he knows that
he knows nothing. That is exactly what he does not know.
The floor has fallen out of his mind and the abyss below may
contain subconscious certainties as well as subconscious doubts.
He is too ignorant even to ignore; and he must confess himself
an agnostic about whether he is an agnostic.

That is the coil or tangle, at least, which the dragon has reached
even in the scientific regions of the West. I only describe
the tangle; I do not delight in it. Like most people with a taste
for Catholic tradition, I am too much of a rationalist for that;
for Catholics are almost the only people now defending reason.
But I am not talking of the true relations of reason and mystery,
but of the historical fact that mystery has invaded the peculiar
realms of reason; especially the European realms of the motor
and the telephone. When we have a man like Mr. William Archer,
lecturing mystically on dreams and psychoanalysis, and saying
it is clear that God did not make man a reasonable creature,
those acquainted with the traditions and distinguished record
of that dry and capable Scot will consider the fact a prodigy.
I confess it never occurred to me that Mr. Archer was of such stuff
as dreams are made of; and if he is becoming a mystic in his old age
(I use the phrase in a mystical and merely relative sense)
we may take it that the occult oriental flood is rising fast,
and reaching places that are not only high but dry.
But the change is much more apparent to a man who has chanced
to stray into those orient hills where those occult streams
have always risen, and especially in this land that lies
between Asia, where the occult is almost the obvious, and Europe,
where it is always returning with a fresher and younger vigour.
The truth becomes strangely luminous in this wilderness between
two worlds, where the rocks stand out stark like the very bones
of the Dragon.

As I went down that sloping wall or shoulder of the world
from the Holy City on the mountain to the buried Cities of
the Plain, I seemed to see more and more clearly all this Western
evolution of Eastern mystery, and how on this one high place,
as on a pivot, the whole purpose of mankind had swerved.
I took up again the train of thought which I had trailed through
the desert, as described in the last chapter, about the gods of Asia
and of the ancient dispensation, and I found it led me along
these hills to a sort of vista or vision of the new dispensatio