t the animal instincts are
patent on which those spiritual yearnings repose.

[Sidenote: Absolutist philosophy human and halting.]

This last fact would be nothing against the feelings in question, if
they were not made vehicles for absolute revelations. On the contrary,
such a relativity in instincts is the source of their importance. In
virtue of this relativity they have some basis and function in the
world; for did they not repose on human nature they could never express
or transform it. Religion and philosophy are not always beneficent or
important, but when they are it is precisely because they help to
develop human faculty and to enrich human life. To imagine that by means
of them we can escape from human nature and survey it from without is an
ostrich-like illusion obvious to all but to the victim of it. Such a
pretension may cause admiration in the schools, where self-hypnotisation
is easy, but in the world it makes its professors ridiculous. For in
their eagerness to empty their mind of human prejudices they reduce its
rational burden to a minimum, and if they still continue to dogmatise,
it is sport for the satirist to observe what forgotten accident of
language or training has survived the crash of the universe and made the
one demonstrable path to Absolute Truth.

[Sidenote: All science a deliverance of momentary thought.]

Neither the path of abstraction followed by the mystics, nor that of
direct and, as it avers, unbiassed observation followed by the
naturalists, can lead beyond that region of common experience,
traditional feeling, and conventional thought which all minds enter at
birth and can elude only at the risk of inward collapse and extinction.
The fact that observation involves the senses, and the senses their
organs, is one which a naturalist can hardly overlook; and when we add
that logical habits, sanctioned by utility, are needed to interpret the
data of sense, the humanity of science and all its constructions becomes
clearer than day. Superstition itself could not be more human. The path
of unbiassed observation is not a path away from conventional life; it
is a progress in conventions. It improves human belief by increasing the
proportion of two of its ingredients, attentive perception and practical
calculus. The whole resulting vision, as it is sustained from moment to
moment by present experience and instinct, has no value apart from
actual ideals. And if it proves human nature to be