but we have
taken immense account of the universe of which we are a part and the
forces which play around us. Our realities are what we touch and see. We
have given to our sight an immense increase of searching power through
the microscope and telescope, but we are slow to venture beyond what
they reveal to us. We have increased the sensitiveness of our touch
through the instruments of our laboratories. We have organs to sensibly
register the vibrations of an etheric force and even to weigh light. But
we are slow to recognize any range of reality not thus revealed to us.

We have gained in such ways a really illuminating understanding of the
physical universe; we have formulated its laws, chronicled its sequence
and made it in a marvellous way the instrument of our material
well-being. If we have speculated at all it has been rather in the
direction of the ultimate nature of matter and force, as these have
supplied us material for speculation, than in any other direction. We
have been generally and soundly suspicious of conclusions which cannot
be verified by the scientific method, and so have built about ourselves
restraining limitations of thought which we are wholesomely unwilling to
pass. We have found our real joy in action rather than meditation. Our
scientific achievements have supplied material for our restless energy
and our restless energy has urged us on to new achievement.

True enough, there has been of late signs of a changing temper. We are
beginning to discover that science has marked limitations; there are
ranges of reality of which our laboratories can make no possible report
which we are beginning to take into account. But in a large way the
matured Western outlook upon life has been conditioned by the scientific
interpretation of the universe.

_Chesterton's Two Saints_

The East has taken an entirely different line; its laboratories have
been the laboratories of the soul. The East has had little concern about
outside things; it has had an immense concern for its own inner life.
The East has made little attempt to master outer forces; it has been
generally content to let them have their way with it, realizing, maybe,
that after all what the outside world can do for the inner life is
negligible compared with what the soul can do for itself. Race and
climate and the sequence of history have all conspired to produce this
temper. The history of the East is a strange combination of drive and
quiesc