never reconcile himself to accept the limitations of nature as absolute? Why could he, in his physical and moral world, attempt impossibilities that stagger imagination, and, in spite of repeated disappointments, never accept defeat?
Looked at from the point of view of nature man is foolish. He does not fully trust the world he lives in. He has been waging war with it from the commencement of his history. He seems so fond of hurting himself from all directions. It is difficult to imagine how the careful mistress of natural selection should leave loopholes through which such unnecessary and dangerous elements could find entrance into her economy and encourage man to try to break the very world that sustains him. But the chick also behaves in the same unaccountably foolish manner in pecking through the wall of its little world. Somehow it has felt, with the accomplishment of an irresistible impulse, that there is something beyond its dear prison of shell, waiting to give it the fulfilment of its existence in a manner it can never imagine.
In the same manner also man, in his instinct, is almost blindly sure that, however dense be his envelopment, he is to be born from Nature's womb to the world of spirit,—the world where
