cumstanced.

"Surely we should all perish through sheer inanity, or die desperately
by suicide if no mystery remained in the world. Mystery takes a thousand
beautiful shapes; it lurks even in the handiwork of man, in a stone god,
or in some mighty, intricate machine, incomprehensibly deliberate and
determined. The imagination endows the man-made thing with consciousness
and powers, whether of reservation or aloofness; the similitude of
meditation and profundity is wrought into stone. Is there not source for
mystery to the uninstructed in the great machine registering the
progress of its own achievement with each solemn, recurrent beat of its
metal pulse?

"Behind all these things is the wonder of the imagination that never
approaches more nearly to the creation of a hitherto unknown image than
when it thus hesitates on the verge of mystery.

"There is yet so much, so very much cause for wondering speculation.
Science gains ground so slowly. Slowly it has outlined, however vaguely,
the uncertainties of our origin so far as this world is concerned, while
the mystic has fought for his entrancing fairy tales one by one.

"The mystic still holds his enthralling belief in the succession of
peoples who have risen and died--the succeeding world-races, red, black,
yellow, and white, which have in turn dominated this planet. Science
with its hammer and chisel may lay bare evidence, may collate material,
date man's appearance, call him the most recent of placental mammals,
trace his superstitions and his first conceptions of a god from the
elemental fears of the savage. But the mystic turns aside with an
assumption of superior knowledge; he waves away objective evidence; he
has a certainty impressed upon his mind.

"And the mystic is a power. He compels a multitude of followers, because
he offers an attraction greater than the facts of science. He tells of a
mystery profounder than any problem solved by patient investigation,
because his mystery is incomprehensible even by himself; and in fear
lest any should comprehend it, he disguises the approach with an array
of lesser mysteries, man-made; with terminologies, symbologies and high
talk of esotericism too fearful for any save the initiate.

"But we must preserve our mystic in some form against the awful time
when science shall have determined a limit; when the long history of
evolution shall be written in full, and every stage of world-building
shall be made plain. When th