The proper attitude to-day in which the problem of man’s place in nature should be approached is one of bewilderment and humility. Both the material universe and the mind of man are very mysterious things. At the present time it is only an inadequate mind which is confident that it knows what is impossible. There was never a time when hearty dogmatism and loud confidence were more out of place. We must think as best we can, of course. The next step upward in the development of the human consciousness will not be achieved by either slovenly credulity or slovenly scepticism, but only by a terrifying mental travail. I see a human mind as some multiple plant, here in full flower, there still in the bud. Different minds have flowered in different ways. Beethoven’s _Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit_ points to the complete development in him of something which those of us who understand him have only in embryo. In those who do not understand him it is non-existent. And the great mystics ought at least to make us doubt whether it is we who are not deficient rather than they who are mad. It is rash to dismiss our exceptional moods, our strange flashes of what seems like insight, as mere whimsies without significance. They may be faint stirrings of the next thing that is destined to become fully alive. All that we can say is that the mind lives in a universe largely of its own creation, and that the universe, together with the mind, will change in ways we cannot foresee. 4 We have seen that the philosophy that regards man as a meaningless accident in an alien universe receives no support from modern physics. The true ground of that philosophy is now, as it always has been, the apparently meaningless misery that forms part of life. It is not by mistaking matter for an ultimate reality or by pondering on the fact that laws of nature exist that we can conclude that man is of no cosmic significance. That conclusion can be reached logically only on the basis of arbitrary assumptions. But the conclusion is not, in fact, reached in that way: it is reached through feeling. And it cannot be transcended by a logical process, but only in virtue of a mystic experience. The old materialistic outlook, although it no longer has any scientific justification, is still active in many branches of science. It has made popular certain types of explanation and is the cause of the direction pursued by certain researches. In particular it has led to a great deal of useless or misleading work being done in the attempt to reduce qualitative to quantitative differences.