Now there is in our experience already one principle which does answer the question “Why?” in such a way as to raise no further questions; that is, the principle of Purpose.  Let us take a very simple illustration.  Across many of the hills in Cumberland the way from one village to another is marked by white stones placed at short intervals.  We may easily imagine a simple-minded person asking how they came there, or what natural law could account for their lying in that position; and the physical antecedents of the fact—­the geological history of the stones and the physiological structure of the men who moved them—­give no answer.  As soon, however, as we hear that men placed them so, to guide wayfarers in the mist or in the night, our minds are satisfied.

Dr. Temple holds fast to that great word that infallible clue, Purpose.  He is not arguing from design.  He keeps his feet firmly on scientific ground, and asks, as a man of science asks, What is this? and Why is this?  Then he finds that this question can proceed only from faith in coherence, and discovers that the quest of science is quest of Purpose.

To investigate Purpose is obviously to acknowledge Will.

Science requires, therefore, that there should be a real Purpose in the world. . . .  It appears from the investigation of science, from investigation of the method of scientific procedure itself, that there must be a Will in which the whole world is rooted and grounded; and that we and all other things proceed therefrom; because only so is there even a hope of attaining the intellectual satisfaction for which science is a quest.

Reason is obliged to confess the hypothesis of a Creative Will, although it does not admit that man has in any way perceived it.  But is this hypothesis, which is essential to science, to be left in the position of Mahomet’s coffin?  Is it not to be investigated?  For if atheism is irrational, agnosticism is not scientific—­“it is precisely a refusal to apply the scientific method itself beyond a certain point, and that a point at which there is no reason in heaven or earth to stop.”

     To speak about an immanent purpose is very good sense; but to speak
     about a purpose behind which there is no Will is nonsense.

People, he says, become so much occupied with the consideration of what they know that they entirely forget “the perfectly astounding fact that they know it.”  Also they overlook or slur the tremendous fact of spiritual individuality; “because I am I, I am not anybody else.”  But let the individual address to himself the question he puts to the universe, let him investigate his own pressing sense of spiritual individuality, just as he investigates any other natural phenomenon, and he will find himself applying that principle of Purpose, and thinking of himself in relation to the Creator’s Will.

If there is Purpose in the universe there is Will; you cannot have Purpose or intelligent direction, without Will.  But, as we have seen, “to speak about an immanent will is nonsense”: