or the New Paul and Virginia. "If we would be solemn, high and  happy and heroic and saintly, we havebut to strive and struggle to do what we cannot for fact that it was an instant avoid doing.” 

Is it not so? Where do all the those important words, motives, and the rest, come in if we we are a mechanism and can only do what we must? The mechanistic explanation of life has fallen before the fire of new facts and the mechanistic explanation of mind is going with it. It was the same Professor McDougall who delivered in his Body and Mind (A very remarkable work) the first great attack in recent years on the mechanist explanation. He jocularly alluded to the fact that odd to find the doctrine of the soul defended as he was defending it, “outside the walls of a Catholic seminary.” It is not the only truth which has been habitually taught within such reluctance no doubt, but none the less surely. It is well for us to recognize our place in this retreat, for science after all is coming back to us as Scholastia—a fact very little realized even by the multitudes of well-read men who are in lamentable ignorance of the teachings of that schooI of philosophy.