Page:Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West.djvu/101

 exchanges its commodities,—is the narrowest, shallowest, most sordid, and most pernicious that ever was conceived by a man with any pretension to learning and wisdom. It is a shallow well, indeed, that of Marx, and its water withal is brackish. I turn away from it, thinking how well it could be filtered, if it were allowed to pass through the channels of religion, at least, and the arts. For these can be of great help, in spite of the breeding theory of Mendel.

More than that. For I believe—holding as I do to the idea of the potentiality of the Unknown and the Unknowable—that religion and the arts can confound Mendel in the end and upset all his demonstrations about the pea, when they are applied to man. Neither science, then, nor education is a panacea. But a reverence for the Unknown, an open mind, a sense of awe before the Unknowable, a quickening hope, an implicit faith in its potentialities,—these will accomplish the miracle that Marx and Mendel and Darwin have only partly