uld immediately have to be summed up again and reduced to
generalities. Under the circumstances of human life, ultimate truth must
forego detailed verification and must remain speculative. The curse of
modern philosophy is only that it has not drawn its inspiration from
science; as the misfortune of science is that it has not yet saturated
the mind of philosophers and recast the moral world. The Greek
physicists, puerile as was their notion of natural mechanism, had a more
integral view of things. They understood nature's uses and man's
conditions in an honest and noble way. If no single phenomenon had been
explained correctly by any philosopher from Thales to Lucretius, yet by
their frank and studious contemplation of nature they would have
liberated the human soul.

[Sidenote: Obstruction by alien traditions.]

Unfortunately the supplements to science which most philosophers supply
in our day are not conceived in a scientific spirit. Instead of
anticipating the physics of the future they cling to the physics of the
past. They do not stimulate us by a picture, however fanciful, of what
the analogies of nature and politics actually point to; they seek rather
to patch and dislocate current physics with some ancient myth, once the
best physics obtainable, from which they have not learned to extricate
their affections.

Sometimes these survivals are intended to modify scientific conceptions
but slightly, and merely to soften a little the outlines of a cosmic
picture to which religion and literature are not yet accustomed. There
is a school of political conservatives who, with no specific interest in
metaphysics, cannot or dare not break with traditional modes of
expression, with the customs of their nation, or with the clerical
classes. They accordingly append to current knowledge certain
sentimental postulates, alleging that what is established by tradition
and what appeals to the heart must somehow correspond to something which
is needful and true. But their conventional attachment to a religion
which in its original essence was perhaps mystical and revolutionary,
scarcely modifies, in their eyes, the sum of practical assurances or the
aim of human life. As language exercises some functions which science
can hardly assume (as, for instance, in poetry and communication) so
theology and metaphysics, which to such men are nothing but languages,
might provide for inarticulate interests, and unite us to much that lies
in t