[The scientific part of this essay, indeed the central idea which makes it anything more than a philosophic vagary, is borrowed from an unpublished lecture of my brother, Prof. Louis T. More, who holds the chair of Physics in the University of Cincinnati. If I have printed the paper under my name rather than his, this is because he, as a scientist, might not wish to be held responsible for the general drift of the thought.] The story is told of Dante that in one of his peregrinations through Italy he stopped at a certain convent, moved either by the religion of the place or by some other feeling, and was there questioned by the monks concerning what he came to seek. At first the poet did not reply, but stood silently contemplating the columns and arches of the cloister. Again they asked him what he desired; and then slowly turning his head and looking at the friars, he answered, "Peace!" The anecdote is altogether too significant to escape suspicion; yet as _The Divine Comedy_ is supposed to contain symbolically the history of the human spirit in its upward growth and striving, so this fable of the divine poet may be held to sum up in a single word the aim and desire of the spirit's endless quest. So clearly is the object of our inner search this "peace" which Dante is said to have sought, and so close has the spirit come again and again to attaining this goal, that it should seem as if some warring principle within ourselves turned us back ever when the hoped-for consummation was just within reach. As Vaughan says in his quaint way: Man is the shuttle, to whose winding quest And passage through these looms God ordered motion, but ordained no rest. It is possible, I believe, to view the ceaseless intellectual fluctuations of mankind backward and forward as the varying fortunes of the contest between these two hostile members of our being,--between the deep-lying principle that impels us to seek rest and the principle that drags us back into the region of change and motion and forever forbids us to acquiesce in what is found. And I believe further that the moral disposition of a nation or of an individual may be best characterised by the predominance of the one or the other of these two elements. We may find a people, such as the ancient Hindus, in whom the longing after peace was so intense as to make insignificant every other concern of life, and among whom the aim of saint and philosopher alike was to close the eyes upon the theatre of this world's shifting scenes and to look only upon that changeless vision of central peace subsisting at the heart Of endless agitation. The spectacle of division and mutation became to them at last a mere phantasmagoria, like the morning mists that melt away beneath the upspringing day-star.