“One generally finds that this kind of reasoning is merely a piece of controversial athletics or a thin excuse for idleness.  People tell you that the conflict of science and religion—­it would be better to say, the conflict of modern culture and ancient traditions—­has robbed life of its plain significance.  The men who, like Tolstoi, seriously urge this point fail to appreciate the modern outlook on life.  Certainly modern culture—­science, history, philosophy, and art—­finds no purpose in life:  that is to say, no purpose eternally fixed and to be discovered by man.  A great chemist said a few years ago that he could imagine ’a series of lucky accidents’—­the chance blowing by the wind of certain chemicals into pools on the primitive earth—­accounting for the first appearance of life; and one might not unjustly sum up the influences which have lifted those early germs to the level of conscious beings as a similar series of lucky accidents.

“But it is sheer affectation to say that this demoralises us.  If there is no purpose impressed on the universe, or prefixed to the development of humanity, it follows only that humanity may choose its own purpose and set up its own goal; and the most elementary sense of order will teach us that this choice must be social, not merely individual.  In whatever measure ill-controlled individuals may yield to personal impulses or attractions, the aim of the race must be a collective aim.  I do not mean an austere demand of self-sacrifice from the individual, but an adjustment—­as genial and generous as possible—­of individual variations for common good.  Otherwise life becomes discordant and futile, and the pain and waste react on each individual.  So we raise again, in the twentieth century, the old question of ’the greatest good,’ which men discussed in the Stoa Poikile and the suburban groves of Athens, in the cool atria of patrician mansions on the Palatine and the Pincian, in the Museum at Alexandria, and the schools which Omar Khayyam frequented, in the straw-strewn schools of the Middle Ages and the opulent chambers of Cosimo dei Medici.”

And again: 

“The old dream of a co-operative effort to improve life, to bring happiness to as many minds of mortals as we can reach, shines above all the mists of the day.  Through the ruins of creeds and philosophies, which have for ages disdained it, we are retracing our steps toward that height—­just as the Athenians did two thousand years ago.  It rests on no metaphysic, no sacred legend, no disputable tradition—­nothing that scepticism can corrode or advancing knowledge undermine.  Its foundations are the fundamental and unchanging impulses of our nature.”

And again: