The Search for Mysteries

One reason why progress is possible is that there are always among us those who are never content with what they know or with what other men know⎯those wholesomely restless spirits who are always searching for what lies beyond the obvious. To some extent this is a common characteristic of humankind. Somehow we like to pry out the secrets and search out the mysteries and try the untried. This quality, like all other useful qualities, may also be subject to abuses and excesses. Sometimes in looking for what lies beyond the obvious, we overlook what is obvious. Sometimes in our search for the mysteries, we ignore the plain and simple truth. Sometimes in looking for elusive answers, we forget present realities; for example, there are those who are forever looking for economic mysteries, always hoping that the factors of soundness can somehow be suspended⎯searching for the mysteries of a procedure that will permit them to live perpetually beyond their means and remain solvent. There are those who are forever looking for legal mysteries, searching for loopholes⎯hoping somehow to find a way of ignoring the laws both of man and of God and of avoiding the consequences. There are those, too, who think so much about the unknown mysteries of heaven that they neglect the opportunities and responsibilities of earth. It is quite within reason to want to look beyond, but successful searching begins with facts⎯it doesn’t ignore facts; it begins with known truth⎯it doesn’t discard truth. Progress is a process of improving upon the past⎯and not a process of throwing away the past⎯because the past has much of hard-earned truth, as well as much of error, and its truth must be preserved. In our quest for the unknown we must remember that many mistakes have already been made, that many things have been proved false, that much of truth is already discovered, that many questions have already been answered⎯and if, in searching for the unknown we overlook and disregard what has already been proved, we have moved backward, rather than serving the purposes of progress.