spelling on a purely phonetic basis. A
more rational system of spelling is nevertheless an object worthy of all
consideration.

* * * * *

Intellectualism and sensationalism have both broken down. The world of
speculation is anxiously looking for a new clue. Witness the pathetic
eagerness with which it clutches at every floating straw. The
innumerable "isms" by which it seeks ever and anon to keep itself afloat
are most of them but the sometimes unrecognisable wreckage of the old
systems drifting about under very inappropriate names. Such terms as
Realism and Idealism are freely used (generally prefixing the adjective
"new") by writers in philosophic periodicals in a sense which might make
Plato, Aquinas, or Kant turn in their graves.

We see their votaries encumbered with the trappings of a futile
erudition of the insignificant or clinging pathetically to the insecure
relics of teleological doctrine, or, still less virile, seeking support
in a return to the unscientific tales of supernatural spiritualism. Such
efforts are vain.

Only by facing the facts with all their consequences, whatever these
may be and whatever they may involve for the proudest aspirations of
mankind--only thus can truth be attained. And lest any should say that
we preach an unrelieved pessimism, let us remind such that Knowledge is
not after all the source of Life, that another category and a different
principle--that, namely, which we indicate under the term
Love-divine--must have generated the potent current of Life, and that no
one should close the door against the hopes of the human Intelligence
until he has discovered what are the limits imposed upon what Perfect
Love can do.

The question still remains whether mankind will be equal to the effort
required to assimilate the essential truth. They very nearly failed to
assimilate the Copernican cosmogony. For sixteen hundred years after it
was first offered to mankind the race preferred to grope in the darkness
and confinement of a false conception.

If they succeed in accomplishing the reception of the new truth,
unheard-of progress may be looked for. If they fail, civilisation must
disappear and humanity decline. There is no middle course. As Bacon
remarked, in this theatre of man's life it is reserved only to God and
angels to be lookers-on.

We know how stubbornly the Ptolemaic cosmogony still clings to our
conceptions, how largely it still dominates