For Amiralno himself there remained one serious question, which had troubled the race from the time that mere faith had ceased to rule and pilot their creed, and reason had been accepted as the only ultimate guide of life, the final court of appeal in which all questions must be decided. They could not trust to emotion or instinct; for these were but hard-won creeds and habits of past imperfect ages grown unconscious of their origin by transmission from generation to generation. Authority out of the past, tradition, law of nature, had the same taint upon them. They were but the crude conclusions of comparatively primitive times, with the logic leading to them veiled by oblivion, then thrust upon later ages as inspiration. All these dogmatic judges of the present and the future were but the shadows of their own worst and atavistic selves. It was only an illusion, a mirage in the desert of the past, to trust these merely subjective impressions as reflections from the ultimately real, the absolute. A people like this was sure to abandon all such projections of their own dead selves as steps to higher than themselves. Every man had to settle for himself the problems that his science had been unable to solve, and that he must find some solution of in death. They had longed and striven for absolute certainty, yet every new age had to fall back upon the individual consciousness and hope, which were wholly on the side of belief in personal immortality. They knew that the energy in them could never die, whatever form it might take. Never had they found in the whole round of their investigations anything like absolute death or annihilation; every change that they observed, however far into infinity they had searched, was but a transformation of energy, and not its final evanishment. Matter was only a resting-place, a half-way house, of energy. And even matter was a comparative term, depending on the sensuous point of view of the observer. What was matter to one generation was found by a later to be pure energy, or even a mass of life. What was matter to one sense was to another nothing but energy. And the development of new senses, that gave them full consciousness of some hitherto-unrecognised type of energy, saved them from the dogmatism about the future based upon the idea that all types of energy were known to them. Their wonderful instruments of research revealed to them worlds of energy which might have lain for ages undiscovered, and swept out all stupid trust in the omniscience of the senses or the instincts. They refused to dogmatise about the existence or non-existence of any type of energy or being. Nay, they preferred to accept provisionally the existence of any form that their imagination might sketch out as possible and as consistent with the laws they had found permeating all the known universe. Belief was for them hope waiting for realisation.