948 HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



At first sight it may appear as if the question were ahready 

 answered in the affirmative ; for is not the value of life implied 

 in its expansion, in the power of which its expansion is but the 

 expression ? Science, it may be said, stimulates the expansion 

 of life ; therefore, at the same time, it gives to life its value, 

 because it gives it the means of gratifying its most ardent desire. 

 And yet to reason thus is to leave out of account one funda- 

 mental fact, and this fact is the insatiability of life, an insatia- 

 bility which is the counterpart to the need of expansion. Though 

 science may partly gratify the desire of life for expansion, it 

 cannot do so to the extent of satisfyiag it completely ; the 

 greater the power of expansion, the greater the desire for it ; 

 and the power of expansion must always remain less than the 

 desire. Science stimulates the expansion of life, and it gives 

 us means to reaHse this need of expansion which we did not 

 formerly possess. But iri proportion as our thirst for expansion 

 is satisfied, it does but increase in intensity ; and the satisfying 

 of this desire for expansion, which is none other than the desire 

 for hfe itself, is beyond the resources of science. For science is, 

 in the nature of things, relative. It can give us no insight into 

 the deeper mysteries of existence, no reply to the wherefore of 

 life, to the anxious Wohin and Wozu. Some seem to think it 

 enough to proclaim that these things which science is unable to 

 explain do not really concern us, that we have to do only with 

 life as we five it, and that we have no concern with the things 

 which are behind life. But this is a short-sighted doctrine. 

 Every man, at some moment or other of his existence, must ask 

 himself the reason of all this Streben, of aU these efforts, of all 

 this suffering which accompanies the life which is reaUy lived. 

 It is true that science has caused the mystery which formerly 

 surroimded us to recede further and further. It is also true that 

 it has substituted for the legend of creation and the miraculous 

 interposition of a divine power, the great doctrine of evolution 

 and the reign of law. But, however far it may have caused the 



