November 12, 1915] 



SCIENCE 



673 



to that great question, in attempting, that 

 is, to indicate the relations of mathematics 

 to the supreme ideals of mankind, it will 

 be necessary to seek a perspective point of 

 view and to deal with large matters in a 

 large way. 



Of the countless variety of appetitions 

 and aspirations that have given direction 

 and aim to the energies of men and that, 

 together with the constraining conditions 

 of life in our world, have shaped the course 

 and determined the issues of human his- 

 tory, it is doubtless not yet possible to at- 

 tempt a confident and thoroughgoing 

 classification according to the principle of 

 relative dignity or that of relative strength. 

 If, however, we ask whether, in the great 

 throng of passional determinants of hu- 

 man thought and life, there is one supreme 

 passion, one that in varying degrees of con- 

 sciousness controls the rest, unifying the 

 spiritual enterprises of our race in direct- 

 ing and converging them all upon a single 

 sovereign aim, the answer, I believe, can 

 not be doubtful: the activities and desires 

 of mankind are indeed subject to such im- 

 perial direction and control. And if now 

 we ask what the sovereign passion is, again 

 the answer can hardly admit of question or 

 doubt. In order to see even a priori what 

 the answer must be, we have only to imag- 

 ine a race of beings endowed with our hu- 

 man craving for stability, for freedom, and 

 for perpetuity of life and its fleeting goods, 

 we have only to fancy such a race flung, 

 without equipment of knowledge or 

 strength, into the depths of a treacherous 

 universe of matter and force where they 

 are tossed, buffeted and torn by the tumul- 

 tuous onward-rushing flood of the cosmic 

 stream, originating they know not whence 

 and flowing they know not why nor 

 whither, we have, I say, only to imagine 

 this, sympathetically, which ought to be 

 easy for us as men, and then to ask our- 



selves what would naturally be the control- 

 ling passion and dominant enterprise of 

 such a race — unless, indeed, we suppose it to 

 become strangely enamored of distress or 

 to be driven by despair to self-extinction. 

 We humans require no Gotama nor Hera- 

 cleitus to tell us that man's lot is cast in a 

 world where naught abides. The universal 

 impermanence of things, the inevitableness 

 of decay, the mocking frustration of deep- 

 est yearnings and fondest dreams, all this 

 has been keenly realized wherever men and 

 women have had seeing eyes or been even a 

 little touched with the malady of medita- 

 tion, and everywhere in the literature of 

 power is heard the cry of the mournful 

 truth. ' ' The life of man, ' ' said the Spirit 

 of the Ocean, "passes by like a galloping 

 horse, changing at every turn, at every 

 hour. ' ' 



' ' Great treasure halls hath Zeus in heaven, 

 From whence to man strange dooms be given, 

 Past hope or fear." 



Such is the universal note. "Whether we 

 glance at the question in a measure a 

 priori, as above, or look into the cravings 

 of our own hearts, or survey the history of 

 human emotion and thought, we shall flnd, 

 I think, in each and all these ways, that 

 human life owns the supremacy of one de- 

 sire : it is the passion for emancipation, for 

 release from life's limitations and the 

 tyranny of change : it is our human passion 

 for some ageless form of reality, some ever- 

 lasting vantage-ground or rock to stand 

 upon, some haven of refuge from the all- 

 devouring transformations of the welter- 

 ing sea. And so it is that our human aims, 

 aspirations, and toils thus find their high- 

 est unity — their only intelligible unity — in 

 the Spirit's quest of a stable world, in its 

 endless search for some mode or form of 

 reality that is at once infinite, changeless, 

 eternal. 

 Does some one say : This may be granted, 



