This aspect of Maxwell, as a critic at large, as it were, would well repay study, and it is unfortunate that our material for it is contained in a scarcely ideal biography. He differed from the run of scientific men, whose absorption in one pursuit makes their mental life unrepresentative; his chief problems are not found in his scientific writings, and they are the problems of us all. There was nothing superficial in Maxwell, and he had no easily won conclusions. It is the path he followed that gives interest to his goal. We should like to know, for instance, what experiences, what reflections, enabled him to write: “Long ago I felt like a peasant in a country overrun with soldiers, and saw nothing but carnage and danger. Since then I have learned at least that some soldiers in the field die nobly, and that all are summoned there for a cause.” That Maxwell, either suddenly or gradually, developed a mystic consciousness of life, is borne out by many passages of his correspondence. We can attach no other significance to his description of his “nostrum”: “an abandonment of wilfulness without extinction of will, but rather by means of a great development of will, whereby, instead of being consciously free and really in subjection to unknown laws, it becomes consciously acting by law, and really free from the interference of unrecognised laws”; and his letters to his wife, dealing with passages from the Bible, abound in interpretations which are indubitably mystical. Yet we have no evidence that he was acquainted with the literature and terminology of mysticism; he is speaking of personal experiences, not of acquired doctrines. The maintenance of a mystical outlook on life, together with a perfect realisation of the implications of physical science, was accomplished, in Maxwell’s case, by denying the ordinary conception of the _direction_ of scientific progress. It is the idea which would inevitably occur to him, for it is the peculiar merit of his own work that it was not the result of straightforward progress. He made a new way of thinking necessary just as, in our own time, Quantum Theory and Relativity Theory have fundamentally disturbed our most unquestionable assumptions. The way Maxwell actually approached the problem we have mentioned was by insisting on what he called, by a mathematical analogy, the “singular points” of existences, that is, the points where the equations break down, and he postulated that the more there were of these singular points the higher the rank of the existence. At a “singular point” influences which are usually negligible may assume a dominating importance, and Maxwell saw the science of the future as being largely concerned with these lapses in continuity--as, in fact, science since his time has been. In this way he escaped determinism. In his own words: