In all these mixings-up of faith and unfaith in our supposably achieved liberties one can discern a foundation-issue in our philosophy of life. The whole universe of our experience--the solid earth, the sea, the sky, the past and present of society, the achievements of science, the devices and desires of the heart, the inspiring faiths--all this confronts us with the question, What do you really want, and how much will you dare on behalf of it? Our answer involves our assessment of our own selfhood. Usually the alternatives for our enterprise are, on the one hand, increasing or stabilizing some conventional and comfortable function, or, on the other hand, reaching after an unconventional blessing that costs the pain of self-reconstruction. We cannot have brotherhood, democracy, industrial justice, world-peace, _or freedom_ at a lower cost than this. Shall we, then, experiment, explore, adventure in the area of selfhood as we are doing at the present moment in the sky? Can the mind, as well as the body, support itself in a less dense medium than that in which it has moved in the past? The scientific movement has made us daring in the realm of ponderables but not with respect to ourselves. Pure science seeks only one value, that of knowing the connections of things; its one interest in personality is that scientific method should be employed; its one interest in freedom is this. In our academic institutions a spiritually delicate sensitivity at this point may be joined with indifference to freedom in the other essays of man. A kind of daring different from that of the laboratory or even of polar exploration is required if we are to cast off the moorings of an old selfhood and voyage forth in search of new spiritual continents. Further, the scientific spirit can be and often is inattentive to the life-values or dis-values that are promoted by the application of its discoveries. The uncriticized purposes of the present, accordingly, have unobstructedly capitalized on their own static behalf our enormously increased power over nature. Indeed, these purposes, because they use new and shining machinery, have actually acquired something of the éclat of the sciences. A current writer, according to an announcement that has appeared since this chapter was begun, declares that science has actually been accepted as a sort of messiah, deliverer, or solver of life’s final problems--a rôle for which it is totally unqualified.[8] The obverse of this attitude toward science is inertia toward the values that science as such does not feel.