JOHN LANGDON-DAVIES 207 



both a search for the poetry lurking round the corner 

 throughout the universe. 



The fact that so many of us never discover this is 

 due to the bad way in which science is taught in schools, 

 and also to the general opinion among ignorant people 

 that the object of science is utilitarian, — motor cars, 

 gas pipes or a new patent medicine perhaps, — ^but if 

 the modern man rightly understands science he will 

 discover that it arouses in him the same exalted state 

 of mind experienced as we listen to a beautiful piece 

 of music, or read a sublime piece of prose. It leads 

 him to the land beyond good and evil, where happiness 

 and sorrow dissolve and become tranformed into a 

 mixture of reverence, awe and wistful peace. 



One of the things which comes out of reading this 

 vast epic is a realization that precisely the same forces 

 which make you or me exalted with hope or debased 

 with fears are working to produce curious results in 

 the ant or the wasp; and that we, reader and writer, 

 together with Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, Mr. Hoover, 

 Gene Tunney and Mary Pickford, are really so many 

 attempts to solve an unknown problem set by an un- 

 known something; and that the ant, the tiger and the 

 palm tree are other attempts. Human beings are 

 not the solutions and the rest the failures; the palm 

 tree may be as good a solution as Mr. Hoover; we 

 do not know: all we can know is that a very exciting 

 game is being played with ourselves as pieces, and 

 not the least exciting thing about it is that apparently 

 we know as much about it when we are asleep as we do 

 when we are awake. 



Let us think for a moment of our part in this enor- 



