We have followed the physicist and the chemist to the farthest point they have reached in their research. They cannot show us anything beyond, and we, unsatisfied, must look elsewhere. The problems of life remain. We ourselves stand on the great pathway, its continuous road of rising orders, and from our place of vantage we contemplate the first living thing. A profound discrepancy, or what seems like one, stares us in the face, the discrepancy between our mastery over things and our self-conscious, self-creative abilities on the one hand, and, on the other, that first humble yet awe-inspiring revelation by elements generated, perhaps, within a white-hot star. Science has nothing to do with meanings and purposes and values in our lives or with our concern for them. Indeed it has nothing to do, in strictness, with meanings and purposes and values anywhere. This is the business of philosophy and of all ordinary men.

We have learnt a lesson as we followed the men of science from step to step, and heard nature respond to their questions with intelligible answers. We have learnt that, so far as it has been examined, the universe, like ourselves, is rational and has a history. It moves, changes, grows; it is real and its history is real too. And though science is not concerned with its meaning, we are. We hold fast to our science, but we care for more than science. We cannot help it, for we are aware of meaning in ourselves; as the man of science is when he is not being only scientific. We are aware too of purpose and of values; we are aware of making and shaping and creating; we know what it is to choose and direct, to arrange and rearrange, to produce novelty. Both sides of our knowledge and our caring, the scientific side and the personal side, make a difficulty for us in regard to the philosophers with whom we shall put ourselves to school. Our chosen teachers must reckon with life as we know and possess it in ourselves; but they must reckon too with every word of the scientific man. Nothing less will content us now. The philosophers we shall follow must not be playing a game among themselves, using thoughts like pieces on a board, to be moved according to rules they have laid down. Neither must they resolve the great drama of real things and real history into a phantasmagoria of mind; nor try to educe mind, consciousness, the spiritual activities of man, from the interplay of parts of a material machine. In our view both the material and the spiritual are real. It is for the philosopher, so we think, to show us the real relation between them. To do him justice, the philosopher has been thoroughly aroused of late years to the importance of reckoning with science. Consequently he draws to his side thinking ordinary men as they have perhaps never been drawn before, except when Socrates at Athenian banquets and in Athenian streets 'made himself a fool that others by his folly might be made wise.' We have no difficulty now in finding a philosopher, indeed many philosophers, to our mind. Philosophy is alive, sitting at our banquets, walking in our streets, even writing books that ordinary men, living each his own extraordinary life, can read. We are able to call in our philosopher, then, as we have called in the bio-chemist, knowing him to be one who reckons to the full with science, that he may tell us what he can and will concerning life and living.

A philosopher of that mind and reckoning has presented us with a picture in which we see life coming (may be from very far, coming, we may think, although concealed, by the material pathway from the ether that science has revealed to us) as an enormous impetus which finds the first of its advantages that are discernible by us, in that colloid assembly of compounded, complicated, delicately-strung, hair-trigger-hung elements, the protoplasmic stuff. We plainly see a new beginning which, in philosophic truth, is a continuance in new manners upon this earth of that which has no beginning; we see a living thing which lives because an impulsive and propulsive life, not material but spiritual, has raised material elements from the rank of dust, and has found a means of using material powers to purposes and ends. And this philosopher tells us that from its marvellous but humble first appearing in matter life advances, not like the trickle of a single stream, but like the bursting forth of a potent, spreading fountain whose waters part in a thousand directions to make a thousand streams, each purposive, each at first seeking, but many of them unsuccessfully, to fulfil some part of the purpose of the whole. And in regard to this frequent unsuccess, we find the philosopher borne out by the palaeontologist, whose 'general picture ... of the evolution of the animal kingdom is accordingly that of an immense number of ... lives which evolve parallel to one another, and without coalescing, throughout longer or shorter geological times,' each of which 'culminates sooner or later in mutations of great size and highly specialized characters, which become extinct and leave no descendants.' At the heart of life, as in the philosophic mirror we watch its advance, there seems one guiding and supreme purpose, which is manifest in the continuous effort 'to engraft on the necessity of physical forces the largest possible amount of indetermination,' that is, of freedom in choice. But this purpose is evidently very hard to fulfil, and as we see, often fails of being fulfilled.

