only at this or that fragment of
the whole are as irrelevant, if not as inept, as the criticism of the
mathematician directed against _Paradise Lost_, that it 'proved
nothing.' The mystery of being and of life, the true purport and
reality of this world of which we seem to be a part, and yet of which
we seem to have some apprehension as though we were other than a part;
the strange problems of creation and change and birth and death, of
love and sin and purification; of a heaven dreamt of or believed in, or
somehow actually apprehended; of life here, and of an immortality
yearned after and hoped for--these {68} problems, these mysteries, no
philosophy ever did or ever can empty of their strangeness, or bring
down to the level of the commonplace 'certainties' of daily life or of
science, which are no more than shadows after all, that seem
certainties because of the background of mystery on which they are cast.

But just as an individual is a higher being, a fuller, more truly human
creature, when he has got so far removed from the merely animal
existence as to realise that there are such problems and mysteries, so
also the humanisation of the race, the development of its noblest
peoples and its noblest literatures, have been conditioned by the
successive visions of these mysteries in more and more complex
organisation by the great philosophers and poets and preachers. The
systems of such men may die, but such deaths mean, as Empedocles said
of the ordinary deaths of things, only an infinity of new births.
Being dead, their systems yet speak in the inherited language and ideas
and aspirations and beliefs that form the never-ending, still-renewing
material for new philosophies and new faiths. In Thales, Heraclitus,
Pythagoras, Parmenides, Empedocles we have been touching hands with an
apostolic succession of great men and great thinkers and great
poets--men of noble life and lofty thoughts, true prophets and
revealers. And the apostolic succession even within the Greek world
does not fail for centuries yet.

{69}

Passing from the general conceptions of Empedocles to those more
particular rationalisations of particular problems which very largely
provided the motive of early philosophies, while scientific methods
were in an undeveloped and uncritical condition, we may notice such
interesting statements as the following: [135] "The earth, which is at
the centre of the sphere of the universe, remains firm, because th