We move in the illusion of seeing and knowing that which is strictly indispensable to our little lives. As for all the rest, which is well-nigh everything, our organs not only debar us from reaching, seeing or feeling it, but even restrain us from suspecting what it is, just as they would prevent us from understanding it if an intelligence of a different order were to bethink itself of revealing or explaining it to us. The number and volume of those mysteries is as boundless as the universe itself. If mankind were one day to draw near to those which to-day it deems the greatest and the most inaccessible, such as the origin and the aim of life, it would at once behold rising up behind them, like eternal mountains, others quite as great and quite as unfathomable; and so on, without end. In relation to that which it would have to know in order to hold the key to the riddle of this world, it would always find itself at the same point of central ignorance. It would be just the same if we possessed an intelligence several million times greater and more penetrating than ours. All that its miraculously increased power could discover would encounter limits no less impassable than at present. All is boundless in that which has no bounds. We shall be the eternal prisoners of the universe. It is therefore impossible for us to appreciate in any degree whatsoever, in the smallest conceivable respect, the present state of the universe and to say, as long as we are men, whether it follows a straight line or describes an immense circle, whether it is growing wiser or madder, whether it is advancing towards the eternity which has no end or retracing its steps towards that which had no beginning. Our sole privilege within our tiny confines is to struggle towards that which appears to us the best, and to remain heroically persuaded that no part of what we do within those confines can ever be wholly lost. 6