Philosophy, however, has seldom consented to this confession of impotence. On the contrary, it has repeatedly reverted to some absolute assumption of an adequate cause which lies behind the possibility of proof. Sometimes it is the assumption of a vital Substance, one and unchangeable; sometimes it is the assumption of an infinite concourse of atoms. Yet such conceptions are in the highest degree elusive, and force us to inquire whence such substance, be it simple or infinitely divided, comes, how it becomes quickened with life, and how it imparts the life it has. The transition from such mere movements of atoms to phenomena of feeling or thought or will, makes a leap in nature which no man has in the remotest degree proposed to explain. On the contrary, instead of bridging such a chasm the most famous inquirers simply record the melancholy confession: “Ignoramus, ignorabimus.” Sometimes, again, philosophy has taught, with many and large words, that the meaning of the world resides in an opposition between Being and Not-being. This is no new doctrine and it is at least intelligent and intelligible. Yet what we really need to know concerns Being alone. It is the world that lies before our eyes that interests us. How has this world come to be, we ask, or is it perhaps a mere illusion, the mirage of our own thought, with no reality but that which our own minds assign, as people in their despair have sometimes believed it to be? As for Non-existence, what rational interest has this for us? Is it even an intelligible conception? Does it not rather set before us a contradiction which we may conceive, but can never verify, and which has for life itself no significance at all? Still other philosophers invite us to turn from the outward world whose final cause thus eludes us, and to consider our own self-conscious nature, the Ego, concerning which no one can doubt and which no philosophy is needed to prove. Yet no sooner does this poor Ego issue from its own self-consciousness and, as it were, take a step into the outward world, as though to interpret through itself the meaning of life, than it becomes aware that some further and external cause is necessary to explain even the Ego to itself.