k. But to-day it is
very hard for a scientific man to say where the supernatural ends
or the natural begins, or what name should be given to either.
The word agnostic has ceased to be a polite word for atheist.
It has become a real word for a very real state of mind,
conscious of many possibilities beyond that of the atheist,
and not excluding that of the polytheist. It is no longer a question
of defining or denying a simple central power, but of balancing
the brain in a bewilderment of new powers which seem to overlap
and might even conflict. Nature herself has become unnatural.
The wind is blowing from the other side of the desert, not now with
noble truism "There is no God but God," but rather with that other
motto out of the deeper anarchy of Asia, drawn out by Mr. Kipling,
in the shape of a native proverb, in the very story already mentioned;
"Your gods and my gods, do you or I know which is the stronger?"
There was a mystical story I read somewhere in my boyhood,
of which the only image that remains is that of a rose-bush growing
mysteriously in the middle of a room. Taking this image for the sake
of argument, we can easily fancy a man half-conscious and convinced
that he is delirious, or still partly in a dream, because he sees
such a magic bush growing irrationally in the middle of his bedroom.
All the walls and furniture are familiar and solid, the table,
the clock, the telephone, the looking glass or what not; there is
nothing unnatural but this one hovering hallucination or optical
delusion of green and red. Now that was very much the view taken
of the Rose of Sharon, the mystical rose of the sacred tradition
of Palestine, by any educated man about 1850, when the rationalism
of the eighteenth century was supposed to have found full
support in the science of the nineteenth. He had a sentiment
about a rose: he was still glad it had fragrance or atmosphere;
though he remembered with a slight discomfort that it had thorns.
But what bothered him about it was that it was impossible.
And what made him think it impossible was it was inconsistent
with everything else. It was one solitary and monstrous
exception to the sort of rule that ought to have no exceptions.
Science did not convince him that there were few miracles,
but that there were no miracles; and why should there be miracles
only in Palestine and only for one short period? It was a single
and senseless contradiction to an otherwise complete cosmo