Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II THE EVOLUTION OF MYSTERY IT is not unreasonable to believe that the paramount interest of life, all that is truly lofty and remarkable in the destiny of man, reposes almost entirely in the mystery that surrounds us ; in the two mysteries, it may be, that are mightiest, most dreadful of all — fatality and death. And indeed there are many whom the fatigue induced in their minds by the natural uncertainties of science has almost compelled to accept this belief. I, too, believe, though in a somewhat different fashion, that the study of mystery in all its forms is the noblest to which the mind of man can devote itself; and truly it has ever been the study and care of those who, in science and art, in philosophy and literature, have refused to be satisfied merely to observe and portray the trivial, well-recognised truths, facts, and realities of life. And we find that the success of these men in their endeavour, the depth of their insight into all that they knew, has most strictly accorded with the respect in which they held all they did not know, with the dignity that their mind or imagination was able to confer on the sum of unknowable forces. Our consciousness of the unknown wherein we have being gives life a meaning and grandeur which must of necessity be absent if we persist in considering only the things that are known to us ; if we too readily incline to believe that these must greatly transcend in importance the things which we know not yet. I It behoves every man to frame for himself his own general conception of the world. On this conception re'poses his whole human and moral existence. | But, this general conception of the world, when closely examined, is truly no more than a general conception of the unknown. And we must be careful ; we have not the right, ... --This text refers to the Paperback edition.