ard Kipling; and when I once remarked
on his repulsive little masterpiece called "The Mark of the Beast,"
to a rather cynical Anglo-Indian officer, he observed moodily, "It's a
beastly story. But those devils really can do jolly queer things."
It is but to take a commonplace example out of countless more
notable ones to mention the many witnesses to the mango trick.
Here again we have from time to time to weep over the weak-mindedness
that hurriedly dismisses it as the practice of hypnotism.
It is as if people were asked to explain how one unarmed Indian
had killed three hundred men, and they said it was only the practice
of human sacrifice. Nothing that we know as hypnotism will enable a man
to alter the eyes in the heads of a huge crowd of total strangers;
wide awake in broad daylight; and if it is hypnotism, it is
something so appallingly magnified as to need a new magic to explain
the explanation; certainly something that explains it better
than a Greek word for sleep. But the impression of these special
instances is but one example of a more universal impression of
the Asiatic atmosphere; and that atmosphere itself is only an example
of something vaster still for which I am trying to find words.
Asia stands for something which the world in the West as well
as the East is more and more feeling as a presence, and even
a pressure. It might be called the spiritual world let loose;
or a sort of psychical anarchy; a jungle of mango plants.
And it is pressing upon the West also to-day because of the breaking
down of certain materialistic barriers that have hitherto held it back.
In plain words the attitude of science is not only modified;
it is now entirely reversed. I do not say it with mere pleasure;
in some ways I prefer our materialism to their spiritualism.
But for good or evil the scientists are now destroying their
own scientific world.

The agnostics have been driven back on agnosticism;
and are already recovering from the shock. They find
themselves in a really unknown world under really unknown gods;
a world which is more mystical, or at least more mysterious.
For in the Victorian age the agnostics were not really agnostics.
They might be better described as reverent materialists;
or at any rate monists. They had at least at the back
of their minds a clear and consistent concept of their rather
clockwork cosmos; that is why they could not admit the smallest
speck of the supernatural into their clockwor