;
and the telephone may fairly be said to have faded from view in favour
of the invisible telepath. It is true that the pattern of the paper
has changed, for the very pattern of the world has changed;
we are told that it is not made of atoms like the dots but of
electrons like the spirals. Scientific men of the first rank
have seen a table move by itself, and walk upstairs by itself.
It does not matter here whether it was done by the spirits; it is enough
that few still pretend that is entirely done by the spiritualists.
I am not dealing with doctrines but with doubts; with the mere fact
that all these things have grown deeper and more bewildering.
Some people really are throwing their medicine bottles out
of the window; and some of them at least are working purely
psychological cures of a sort that would once have been called
miraculous healing. I do not say we know how far this could go;
it is my whole point that we do not know, that we are in contact
with numbers of new things of which we know uncommonly little.
But the vital point is, not that science deals with what we do not know,
but that science is destroying what we thought we did know.
Nearly all the latest discoveries have been destructive, not of the old
dogmas of religion, but rather of the recent dogmas of science.
The conservation of energy could not itself be entirely conserved.
The atom was smashed to atoms. And dancing to the tune
of Professor Einstein, even the law of gravity is behaving
with lamentable levity.

And when the man looks at the portrait of himself he really does not
see himself. He sees his Other Self, which some say is the opposite
of his ordinary self; his Subconscious Self or his Subliminal Self,
said to rage and rule in his dreams, or a suppressed self which hates him
though it is hidden from him; or the Alter Ego of a Dual Personality.
It is not to my present purpose to discuss the merit of
these speculations, or whether they be medicinal or morbid.
My purpose is served in pointing out the plain historical fact;
that if you had talked to a Utilitarian and Rationalist of Bentham's time,
who told men to follow "enlightened self-interest," he would have been
considerably bewildered if you had replied brightly and briskly,
"And to which self do you refer; the sub-conscious, the conscious,
the latently criminal or suppressed, or others that we fortunately have
in stock?" When the man looks at his own portrait in his own bedroom,