Though their science does not need it, the moral value of life does.

As to that value they have certain foregone conclusions, which they cannot resolve to abandon, but which their science can make no room for.

Two alternatives are offered them--to admit that life has not the meaning they thought it had, or that their system has not the completeness they thought it had; and of these two alternatives they will accept neither.

They could tell us '_with an iron strength of logic_' that all human sorrow was as involuntary and as unmeaning as sea-sickness; that love and faith were but distillations of what exists diluted in mutton-chops and beer; and that the voice of one crying in the wilderness was nothing but an automatic metamorphosis of the locusts and wild honey.

They could tell us '_with an iron strength of logic_' that all the thoughts and moral struggles of humanity were but as the clanging whirr of a machine, which if a little better adjusted might for the future go on spinning in silence.