THE PURPOSE OF LIFE 167 



plane. But, if our sphere of knowledge is to grow, 

 we need men of science also to ask not why, but how, 

 things are what they seem. For a time, it is best to 

 cease from troubling about ultimate causes, and concen- 

 trate all our efforts on the problem of relations, of how 

 one phenomenon is connected with another, of how one 

 type of life is connected with a higher : we pass, that 

 is to say, into a scientific age. 



In such a period the intellectual stress is laid on the 

 process ; attention is concentrated on the mechanism ; 

 admiration is excited by the wonderful inter-relations 

 of the wheels ; we cannot see the wood for the trees, 

 the God for the machine. 



But when we get used to our new gains of know- 

 ledge, when we have sorted and arranged the fresh 

 store of relations, we find that the old problems still 

 remain very little changed. We know more about 

 methods, and are therefore in a better position to 

 guess at causes, but our intellectual need of such 

 guesses is no less than before. Poet, prophet and 

 philosopher again come to their own, and, on a wider 

 stage, and with somewhat more chance of attaining a 

 lasting solution, once more awake the religious instincts 

 of mankind. They may even proclaim that their far- 

 off predecessors drew very near to what is now re- 

 cognized as probable truth if, at all events, they take 

 as examples those predecessors who confined them- 

 selves to their proper sphere of intuitive insight into 

 Why, and avoided the ever-yawning pitfall of an 

 intuitive inquiry into How. 



It seems as though philosophy were once more find- 

 ing its feet after being swept forward on an advancing 



