Perhaps reason offers the most curious of all the antinomies or self-contradictions which arise when one seeks to develop the physical, mental, and moral nature of man, on an evolutionary basis, from the fundamental instinct of self-preservation. A lesser but striking form of this self-contradiction is, for example, the habit of thrift, which is naturally explained as a tendency of self-protection, yet in its sordid extremes may work to destroy life rather than prolong it. Or, again, there are the strange contradictions involved in the social instinct. As one sees it in the insects, or in the gregarious grouping of the lower animals, the self-preservational basis is obvious enough, and with a few wrenches of excusable ingenuity one may put all human affections and devotions on the same foundation. Yet in the end one arrives at the astonishing paradox that the instinct of self-preservation has developed devotion to others so that a man may be willing to lay down his life for his friend, or even for those who are not his friends. But the extreme of all these contradictions, if one accepts the evolutionary development of reason, is that that marvelous instrument should be produced for the preservation of the individual and yet that the final working of it should be to show how utterly insignificant, pitiable, and unworthy of preservation this very individual is. Another weakness of the scientific spirit, and the curse of its passion for truth, is the difficulty, not to say the impossibility of ever attaining it. In the detail of scientific research this is, perhaps, not an evil, and difficulty is merely a splendid spur and stimulus to ever renewed effort and achievement. But when it comes to profounder and more fundamental matters, the difficulty is more serious, and if it may be justly said that one wearies of everything except to understand, one wearies of the failure to understand more than of anything else. After all, there are but two things that it is really important to know: oneself and God. And it is precisely in regard to these that the impossibility of final knowledge most overwhelms us. In the rugged language of old Ben Jonson: ‘I know no disease of the soul but ignorance; not of the arts and sciences, but of itself.’[102] And a Greek, two thousand years before Ben Jonson, gave vivid utterance to the same sufficiently obvious idea: ‘Many things are obscure to man, but the most obscure of all is his own soul.’[103]