BIOLOGY IN ITS WIDER ASPECTS 1215 



these ; yet such are surely the very pleasures which life most needs, 

 to make it better worth living. Such psychology practically gets no 

 further than did the old hedonism, if indeed as far; and perhaps for 

 the same reason, of the prosaic depression of life in our industrial 

 age, for which "push-pin is as good as poetry" — in Bentham's 

 view. The high and intensely positive pleasure-consciousness of the 

 poets — surely the most vitally developed of our species, and most 

 anticipatory of all — is not to be ignored by science ; the more since 

 what makes all the fine arts fine is their poetic quality, of which 

 science and philosophy at their fullest, share something too. By all 

 means let the physician abate pain, as one real source of organic 

 pleasure, and mental too; yet, as indeed Dr. Bousfield says, is he 

 not most effective when he gives his patient also the active fore- 

 pleasure of renewing health, the hopeful confidence of effective 

 functioning anew. The philanthropist in abating other evils, should 

 follow the like course; yet for normal life, the true joys are those of 

 life-enhancement, alike for the race and for individual participa- 

 tion in it. If so, the joy ot life must be at once an index of its evolu- 

 tion, and of the very essence of its advance. Are we thus returning 

 to utilitarian hedonism? So far, yet not within its narrow circle; 

 but upon the widening spiral of evolution, with possibilities inde- 

 finitely greater. Indeed why not to those divined by the seer of old — 

 "eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the 

 heart of man to conceive what things Life hath prepared for them 

 that love him". As we evolve as evolutionists, from inquirers into 

 past origins to discerners of tendencies and possibilities, such 

 vision may grow clearer. Of old, all faiths were mythopoetic; 

 why not ours in turn? As explained in another section, the 

 Olympians return anew as a rational evolutionary concept, and 

 the Parnassian Muses as well: and both defensible, even demon- 

 strable, more than their Greek creators clearly knew: and so 

 for other high ideals so nobly forth-shadowed in the past, and 

 each with its Eutopia as well. Yet as all high efforts involve 

 a repression or sublimation of simpler functionings, and thus an 

 element of sacrifice, there is also scope in the evolution process 

 for the service in it of the associated pain. The question arises — what 

 then of life in its simple and seeming passive manifestations, as in 

 the sedentary and relatively vegetative animal types, and in the 

 plant world itself? Yet here first take note of the ancient ascetic 

 and mystic disciplines — Indian especially, yet not exclusively, 

 since all lands and times have had the like. These withdraw from 

 conscious sense, from active experience and from ordinary human 

 contacts and their feelings, and even subordinate the high pleasures- 

 of ideation and of imagery as well. They thus concentrate their 

 psychic life into its very centre, thereby to enter the state of 

 mystic ecstasy. This state, so long reverently appreciated as super- 



