Sir Oliver Lodge delivered the Presidential Address at the British
Association at Birmingham on Wednesday. Taking " Continuity " for his theme, he delivered an eloquent protest against that new form of scientific scepticism which animated biologists, physiologists, and physicists in their own controversies and in their attitude towards theories promulgated outside their particular science. "Science," he maintained, "should not deal in negations; it is strong in affirmations, but nothing based on abstraction ought to presume to deny outside its own region." Materialism was appropriate to the material world not as a philosophy, but as a working creed, a proximate and immediate formula for guiding research. But everything beyond that belonged to another region and must be reached by other methods. "It is my function to remind you that our studies do not exhaust the universe, and that if we dogmatize in a negative direction and say we can reduce everything to physics and chemistry, we gibbet ourselves as ludicrously narrow pedants, and are falling far short of the richness and fulness of our human birthright."
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