Now, for my own part, I must confess that if mind with all its nobler manifestations such as Will, Love, Duty, and so forth, be a mere rainbow hovering above the cataract of material force, it does not seem to me worth while to discuss anything, for we, mere particles that glimmer for a moment, can never affect anything, and must soon be where nothing can any longer affect us. It is happily quite true as Santayana says in his Reason in Science,[133] that people who do not think about these matters at all may “know how to live cheerily and virtuously for life’s own sake” on the strength of the normal source of vitality which has made for its own ends from the beginning of things without the aid of our consciousness or criticism. But this consciousness, turning inward as well as outward, this questioning and speculative spirit, are themselves forms of vitality, phases in the gradual conquest of Nothingness (_i.e._ undifferentiated Being) by Life. We stunt and maim ourselves if we try to keep them aloof. It is true that in encouraging them we may often seem to be turning the terrible, two-edged weapon of Analysis against our own higher life. Be it so! We have taken that sword in hand; we have cut down with it a hundred forms of superstition and wrong; and the time to sheath it is not yet. Whatever dangers there may be in it, we must face those dangers; and though it may be left to another generation completely to overcome them, let that generation, at least, say of us that we did not drop our weapons on the field of battle, even if our own life-blood sometimes flowed upon the blade.[134]