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: THE ENIGMA OF LIFE LL roads lead to Rome"—so runs the ancient dictum. How true the analogy that all mental paths, if but logically pursued, lead inevitably to Agnosticism! Approach and attack the riddle of the universe from whatsoever angle you please, and the result will always be the same. As far as the attainment of a definite goal is concerned, it is quite immaterial whether one treat the cosmos itself as the point of departure of one's speculations and work inward, so to speak, towards the finite, or whether some concrete entity or entities be adopted as the starting-point, and one work outward in the direction of the infinite. To him who meditates in Reason's company it be- comes increasingly evident that, just as the mystery of the cosmos in its totality defies unrayelment by man, so in its turn each and every constituent part of it refuses, sphinxlike, to yield up its eternal secret. From time immemorial, believers in an all-benevolent Providence have sought in vain to formulate a reasonable theory of the purpose and utility of some of the lower types of plant and animal life. Many living organisms are hideous and repulsive beyond description, and appear to have no value whatever; a great number, indeed, are positively noxious. "Why, then, are they here?" asks the Theist. "Why were they created? How, in brief, can their existence be reconciled with the supposed goodness of God?" Modern teleologists are not the first, and, one may safely venture to assert, will not be the last, to propound this question, which is a far deeper one than it would on the face of it appear to be. Fifteen centuries ago St. Augustine, to account for the existence of repulsive and harmful organisms, confidently declared that both the animal and the vegetable kingdoms had incurred a div...