“Just when we are safest, there’s a sunset-touch,
  A fancy from a flower-bell, some one’s death,
  A chorus-ending from Euripides,—­
  And that’s enough for fifty hopes and fears
  As old and new at once as nature’s self,
  To rap and knock and enter in our soul,
  Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring,
  Round the ancient idol, on his base again,—­
  The grand Perhaps!  We look on helplessly. 
  There the old misgivings, crooked questions are."[A]

[Footnote A:  Bishop Blougram’s Apology.]

Amongst the facts of our experience which cry most loudly for some kind of solution, are those of our own inner life.  We are in pressing need of a “working hypothesis” wherewith to understand ourselves, as well as of a theory which will explain the revolution of the planets, or the structure of an oyster.  And this self of ours intrudes everywhere.  It is only by resolutely shutting our eyes, that we can forget the part it plays even in the outer world of natural science.  So active is it in the constitution of things, so dependent is their nature on the nature of our knowing faculties, that scientific men themselves admit that their surest results are only hypothetical.  Their truth depends on laws of thought which natural science does not investigate.

But quite apart from this doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, which is generally first acknowledged and then ignored, every man, the worst and the best alike, is constrained to take some practical attitude towards his fellows.  Man is never alone with nature, and the connections with his fellows which sustain his intelligent life, are liable to bring him into trouble, if they are not to some degree understood.

  “There’s power in me,” said Bishop Blougram, “and will to dominate
  Which I must exercise, they hurt me else.”

The impulse to know is only a phase of the more general impulse to act and to be.  The specialist’s devotion to his science is his answer to a demand, springing from his practical need, that he realize himself through action.  He does not construct his edifice of knowledge, as the bird is supposed to build its nest, without any consciousness of an end to be attained thereby.  Even if, like Lessing, he values the pursuit of truth for its own sake, still what stings him into effort is the sense that in truth only can he find the means of satisfying and realizing himself.  Beneath all man’s activities, as their very spring and source, there lies some dim conception of an end to be attained.  This is his moral consciousness, which no neglect will utterly suppress.  All human effort, the effort to know like every other, conceals within it a reference to some good, conceived at the time as supreme and complete; and this, in turn, contains a theory both of man’s self and of the universe on which he must impress his image.  Every man must have his philosophy of life, simply because he must act; though, in many