We are still in the stage of mystery in dealing with the causes of variations and mutations in the biological order. Something surprising and novel, something that was not there before, something incalculable and unpredictable suddenly appears and a little living creature arrives equipped with a trait which no ancestor had and by means of which he can endure better, can see farther or run faster, can survive longer, and is, in fact, on a higher life-level. We do not know how the little midget did it. But some _élan vital_ may have burst in from an invisible and intangible environment, more real even than the environment we see. The universe, as Professor Shaler once said, seems to be “a realm of unending and infinitely varied originations.” So, too, these flushes of splendor which break through the “Soul’s east window of divine surprise” may come from a perfectly real spiritual environment without which a finite spirit could not be at all or live at all. I do not know. Our fragmentary experiences cannot enable us to furnish irrefragible proof. It only looks _as though_ God were within reach and _as though_ at moments we were at home with Him. Gilbert Murray’s cautious conclusion in his fine essay on _Stoicism_ is a good word with which to close this chapter. “We seem to find,” he says, “not only in all religions, but in practically all philosophies, some belief that man is not quite alone in the universe, but is met in his endeavours towards the good by some external help or sympathy.... It is important to realize that the so-called belief is not really an intellectual judgment so much as a craving of the whole nature [in us].... It is only of very late years that psychologists have begun to realize the enormous dominion of those forces in man of which he is normally unconscious. We cannot escape as easily as these brave men [the Stoics] dreamed from the grip of the blind powers beneath the threshold. Indeed, as I see philosophy after philosophy falling into this unproven belief in the Friend behind phenomena, as I find that I myself cannot, except for a moment and by an effort, refrain from making the same assumption, it seems to me that perhaps here, too, we are under the spell of a very old ineradicable instinct. We are gregarious animals; our ancestors have been such for countless ages. We cannot help looking out on the world as gregarious animals do; we see it in terms of humanity and of fellowship. Students of animals under domestication have shown us how the habits of a gregarious creature, taken away from his kind, are shaped in a thousand details by reference to the lost pack which is no longer there—the pack which a dog tries to smell his way back to all the time he is out walking, the pack he calls to for help when danger threatens. It is a strange and touching thing, this eternal hunger of the gregarious animal for the herd of friends who are not there. And it may be, it may very possibly be, that,