THE TROBLEM OF LIFE. 



What Is man or what is Hfe ? — and concerned merely 

 with the relation of man to his Cause, to his Environ- 

 ment, and to his Future. The questions of man's 

 relation to God, to the w^orld, and to immortality, 

 are the three great problems of philosophy, to which 

 all other speculative inquiries are subsidiary ; and 

 in a sense the three are one. 



§ 5. And this ultimate unity of life, which it is 

 the business of philosophy consciously to restore, 

 was unconsciously foreshadowed by the origin of its 

 problems. The material Sphinx is the oldest of the 

 extant monuments of human labour, and was a 

 mystery even to the old-time builders of the pyra- 

 mids. But the spiritual Sphinx, its archetype, is 

 older still ; it is as old as reflection, as old as know- 

 ledge, and, we may be assured, will last as long. 

 And knowledge is one and indivisible, and an inte- 

 gral portion of life. For in order to live we must 

 know, and knowledge sets us the problems of which 

 philosophy essays the solution. Our solutions, it is 

 true, must be imperfect until the end is reached ; but 

 is it not sufficient that our errors should progress- 

 ively approximate to truth ? If we can bring our- 

 selves to believe that an impulse so deeply rooted 

 in our nature, so intimately bound up with all our 

 knowledge, as that of speculation, can be an illusion, 

 intended to misguide us, and destined never to be 

 satisfied, what must we think of a world so ordered 

 to delude us ? What but that it may contain such 

 ineradicable illusions elsewhere also ? For philo- 

 sophy does not arise self- sought from idle wonder 

 and vain speculation. The wonder, to which Greek 

 thinkers were fond of attributing the origin of philo- 

 sophy, is an essential characteristic of the mind, or 

 rather, it Is the inevitable reflexion of the action of 



