It may now be asserted that the facts are not in accord with the view to which I have just given expression, that sometimes, and very of ten too, the forms and doctrines of science are imposed without modification or translation upon practical life. Thus, though the names for edibles themselves as present to the eye--or to any other sense--are not normal substitutes for food, nevertheless some people, whether from poverty or from indigestion, have fed on them, just as they have taken long journeys with maps, time-tables, and guide books. In education, too, the formal conditions of science have suggested object-lessons and pure induction; in political organization we have had programmes of extreme elemental individualism, of lawless democracy, and of abstract communism and Christian Socialism; in religion God [p.115] has been like a thing seen, perhaps a tree walking or a man working, whether with hoe or rake or with other implement, perhaps a trident, and belief has been identified with an articulate dogma or formula; and many a realistic novel, treating the details of life as a scientist might treat them, or many a psychological novel, more problematic than artistic, has been put upon the market. But what can all this mean, undoubtedly true as it is, save that science belongs to life, yet is applied to it with difficulty and only under conditions of conflict? In the case of the edibles, poverty or illness, both of them incidents of conflict, is responsible for the unnatural substitution, and in cases of education, politics, religion, and literature, the substitution is equally a makeshift which the conditions of conflict impose upon life. An individualistic programme will not work, nor will a purely socialistic programme work. Mere induction will not educate. No visible God ever was divine, and no articulate creed ever was true. Life is a game throughout; its vital character, its very integrity is its experimental character; it is not a settled, abstractly perfect thing. Life is dynamic, not static. Accordingly it must move forward by its mistakes, or by storm and stress of the incongruous and misapplied, being inspired, not by somebody's complacent optimism, but by a sacrificial, always heroic idealism; and its scientific practices, however truly a mixing of things formally incongruous or disparite, are just aids to its reality. Moreover, those science-formed practices are always in some measure sophisticated. Human nature is rather a fine thing in its way, as [p.116] many a man has flattered himself and his kind by saying. Witness the homeless, ill-clad, starving child feeding over the odorous grating and before the well-stocked window of the restaurant, and feeling, if not actually saying: "As long as I cannot have and eat, it is good to smell and see." Witness, also, the educator or the statesman or the priest or the novelist. Each knows his makeshift and feels some of the humour of it, and in his closet, when not before his public, acknowledges the violence to which he is lending himself.