Man's Place in Nature 241 



the impression that everything has been explained. 

 It would be more accurate to say that, as far as 

 science is concerned, nothing has been explained. 

 Of course immediate explanations are contin- 

 ually being given, but they are never more than 

 statements of fact, or accurate descriptions of 

 happenings, or unravellings of an intricate se- 

 ries of sequences into their component more 

 familiar sequences, or comparisons of what 

 seems a novel succession of events with previ- 

 ously well-known successions, or tracing back a 

 development through its phases, or making a 

 general formula which unifies a whole series of 

 occurrences, and so on. These interpretations 

 leave the fundamental mysteriousness of the uni- 

 verse untouched. 



Perhaps the greatest service that we can do in 

 this course is simply to emphasize these limitations 

 of science, thus clearing the way for ideal con- 

 structions which each of us must make after his 

 own fashion, which will not be true for us unless 

 we make them ourselves. Thus while it may seem 

 at first discouraging to say that "all our physical 

 experience is rounded with mystery," further re- 

 flection will show that " this final margin of mys- 

 tery becomes the light of life." In face of these 

 riddles, we feel that the scientific outlook alone is 

 unsatisfying. Many scientific workers, who can 

 find no resting-place in science alone, agree with 



