240 The Bible of Nature 



Or again, he feels that "the purpose of his life 

 is the most intimate and fundamental reality of 

 which he has any knowledge," and he projects on 

 Nature this explanatory unifying idea of purpose, 

 believing that the causal reality of which Nature 

 is an expression is also Purpose — a wider and 

 richer Purpose. 



Again, amid the ceaseless flux of things, the 

 endless making and unmaking, Werden und 

 Vergehen, Man makes a demand for an end — in 

 itself — "that is, for a fact of such a nature that its 

 existence justifies itself." He cannot find this in 

 extra-human nature; he can find it only in his own 

 spiritual development. There he finds an end in 

 itself worthy of attainment, and he reads this back 

 into nature as the end of existence as such, as "the 

 open secret of the universe." To many "the 

 moral and spiritual life remains unintelligible un- 

 less on the supposition that it is in reality the key 

 to the world's meaning, the fact in the light of 

 which all other phenomena must be read." 

 "Man's personal agency — the one perpetual mir- 

 acle — is nevertheless our sure datum and our only 

 clue to the mystery of existence." (A. Pringle 

 Pattison.) 



Limitations of Science. — There have been some 

 who have not hesitated to publish abroad what 

 they regard as a scientific clearing up of the riddles 

 of the universe, leaving their gullible readers with 