We may in mind and imagination walk in company with these teachers of ours; we may see the stages of the past of living creatures marked out in the geological strata, learning thus how life has grown from less to more, how its divergent streams have turned this way or that, and how some have been frustrate, as in the giant saurians and labyrinthodonts. We may learn too from the biologist that in our own day others (for instance perhaps those in the elephant and the ostrich and the whale) are in like manner drawing near to frustration by that impressive wearing out and perishing of a race, which is so clearly illustrated in the geological record. We discover that when impulsive life, seeking a free way, finds advance only through an excessive increase in the size of some creature, that creature's fate is sealed, and that manner of advance is barred. Size extending much beyond a certain range normal in the particular kind of animal is (perhaps in consequence of purely mechanical influences) to all the main intents and purposes of life no better than a blind alley. A like impulse, finding its outlet in the elaboration of nervous apparatus ranging from an all but indiscoverable structure to that definite and complex yet indefinitely mobile organ of an indefinitely extending choice—that living instrument for overcoming mechanism, that 'veritable reservoir of indetermination'—the human brain, finds there and there alone a road to great and full success. Yet it finds a road to minor and circumscribed successes in the lives of plants and animals which, interacting together, become of immeasurable value for the whole realm of life and the well-being of its citizens—for that realm of interlacing purposes and ends, where partial failure is so often converted to a new and a remoter triumph.

It seems as though in many, indeed in most instances, a life current, instead of driving on towards either greater freedom or complete arrest, met with a resistance able to constrain it, as it were, into eddies, wherein it circles as creatures living out either in a relative independence or in a parasitic state (sometimes of primary development, at others of degradation from a higher mode) their restricted lives. They are being fulfilled according to their restricted wants; they are needing no more of life than they have, and therefore seek no further than they are. And they have their co-operative value in the whole. These are the minor, yet many of them—and that in spite of dangers and pain and death—the delightful, successes of life. Everywhere upon this earth now, it seems, except in man, we may justly picture the life-currents as either coming to an end or circling round and round in some such eddy, at most curving out a little way to change a little in shape, to form new varieties within a species or, rarely, new species within a genus. There is in lower animals than ourselves, and in the plants, a certain contentment, on which tired men have sometimes been known to look with envy. The realm of nature is well served by servants such as these, and natural delights, in spite of natural pains, are won. But not all that life can do and be is represented in those finished forms. In the plants it seems to be asleep. There the protoplasmic stuff has built a wall about its soft body, the casing of cellulose behind which it sleeps, working in sleep, in great measure cut off from the varied stimulus and many-tongued summons, the resistances and opportunities, of an outer world. And some of the animals that are now extinct owe their extinction, not to their gigantic size, but to their having sought safety rather than adventure, and imprisoned themselves in their mechanical armour of defence. They too were in their measure cut off from the stir and help and moving oppositions of associated lives. In truth and in regard to the supreme purpose manifested in life, all the non-human creatures of the earth have, within themselves and for themselves, in one fashion or another barred its advance; although very many of them are furthering its purposes, indeed giving them indispensable support, elsewhere. Those which have not been extinguished and still maintain their place in the world are too complete, too well-adapted to a satisfying but narrow sphere, for progress to a wider. Life is not bearing them on; their nervous organ, that structure of inter-related cells by which they use their world, selecting and determining this or that, has not like ours capacity for indefinite change. Theirs is exactly fitted for their narrow use of it, and they and it are constrained together.

When we look at man through the eyes of the philosopher we see life clearly as a spiritual impulse, an impulse of a higher order than the animal, at least as much higher as that is than the material, and ever driving on. Man is not content; he is not fulfilled. He is fully awake; and he is not only conserving his long past but peering into the distances of his future. His brain is flexible, and able to provide a multitude of new structural arrangements; it is therefore an instrument of such choice as gives him leave to shape his future. And it is an active instrument; it brings to him through extending perception a field for his own spiritual activities that stretches out to match them, and enables him to become a ruler among circumstances. It allows him to worship beauty and even to create it; and to seek and worship truth; to adore goodness and be good. It permits desire to grow and the spirit within him to reach limit after limit, using each limit as an opportunity for further growth. All this the brain of man allows and promotes; and on this earth his brain alone. There is nowhere so magnificent and marvellous a bodily organ; for in it and by means of it physical things and physical laws are subdued to the purposes and ends of a free enduring creation.