364 FOOT-NOTES TO EVOLUTION. 
guides to action. But in new conditions neither con- 
ventionality nor impulse nor desire will suffice. He 
must know what is about him in order that he may know 
what he is doing. He must know what he is doing in 
order to do anything effectively. Ignorant action is 
more dangerous than no action at all. The “sealed 
orders” under which live the lower animals and our 
“ brother organisms the plants” are in a measure inade- 
quate for man. With the power of movement and the 
“knowledge of good and evil,” he has no choice but to 
accept the conditions. He must shape 
his own life. He must mould his ideals 
into actuality. And thus it comes that 
there is “no alleviation for the sufferings of man ex- 
cept through absolute veracity of thought and action, 
and the resolute facing of the world as it is,” 
And thus it comes also that it is well for man not 
“to pretend to know or to believe what he really does 
not know or believe.’”” We may play at 
philosophy, if we have pleasure in doing 
so. We may find intellectual strength 
through exercise of the mind, even on its own products. 
But we must guide our lives by science. The appetites, 
impulses, passions, illusions, if you choose, which have 
proved safe in the past development of life, science 
would not destroy. But they must be subordinate to 
the will and the intellect. And this subordination of 
the lower to the higher motives in life is the vital fact 
of human evolution, as it has been the ideal of those 
who in the name of religion have striven worthily for 
man’s spiritual advancement. 
As knowledge is in its essence only a guide to ac- 
tion, and as knowledge, being human, can be approxi- 
mate only, not reality, but a movement toward reality, 
we are brought to the famous words of Lessing: 
The world 
as it is. 
Subordination 
of impulses. 
