numbra in literature and conversation.
There is a mass of fiction and fashionable talk of which it may
truly be said, that what we miss in it is not demons but the power
to cast them out. It combines the occult with the obscene;
the sensuality of materialism with the insanity of spiritualism.
In the story of Gadara we have left out nothing except the Redeemer,
we have kept the devils and the swine.

In other words, we have not found St. George; but we have found
the Dragon. We have found in the desert, as I have said,
the bones of the monster we did not believe in, more plainly than
the footprints of the hero we did. We have found them not because we
expected to find them, for our progressive minds look to the promise
of something much brighter and even better; not because we wanted
to find them, for our modern mood, as well as our human nature,
is entirely in favour of more amiable and reassuring things;
not because we thought it even possible to find them, for we really
thought it impossible so far as we ever thought of it at all.
We have found them because they are _there_; and we are bound
to come on them even by falling over them. It is Huxley's
method that has upset Huxley's conclusion. As I have said,
that conclusion itself is completely reversed. What he thought
indisputable is disputed; and what he thought impossible is possible.
Instead of Christian morals surviving in the form of humanitarian morals,
Christian demonology has survived in the form of heathen demonology.
But it has not survived by scholarly traditionalism in the style
of Gladstone, but rather by obstinate objective curiosity according
to the advice of Huxley. We in the West have "followed our reason
as far as it would go," and our reason has led us to things that
nearly all the rationalists would have thought wildly irrational.
Science was supposed to bully us into being rationalists;
but it is now supposed to be bullying us into being irrationalists.
The science of Einstein might rather be called following our
unreason as far as it will go, seeing whether the brain will crack
under the conception that space is curved, or that parallel
straight lines always meet. And the science of Freud would make it
essentially impossible to say how far our reason or unreason does go,
or where it stops. For if a man is ignorant of his other self,
how can he possibly know that the other self is ignorant?
He can no longer say with pride that at least