Finally, philosophy, in its search for the meaning of life, bows to the authority of natural science and proposes to interpret experience through some doctrine of development, or evolution, or heredity, or natural selection. All that exists, it announces, comes of some primitive protoplasm, or even of some single primitive cell. Yet still there presses the ancient question how such cells may have been made and how there has been imparted to them their infinite capacity for life and growth. It is the question which the keen and practical Napoleon asked as he stood a century ago under the mystery of the stars in Egypt. Turning to the scholar Monge, he said: “Qui a fait tout cela?” To such a question neither abstract philosophy nor natural science has as yet given and, so far as we can judge, will ever give any answer. To interpret the world, then, by itself or through itself is impossible, for there is in the world itself no final cause. If the mind of man is the final interpreter of the world, then it becomes itself the God it seeks, and the philosophers become the object of a kind of worship. Here, indeed, is the outcome of much philosophy to-day. If, however, the philosophers have any power of observation, they soon discover one positive barrier to this excessive self-importance. It is the humbling consciousness of limitation in their own powers and in their own hold on life itself; the inevitable impression, which no human praise can remove, of their own defects; the impossibility of finding a meaning even for their own lives within those lives themselves. Here is the weakness of that pantheism which, from the time of Spinoza, has so largely controlled speculative thought, and, from the time of Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Goethe, has been the prevailing creed of cultivated people, so far as they concern themselves with philosophy. No form of philosophy is so demoralizing in its ethical consequences as this. It breeds contempt of moral activity; it forfeits the right of the will to oppose what is evil and to create what is good. Sooner or later the corollary of such a faith appears in some form of superstition, crude but compelling,--like hypnotism or spiritualism, or the vulgar and noisy substitutes for religion which are now so conspicuous. Thus the cycle of philosophical speculation fulfils itself, and returns after centuries to the same point at which it began. The final form of truth may come to be, not the systems of abstract philosophy or of speculative theology, which have proved so misleading and unsatisfying, but simply a summing-up of the experience of mankind, as it has affected human destiny through the history of the world; and in this experience we have a philosophy better than abstractions, and always within one’s reach.