is also to the religious spirit. It is because of this that the universe
is a thing of beauty for the poet, a revelation of God's goodness to the
devout soul, and a manifestation of absolute reason to the philosopher.
Art, religion, and philosophy fail or flourish together. The age of
prose and scepticism appears when the sense of the presence of the whole
in the particular facts of the world and of life has been dulled. And
there is a necessity in this; for if the conception of the world as a
whole is held to be impossible, if philosophy is a futility, then
poetry will be a vain sentiment and religion a delusion.

Nor will the failure of thought, when once demonstrated in these upper
regions, be confined to them. On the contrary, it will spread downwards
to science and ordinary knowledge, as mountain mists blot out the
valleys. For every synthesis of fact to fact, every attempt to know,
however humble and limited, is inspired by a secret faith in the unity
of the world. Each of the sciences works within its own region, and
colligates its details in the light of its own hypothesis; and all the
sciences taken together presuppose the presence in the world of a
principle that binds it into an orderly totality. Scientific explorers
know that they are all working towards the same centre. And, ever and
anon, as the isolated thinker presses home his own hypothesis, he finds
his thought beating on the limits of his science, and suggesting some
wider hypothesis. The walls that separate the sciences are wearing thin,
and at times light penetrates from one to the other. So that to their
votaries, at least, the faith is progressively justified, that there is
a meeting point for the sciences, a central truth in which the dispersed
rays will again be gathered together. In fact, all the sciences are
working together under the guidance of a principle common to them all,
although it may not be consciously known and no attempt is made to
define it. In science, as in philosophy and art and religion, there is a