However wise a code of morality may be, it is necessarily artificial. It has grown up to suit the peculiar circumstances and demands of race, climate and time. The basic reason for its existence is too often encrusted and disguised by fears, superstitions and illusions, perpetual creatures of the human mind; the essentials are often lost sight of or forgotten, and Truth is parodied as the principle that gave birth to the ecclesiastical chimera which forms the edifice of modern cults. Is it surprising, then, that morality is garbed in the changing coat of a chameleon? That what is held moral to-day is immoral to-morrow, and that what is held immoral here is moral elsewhere? The second and deeper morality concerns ourselves only. It demands an answer to the eternal question: What is the Ultimate Good? One great imperative stands out pre-eminent: we must be true to ourselves. He who would seek the truth must himself be true. Without truth there is no creation, no progress. But before we can be true to ourselves, we must know ourselves; that is the problem we are considering--knowledge of the ego. Some men are content to supply synonyms for the Ideal--for Perfection, the goal of endeavour--imagining they are thereby showing the way. Others realize the first task must be to cleanse the way of the inadequacies and perversions which masquerade as the whole Truth, as the "word of God." The Ultimate Good cannot be translated into the petty codes of human convenience, neither can it be deduced from the wanton phantoms of man's wild fancy, called religion, which, by attempting to expound everything, explains nothing. What is religion? Is it the search for truth? Is it not an attempt to clothe our conception of the Infinite in terms finite?--the result being grotesque, bearing no relation to existence, a lawless chimera, born of man's dread of the unknown, an amorphous fantasy fashioned out of the distorted visions of man's hopes and fears, modelled, amended and shaped in course of time in accordance with the postulate of man's nature--man the religious animal! Science cannot give us the whole truth and admits it! "Absolute beginnings or origins are beyond the pale of science."[34] But religion professes to know and is disproved at every step. It is when Religion refuses to learn that she is harmful; because her values are false and her thought retrospective that she is inadequate. It is not because the religions of the past and their legacies to-day cannot prove the Transcendent that they should be discarded, but because they attempt to prove it and turn the world into chaos in so doing. It is not only because, in the words of Huxley, "everywhere priests have broken the spirit of wisdom and tried to stop human progress by quotations from their Bibles or books of their Saints," that the old religion is outgrown, but because it is daily growing more and more impotent.