our powers of thought there, but has left us, mind and mind, out of community and in a moral confusion that lies, not in the open conflict of ideas, but in tacit disparities of idea that never meet. Modernism reaches its ultimate goal in a knowledge of nature. But nature has no need of our knowledge. It is _we_ who need it, for our own ends. In the measure in which, for the conception of those ends, we lose our powers of thought, so precariously wrought in the long travail of the past, and so dependent upon unremitting reconquest, we shall in fact have killed the goose that lays the golden egg. _Courage and Education_[74] RICHARD LINDLEY BROWN Diverse and variegated as the texture of our contemporary life and literature is, a great part of it may be shown to have a fundamental unity. That unity lies in a certain fear and hopelessness,--occasioned by a mechanistic philosophy and ultimately owing, I think, to the misapplied and ill-digested implications of a popular scientific education. One meets everywhere some attempt to analyse and explain the life and destiny of man solely on the basis of his physique or environment, or on some other basis equally uncoloured by human imagination and idealisation. This attitude is not universal with us, nor is it even general, but it contains almost all that is original with us, and if we consider what is original as also characteristic, we can only postulate that the characteristic feature in our contemporary literature is the interpretation of life as a phase of merely animalistic existence. Now, this admission that man in no way transcends the limits of purely physical life is an act of cowardice to which no previous generation has ever so thoroughly committed itself. This admission is directly contrary to the general spirit of Ancient philosophy, impossible to the serenity of the Middle Ages, repugnant to the exuberance of the Renaissance, unnatural to the Romanticism, however defined, of the early nineteenth century. And even during the faltering generations just preceding our own, there were still eloquent humanists able to show that whatever man’s circumstances may be, and whatever his origin may have been, man was yet able to form for himself an intellectual and spiritual life and destiny independent of origin and circumstance.