These are some of the questions which this book attempts to answer. But before plunging merrily into such a task it may be well to pause and consider yet further the testimony of Belloc. He may be mistaken as to people in general, but he is almost incredibly correct in regard to a small but very influential body of conspicuous persons who may be described as the Materialistic Philosophers. Scientists some of them call themselves, and scientists they are--of a sort. But as they permit themselves to be perpetually hag-ridden by questions of eschatology--doctrines relating to that ultimate dim Thule towards which the whole creation does or does not move--philosophy is what they chiefly have to offer, no matter by what other name they seek to give it a more modern and therefore presumably sweeter odor. The ultimate nature of things engrosses them, and just how little they struggle against the threatened loss of a world of poetry, mythology and religion may be seen by a quotation taken at random, or, to be more specific, from “The Mechanist Conception of Life,” by a veritable general in the materialistic army, Prof. Jacques Loeb, formerly of the University of California. “Our wishes and hopes, disappointments and sufferings,” he says, “have their source in the instincts which are comparable to the light instincts of the heliotropic animals.” A tropism, it should perhaps be explained for the benefit of the older generation, is a tendency to move toward or away from any external object, the operation being carried out by means of chemical and mechanical changes within the subject. Thus the heliotrope, which always strives to turn towards the sun, got its name. It is said to be positively tropic to light. Prof. Loeb, however, seems to be negatively tropic in this regard, for he continues: “The need of the struggle for food, the sexual instinct with its poetry and its chain of consequences, the maternal instincts with the felicity and the suffering caused by them ... are the roots from which our inner life develops. For some of these instincts, the chemical basis is at least sufficiently indicated to arouse the hope that their analysis from the mechanistic point of view is only a question of time.”