s the purpose of Catholic cheats like Cardinal Newman
and Professor Chatterton-Hill; it serves hysterical women like
"Mother" Eddy; it serves the New-thoughters, who wish to fill their
bellies with wind; it serves the charlatans and mystagogs who wish to
befuddle the wits of the populace. Real thinkers avoid it as they
would a bottomless swamp; they avoid, not merely the idealism of
Platonists and Hegelians, but the monism of Haeckel, and the
materialism of Buechner and Jacques Loeb. The simple fact is that it
is as impossible to prove the priority of origin and the ultimate
nature of matter as it is of mind; so that the scientist who lays down
a materialist dogma is exactly as credulous as a Christian.

How then are we to proceed? Shall we erect the mystery into an
Unknowable, like Spencer, and call ourselves Agnostics with a capital
letter, like Huxley? Shall we follow Frederic Harrison, making an
inadequate divinity out of our impotence? I have read the books of the
"Positivists", and attended their imitation church in London, but I
did not get any satisfaction from them. In the midst of their dogmatic
pronouncements I found myself remembering how the egg falls apart and
reveals a chicken, how the worm suddenly discovers itself a butterfly.
The spirit of man is a breaker of barriers, and it seems a futile
occupation to set limits upon the future. Our business is not to say
what men will know ten thousand years from now, but to content
ourselves with the simple statement of what men know #now#. What we
know is a procession of phenomena called an environment; our life
being an act of adjustment to its changes, and our faith being the
conviction that this adjustment is possible and worth while.

In the beginning the guide is instinct, and the act of trust is
automatic. But with the dawn of reason the thinker has to justify his
faith; to convince himself that life is sincere, that there is
worth-whileness in being, or in seeking to be; that there is order in
creation, laws which can be discovered, processes which can be
applied. Just as the babe trusts life when it gropes for its mother's
breast, so the most skeptical of scientists trusts it when he declares
that water is made of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, and sets
it down for a certainty that this will always be so--that he is not
being played with by some sportive demon, who will today cause H20 to
behave like water, and tomorrow like benzine.

#Nature'