it does really melt into the face of a stranger or flicker into
the face of a fiend. When he looks at the bedroom itself, in short,
it becomes clearer and clearer that it is exactly this comfortable
and solid part of the vision that is altering and breaking up.
It is the walls and furniture that are only a dream or memory.
And when he looks again at the incongruous rose-bush, he seems
to smell as well as see; and he stretches forth his hand, and his
finger bleeds upon a thorn.

It will not be altogether surprising if the story ends with the man
recovering full consciousness, and finding he has been convalescing in a
hammock in a rose-garden. It is not so very unreasonable when you come
to think of it; or at least when you come to think of the whole of it.
He was not wrong in thinking the whole must be a consistent whole,
and that one part seemed inconsistent with the other.
He was only wrong about which part was wrong through being inconsistent
with the other. Now the whole of the rationalistic doubt about
the Palestinian legends, from its rise in the early eighteenth
century out of the last movements of the Renascence, was founded
on the fixity of facts. Miracles were monstrosities because they
were against natural law, which was necessarily immutable law.
The prodigies of the Old Testament or the mighty works of the New
were extravagances because they were exceptions; and they were
exceptions because there was a rule, and that an immutable rule.
In short, there was no rose-tree growing out of the carpet of a trim
and tidy bedroom; because rose-trees do not grow out of carpets
in trim and tidy bedrooms. So far it seemed reasonable enough.
But it left out one possibility; that a man can dream about a room
as well as a rose; and that a man can doubt about a rule as well
as an exception.

As soon as the men of science began to doubt the rules of the game,
the game was up. They could no longer rule out all the old marvels
as impossible, in face of the new marvels which they had to admit
as possible. They were themselves dealing now with a number of
unknown quantities; what is the power of mind over matter; when is
matter an illusion of mind; what is identity, what is individuality,
is there a limit to logic in the last extremes of mathematics?
They knew by a hundred hints that their non-miraculous world was no
longer watertight; that floods were coming in from somewhere in which
they were already out of their dep