t starts it up. It is far better tactics, if you wish to get
rid of mystery, to brand the narratives themselves as unworthy of
trust. The trustworthiness of most of them is to my own mind far from
proved. And yet in the light of the medium-trance, which is proved, it
seems as if they might well all be members of a natural kind of fact of
which we do not yet know the full extent.

Thousands of sensitive organizations in the United States to-day live
as steadily in the light of these experiences, and are as indifferent
to modern science, as if they lived in Bohemia in the twelfth century.
They are indifferent to science, because science is so callously
indifferent to their experiences. Although in its essence science only
stands for a method and for no fixed belief, yet as habitually taken,
both by its votaries and outsiders, it is {324} identified with a
certain fixed belief,--the belief that the hidden order of nature is
mechanical exclusively, and that non-mechanical categories are
irrational ways of conceiving and explaining even such things as human
life. Now, this mechanical rationalism, as one may call it, makes, if
it becomes one's only way of thinking, a violent breach with the ways
of thinking that have played the greatest part in human history.
Religious thinking, ethical thinking, poetical thinking, teleological,
emotional, sentimental thinking, what one might call the personal view
of life to distinguish it from the impersonal and mechanical, and the
romantic view of life to distinguish it from the rationalistic view,
have been, and even still are, outside of well-drilled scientific
circles, the dominant forms of thought. But for mechanical
rationalism, personality is an insubstantial illusion. The chronic
belief of mankind, that events may happen for the sake of their
personal significance, is an abomination; and the notions of our
grandfathers about oracles and omens, divinations and apparitions,
miraculous changes of heart and wonders worked by inspired persons,
answers to prayer and providential leadings, are a fabric absolutely
baseless, a mass of sheer _un_truth.

Now, of course, we must all admit that the excesses to which the
romantic and personal view of nature may lead, if wholly unchecked by
impersonal rationalism, are direful. Central African Mumbo-jumboism is
one of unchecked romanticism's fruits. One ought accordingly to
sympathize with that abhorrence of romanticism as a sufficient
w