CHILDREN AND GENERALISED EPITOMES 157 



Philosophies, whether scientific or humane, are 

 the end and not the beginning- of wisdom. They are 

 the epitomised expressions of the understanding of 

 the age in which they originated, and, in themselves, 

 or at any other age, they are as little intelligible as 

 shorthand would be to one who has not learnt long- 

 hand. They are in no sense the stepping-stones 

 from which a totally immature or uneducated mind 

 can leap to the inheritance of the ages. It leaps 

 rather into chaos and absurdity. Especially when 

 there occurs, as did occur with the triumph of 

 barbarism at the close of the fourth century, an 

 almost total break of intellectual continuity between 

 the age they served and that to which they survive, 

 they are apt to convey meanings as remote from the 

 original as the conception of energy is from that of 

 the Deity. 



MAN AS THE LINK. 



Science and religion could afford to ignore one 

 another entirely, if sought entirely for their own sake 

 and if the ordinary man was not the link between 

 them. A Hindu mystic or a monk in one of the 

 ascetic orders of the Roman Catholic Church, who 

 has withdrawn himself from the world and practised 

 starvation, celibacy and general mortification of the 

 body, aspires to reach a spiritual plane from which 

 the world, either in its mechanical or its vital aspect, 

 can be left behind and forgotten as a distraction and 

 a curse. Far be it from me to libel a calling I do not 

 profess to understand. My criticism merely is 

 concerned with the value to humanity of the results 

 attained. For whatever pinnacle of pure contempla- 

 tive philosophy that may thus ultimately be reached, 

 little that is communicable or of general value to the 

 life or thought of the world seems to have been the 



result. 



Y 



