be made of
life, a world-weary race might decide that the best was not good
enough, and deliberately turn away from it. But that is a contingency,
a speculation, which no sane man would allow to affect his action here
and now, or to impair his loyalty to his comrades in the great
terrestrial adventure.

And is not this question of the ultimate value of life precisely one
of the uncertainties which lend--if the flippancy may be excused--a
"sporting interest" to our position? I have said that we have two
elements of consolation: the things which are sure and the things
which are unsure: in other words, the axioms and the mysteries.
Reason is all very well so far as it goes, and we do right to trust to
it; but it may prove, after all, that the things that are behind and
beyond and above reason are the things that really matter. Does this
seem a concession to obscurantism? Not at all--for the things
obscurantism glories in are things beneath reason, which is quite
another affair. At the same time, we are too apt to think that reason
has drawn a complete outline-map of its "sphere of influence," in
which there are many details to be filled in, but no boundaries to be
shifted, no regions wholly unexplored. It is, for instance, very
unreasonable to hold that we can draw a hard and fast line between the
materially possible and impossible. There is certainly a curious
ragged edge to our purely scientific knowledge, and it may well be
that in following up the frayed-out threads we may come upon things
very surprising and important. For example, the question whether
consciousness can exist detached from organized matter, or attached to
some form of matter of which we have no knowledge, I regard as purely
a question of evidence; and I not only admit but assert that the
evidence pointing in that direction is worthy of careful examination.
The interpretation which sees in it a proof of personal immortality
may be wrong, but that does not prove that the right interpretation is
not worth discovering. The spiritist voyagers may not have reached the
Indies of their hopes, yet may have stumbled upon an unsuspected
America. Nor does the fact that they are eager and credulous
invalidate the whole, or anything like the whole, of their evidence.

After all, is it a greater miracle that consciousness should exist
_de_tached from matter than that it should exist _at_tached to matter?
Yet the latter miracle nobody doubts, except in the nurser