Life is the final aim of life; the mission of the highest Teacher was that we might have it the more abundantly; and the universe strives best towards its ultimate purpose through the normal, vigorous spirit to whom to live itself is joy.

The danger, then, for our research will lie not in lack but in excess of motive; our minds may be biassed in their judgment of evidence by a deep instinctive desire. For my own part, I certainly cannot claim such impartiality as indifference might bring. From my earliest childhood - from my very first recollections - the desire for eternal life has immeasurably eclipsed for me every other wish or hope. Yet desire is not necessarily bias; and my personal history has convinced myself - though I cannot claim that it shall convince others also - that my wishes do not strongly warp my judgment, - nay, that sometimes the very keenness of personal anxiety may make one afraid to believe, as readily as other men, that which one most longs for.

For when, after deriving much happiness from Christian faith, I felt myself forced by growing knowledge to recognise that the evidence for that culminant instance of spirit return was not adequate, as standing alone, to justify conviction, I did honestly surrender that great joy; although its loss was more grievous to me than anything else which has happened to me in life.

Then with little hope - nay, almost with reluctant scorn - but with the feeling that no last and least chance of the great discovery should be thrown aside, I turned to such poor efforts at psychical research as were at that time possible; and now it is only after thirty years of such study as I have been able to give that I say to myself at last, Habes tota quod mente petisti - "Thou hast what thine whole heart desired;" - that I recognise that for me this fresh evidence, - while raising that great historic incident of the Resurrection into new credibility, - has also filled me with a sense of insight and of thankfulness such as even my first ardent Christianity did not bestow.

Yet if I thus find the happiness which sprang from far-reaching Tradition and Intuition surpassed by the happiness which springs from a narrower, but a more stable range of demonstrated fact, I nevertheless speak in no spirit of reaction or of ingratitude towards traditions and intuitions which must yet, for many a century, be potent for the salvation of men. I by no means take for granted that any scientific inquiry, any induction from empirical facts, can afford to man his only or his deepest insight into the meaning of the Universe. I have no controversy with those who say that contemplation, revelation, ecstasy, may carry deep into certain hearts an even profounder truth. I recognise also that our Science is a conventional structure; that it rests on assumptions which we cannot fully prove; or which even indicate, by their apparent inconsistency, that they can be at best but narrow aspects of some underlying law imperfectly discerned. All this we may all admit; just as we admit the inadequacy, the conventionality, of human speech itself. Speech cannot match the meaning which looks in an hour of emotion from the eyes of a friend. But what we learn from that gaze is indefinable and incommunicable.

Our race needed the spoken and written word, with all its baldness, if they were to understand each other and to grow to be men. So with Science as opposed to Intuition. Science forms a language common to all mankind; she can explain herself when she is misunderstood and right herself when she goes wrong; nor has humanity yet found, at any rate, since that great wedding between Reason and Experience, which immortalises the name of Galileo, - that the methods of Science, intelligently and honestly followed, have led us in the end astray.

It is only in the region of inquiry into a spiritual world - I mean a world of immaterial and yet individual realities - that these truisms are still in danger of being taken for paradoxes. At once the intimate interest and the extreme obscurity of that investigation have long prevented it from being kept fully and fairly in that scientific field where man's attempts at all other knowledge are now collected and appraised.

In their rude beginnings, no doubt, Religion and Science were indistinguishable. The savage observed such scanty facts as he could get at, and tried to shape both his practical and his spiritual life upon that observation. But his need of a theory of the unseen world (to put his vague hopes and terrors into our own phraseology) went far beyond what his scraps of experience could teach him. "What must I do to be saved?" was a question to which he could not find, yet would not wait for an answer. He fell into grotesque fancies, which his experience did not really support; and the divorce of Religion from Science at once began.

The spiritual need which thus acted on the savage continues to act on the civilised man. He too is impelled to build his faith on grounds outside his sphere of observation, to enlarge the safe, general, and permanent formula for religion in various more or less unsafe, specialised, and transitory ways. For it is - as already said - a safe, general, and permanent formula for religion if we regard it as man's normal subjective response to the sum of known cosmic phenomena taken as an intelligible whole. Under the title of Natural Religion this forms at least an element in all the higher forms of faith. Nevertheless it is felt to be inadequate; because the observable phenomena of the Universe, so far at least as they have yet been observed, have not been such as to evoke (save in some few minds) the full hope, the full devotion which our developed nature yearns to feel. To live by Natural Religion alone has been like living on turnips in the field. Most men demand their spiritual nutriment in a more assimilable form. The philosophical or the poetical contemplation of Nature has not satisfied them in the past; nor can they hope that the scientific contemplation of Nature will satisfy them any better now.