who is the mystic.
Nay, the ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist.
He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked
and swept away by mere associations. He has so often seen birds
fly and lay eggs that he feels as if there must be some dreamy,
tender connection between the two ideas, whereas there is none.
A forlorn lover might be unable to dissociate the moon from lost love;
so the materialist is unable to dissociate the moon from the tide.
In both cases there is no connection, except that one has seen
them together. A sentimentalist might shed tears at the smell
of apple-blossom, because, by a dark association of his own,
it reminded him of his boyhood. So the materialist professor (though
he conceals his tears) is yet a sentimentalist, because, by a dark
association of his own, apple-blossoms remind him of apples. But the
cool rationalist from fairyland does not see why, in the abstract,
the apple tree should not grow crimson tulips; it sometimes does in
his country.

This elementary wonder, however, is not a mere fancy derived
from the fairy tales; on the contrary, all the fire of the fairy
tales is derived from this. Just as we all like love tales because
there is an instinct of sex, we all like astonishing tales because
they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment.
This is proved by the fact that when we are very young children
we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales. Mere life is
interesting enough. A child of seven is excited by being told that
Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited
by being told that Tommy opened a door. Boys like romantic tales;
but babies like realistic tales--because they find them romantic.
In fact, a baby is about the only person, I should think, to whom
a modern realistic novel could be read without boring him.
This proves that even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal
leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were
golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they
were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember,
for one wild moment, that they run with water. I have said that this
is wholly reasonable and even agnostic. And, indeed, on this point
I am all for the higher agnosticism; its better name is Ignorance.
We have all read in scientific books, and, indeed, in all romances,
the story of the man who has forgotten his n