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Presidential Address
799
latter went on in its own even tenour of speculation, unaware of the clouds of conflict that were gathering on the horizon. When Science awoke to its own potentialities and became self-conscious, it invaded the domain of Philosophy and snatched the reins of government from its hands, leaving little or nothing for Philosophy, its old master and latterly its neighbour. In the meantime Kant, with a sense of justice unsurpassed in the history of thought, vindicated the claim of Philosophy to settle not only its own boundaries but also those of Science, But his efforts to establish a perpetual peace between the two warring forces eventually failed, and in the latter half of the nineteenth century we witness a furious battle raging between Philosophy and Science, in which victory lies with Science in the earlier and with Philosophy in the latter part. The crude Materialism and Atheism of the eighteenth century were replaced by Naturalism and Agnosticism in the nineteenth. It is well- . known how Darwin's science, though strictly speaking biological, trenched upon the problems of Philosophy very seriously. For tracing the descent of man from lower life, and showing that he was only a link in the long chain of Evolution, governed by the laws of natural selection and survival of the fittest, Darwin's theory gave rise to doubts about the spiritual nature of Man, and dealt almost a death-blow to the design argument for the existence of God as then understood. The popularity of the new theory in the early years of the second half of the nineteeth century created a serious menace to Philosophy, which found two of its fundamental doctrines, the spiritual nature of Man
