These constructions have no continuance. A slight shifting in the point of view, a new "demand" from science, a step forward (or backward) in the higher criticism, a change in the prevalent political obsession, a fit of sickness in democratic aspiration, and down they all go under a breath of the logic that created them, the modernism of to-day becoming the obscurantism of to-morrow. Then the work of accommodation must begin afresh; new concessions are offered to "reason," with the result that rebellious criticism breaks out at another point. Or the cry is raised, by desperate men, that religion is not an affair of the "head" but of the "heart"--as though a religion in which the "head" and the "heart" were at variance could be anything else than a fatal disease of the soul. And may not these apostles of the "heart" be reminded that their proposal to exclude the "head" from the pale of religion has neither force nor meaning until the "head" itself has ratified the bargain and consented to its own exclusion? Which the "head" is not likely to do. If, then, we are to limit the word "reason" to that side of us to which the aforesaid logic makes its approach, we should realize from the outset that none of us can adduce the faintest shadow of reason why he should exist at all, or why, in Sir Leslie Stephen's words, it were not better for the world at large if his neck were wrung five minutes hence. Indeed, if the half-born logic of the unconverted reason is to rule our actions, I am inclined to think that the advice to commit universal suicide would be at least as "logical" as any other that philosophy could tender to the human race at the present moment. But the advice would not be accepted. Rightly or wrongly each one of us insists on regarding his own existence as a fact of some significance--insists on believing that, on the whole, it is better for him to be here than not to be here. However firmly we may be convinced that the One has done its duty when it has differentiated itself into a Many, there is none of us who would take lightly to the proposal that he, John Smith, as one of the Many, should forthwith be blotted out, and another, Wong Fu, placed in the gap left vacant by his disappearance. To most of us, I believe, nay to all, it does make an enormous difference whether the particular niche in question is filled by Wong Fu or by _me_, but a difference for which we should find it extremely difficult to give a "logical" account.