34 THE UNFATHOMED UNIVERSE 



if you heighten the imagination and intensify the will. The dark- 

 ness in you will begin to glow, and you will see clearly, and you 

 will know that what 3'ou thought was but a mosaic of memories is 

 rather the froth of a gigantic ocean of life, breaking on the shores 

 of matter, casting up its own flotsam to mingle with the life of the 

 shores it breaks on." 



And speaking of the concentration required in the habit of 

 vision, he says : '^ It is an exercise this, a training for higher 

 adventures of the soul : it is no light labour. The plough- 

 man's cleaving the furrows is easier by far. Five minutes 

 of this effort will at first leave us trembling as at the close 

 of a laborious day.'' 



Surely students of science should be the last to dogmatise 

 as to the possibilities of this life of ours. 



§ 6. Towards a Philosophical Interpretation of Nature, 



As the scientific order transcends the empirical, it is tran- 

 scended in turn by a philosophical order which aims at a 

 harmonious interpretation of our experience as a whole. The 

 essential change is often referred to as passing from the 

 ' how ' to the ' why ', from analytic and historical description 

 to interpretation, but there is also this difference that while 

 science must keep feeling at an arm's length, philosophy 

 seeks to give a view of the world that will satisfy the claims 

 of feeling as well as those of the understanding. It is just 

 our outlook on the whole of life, the world within as well 

 as the world without, and it includes the assets of feeling 

 as well as intellectual gains. 



To illustrate concretely : biologists are easily satisfied with 

 their outlook on animate nature if they are willing to leave 

 out of account the fact of human personality at its best, 

 or the fact of human society. We may define our biology 



