, things which are
completely unthinkable.

What we actually see, feel, divine, imagine, love, hate, detest,
desire, dream, create and destroy--these living, dying, struggling,
relaxing, advancing and retreating things--this space, this ether,
these stars and suns, these animals, fishes, birds, plants, this earth
and moon, these men and these trees and flowers, these high and
unchanging eternal ideas of the beautiful and the good, these
transitory perishing mortal lives and these dimly discerned
immortal figures that we name "gods," all these, as far as we are
concerned, have for ever existed, all these, as far as we are
concerned, must for ever exist.

In the immense procession of deaths and births, it is indeed certain
that the soul and body of the Earth have given birth to all the souls
and bodies which struggle for existence upon her living flesh
and draw so much of their love and their malice from the
unfathomable depths of her spirit. But when once we accept as our
basic axiom that where the "soul-monad" exists, whether such a
"monad" be human, sub-human, or super-human, it exists in actual
concrete organic personal integrity, we are saved from the
necessity of explaining how, and by what particular series of births
and deaths and change and variation, the living spectacle of things,
as we visualize it today, has "evolved" or has "deteriorated" out of
the remote past.

It is in fact by their constant preoccupation with the immediate and
material causes of such organic changes, that men of science have
been distracted from the real mystery. This real mystery does not
limit itself to the comparatively unimportant "How," but is
constantly calling upon us to deal with the terrible and essential
questions, the two grim interrogations of the old Sphinx, the
"_What_" and the "_Wherefore_."

It is by its power to deal with these more essential riddles that any
philosophy must be weighed and judged; and it is just because
what we name Science stops helplessly at this unimportant "How,"
that it can never be said to have answered Life's uttermost
challenge.

Materialistic and Evolutionary Hypotheses must always, however
far they may go in reducing so-called "matter" to so-called "spirit,"
remain outside the real problem. No attenuation of "matter" into
movement or energy or magnetic radio-activity can reach the
impregnable citadel of life. For the citadel of life is to be found in
nothing less than the complex of pe