gather these laws under still wider ones, and to interpret the world in
the light of the highest principles. And this is precisely what poetry
and religion and philosophy do, each in its own way. They carry the work
of the sciences into wider regions, and that, as I shall try to show, by
methods which, in spite of many external differences, are fundamentally
at one with those which the sciences employ.

There is only one way of giving the quietus to the metaphysics of poets
and philosophers, and of showing the futility of a philosophy of life,
or of any scientific explanation of religion and morals. It is to show
that there is some radical absurdity in the very attempt. Till this is
done, the human mind will not give up problems of weighty import,
however hard it may be to solve them. The world refused to believe
Socrates when he pronounced a science of nature impossible, and
centuries of failure did not break man's courage. Science, it is true,
has given up some problems as insoluble; it will not now try to
construct a perpetually moving machine, or to square the circle. But it
has given them up, not because they are difficult, but because they are
unreasonable tasks. The problems have a surd or irrational element in
them; and to solve them would be to bring reason into collision with
itself.

Now, whatever may be the difficulties of establishing a theory of life,
or a philosophy, it has never been shown to be an unreasonable task to
attempt it. One might, on the contrary, expect, _prima facie_, that in
a world progressively proved to be intelligible to man, man himself
would be no exception. It is impossible that the "light in him should be
darkness," or that the thought which reveals the order of the world
should be itself chaotic.