material foes, our environment, our diseases, our weaknesses. There are amongst us men ourselves, our rivalries, our selfish passions, our anarchical impulses, our blindness, our weak wills, our short and careful lives. These things all stand in the way of progress. For progress, for organization, for life, for spirituality, stand, as the best forces, our healthier social instincts, our courage, our endurance, and our insight. Civilization depends upon these. How hopeless every task of humanity, were not instinct often on the side of order and of spirituality. How quick would come our failure, were not courage and endurance ours. How blindly chance would drive us, did we not love insight for its own sake, and cultivate contemplation even when we know not yet what use we can make of it. And so, these three, if you will, to wit, healthy instinct, enduring courage, and contemplative insight, rule the civilized world. He who wants life to prosper longs to have these things alike honored and cultivated. They are brethren, these forces of human spirituality; they cannot do without one another; they are all needed.
Well, what I have called contemplative insight, that disposition and power of our minds whereby we study and enjoy truth, expresses itself early and late, as you know, in the form of a searching curiosity about our world and about life, a curiosity to which you in vain endeavor to set bounds. As the infant that studies its fist in the field of vision does not know as yet why this curiosity about space and about its own movements will be of service to it, so throughout life there is something unpractical, wayward, if so you choose to call it, in all our curious questionings concerning our world. The value of higher insight is seldom immediate. Science has an element of noble play about it. It is not the activity, it is the often remote outcome of science, that is of practical service. Insight is an ally of the moral nature of man, an ally of our higher social instincts, of our loyalty, of our
