an companionship may be as it exists
among men, humanity as a whole must fight its battle with nature and
with the universe substantially alone, comfortless except for the
comforts that it wins precisely as it builds its houses; namely, by
using the mechanisms of nature for its own purposes. The world happens,
indeed, to give man some power to control natural conditions. But even
this power is due to the very fact that man also is one of nature's
products,--a product possessing a certain stability, a certain natural
plasticity and docility, a limited range of natural initiative. As a
rock may deflect a stream, so man, himself a natural mechanism, may turn
the stream of nature's energies into paths that are temporarily useful
for human purposes. But from the modern point of view the ancient plaint
of the Book of Job remains true, both for the rock and for the man:

"The waters wear away stones,
And the hope of frail man thou destroyest."

In the end, our relations to the universe thus seem to remain relations
to an essentially foreign power, which cares for our ideals as the
stormy sea cares for the boat, and as the bacteria care for the human
organism upon which they prey. If we ourselves, as products of nature,
are sufficiently strong mechanisms, we may be able to win, while life
lasts, many ideal goods. But just so, if the boat is well enough built,
it may weather one or another passing storm. If the body is well knit,
it may long remain immune to disease. Yet in the end the boat and the
human body fail. And in no case, so this view asserts, does the real
world essentially care for or help or encourage our ideals. Our ideals
are as foreign to the real natural world as the interests of the ship's
company are to the ocean that may tolerate, but also may drown them. Be
free from superstition, then; and next: avoid false hopes. Such are the
two theses that seem to embody for many minds the essentially modern
view of things and the essential result for the philosophy of life of
what we have now learned.

But hereupon the question arises whether this is indeed the last word of
insight; whether this outcome of modern knowledge does indeed tell the
whole story of our relations to the real world. That this modern view
has its own share of deeper truth we all recognize. But is this the
whole truth? Have we no access whatever to any other aspect of reality
than the one which this naturalistic view emphasizes? And again, th