g,
Round the ancient idol, on his base again,--
The grand Perhaps! We look on helplessly.
There the old misgivings, crooked questions are."[A]

[Footnote A: _Bishop Blougram's Apology._]

Amongst the facts of our experience which cry most loudly for some kind
of solution, are those of our own inner life. We are in pressing need of
a "working hypothesis" wherewith to understand ourselves, as well as of
a theory which will explain the revolution of the planets, or the
structure of an oyster. And this self of ours intrudes everywhere. It is
only by resolutely shutting our eyes, that we can forget the part it
plays even in the outer world of natural science. So active is it in the
constitution of things, so dependent is their nature on the nature of
our knowing faculties, that scientific men themselves admit that their
surest results are only hypothetical. Their truth depends on laws of
thought which natural science does not investigate.

But quite apart from this doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, which
is generally first acknowledged and then ignored, every man, the worst
and the best alike, is constrained to take some _practical_ attitude
towards his fellows. Man is never alone with nature, and the connections
with his fellows which sustain his intelligent life, are liable to bring
him into trouble, if they are not to some degree understood.

"There's power in me," said Bishop Blougram, "and will to dominate
Which I must exercise, they hurt me else."

The impulse to know is only a phase of the more general impulse to act
and to be. The specialist's devotion to his science is his answer to a
demand, springing from his practical need, that he realize himself
through action. He does not construct his edifice of knowledge, as the
bird is supposed to build its nest, without any consciousness of an end
to be attained thereby. Even if, like Lessing, he values the pursuit of
truth for its own sake, still what stings him into effort is the sense
that in truth only can he find the means of satisfying and realizing
himself. Beneath all man's activities, as their very spring and source,
there lies some dim conception of an end to be attained. This is his
moral consciousness, which no neglect will utterly suppress. All human
effort, the effort to know like every other, conceals within it a
reference to some good, conceived at the time as supreme and complete;
and this, in turn, contains a theory both of man's sel