y but the appearance
of mental images as such, severed from ordinary relations? The
'ordinary relations' of images are those to which we are accustomed,
which conform to our experience. The wider that experience, the more
ordinary will we find extraordinary relations. By example, take
yourself: You sit in a dark auditorium and see a railway train come
rushing at you. Now, it is not at all in ordinary experience for a
locomotive to come dashing in a theater filled with people, it is
quite otherwise; but you keep your seat, you do not flinch, you are
not frightened. It is nothing but a motion picture, which you
understand. But if you were a savage from New Guinea you would rise
and fly in panic from this steaming, shrieking iron monster which
bears down on you. _Tiens_, it is a matter of experience, you see. To
you it is an everyday event, to the savage it would be a new and
terrifying thing.

"Or, perhaps, you are at the hospital. You place a patient between you
and the Crookes' tube of an X-ray, you turn on the current, you
observe him through the fluoroscope and _pouf_! his flesh all melts
away and his bones spring out in sharp relief. Three hundred years ago
you would have howled like a stoned dog at the sight, and prayed to be
delivered from the witchcraft which produced it. Today you curse and
swear like twenty drunken pirates if the Rontgenologist is but thirty
seconds late in setting up the apparatus. These things are
'scientific,' you understand their underlying formulae, therefore they
seem natural. But mention what you please to call the occult, and you
scoff, and that is but admitting that you are opposed to something
which you do not understand. The credible and believable is that to
which we are accustomed, the fantastic and incredible is what we
cannot explain in terms of previous experience. _Voila, c'est tres
simple, n'est-ce-pas?_"

"You mean to say you understand all this?"

"Not at all by any means; I am clever, me, but not that clever. No, my
friend, I am as much in the dark as you, only I do not refuse to
credit what our young friend tells us. I believe the things he has
related happened, exactly as he has recounted them. I do not
understand, but I believe. Accordingly, I must probe, I must sift, I
must examine this matter. We see it now as a group of unrelated and
irrelevant occurrences, but somewhere lies the key which will enable
us to make harmony from this discord, to gather these stray, tan