e cycle of atomic dust to atomic dust is
demonstrated, and the detail of the life-process is taught and
understood, we shall have a fierce need for the mystic to save us from
the futility of a world we understand, to lie to us if need be, to
inspirit our material and regular minds with some breath of delicious
madness. We shall need the mystic then, or the completeness of our
knowledge will drive us at last to complete the dusty circle in our
eagerness to escape from a world we understand....

"See how man clings to his old and useless traditions; see how he
opposes at every step the awful force of progress. At each stage he
protests that the thing that is, is good, or that the thing that was and
has gone, was better. He despises new knowledge and fondly clings to the
belief that once men were greater than they now are. He looks back to
the more primitive, and endows it with that mystery he cannot find in
his own times. So have men ever looked lingeringly behind them. It is an
instinct, a great and wonderful inheritance that postpones the moment of
disillusionment.

"We are still mercifully surrounded with the countless mysteries of
everyday experience, all the evidences of the unimaginable stimulus we
call life. Would you take them away? Would you resolve life into a
disease of the ether--a disease of which you and I, all life and all
matter, are symptoms? Would you teach that to the child, and explain to
him that the wonder of life and growth is no wonder, but a demonstrable
result of impeded force, to be evaluated by the application of an
adequate formula?

"You and I," said Challis, "are children in the infancy of the world.
Let us to our play in the nursery of our own times. The day will come,
perhaps, when humanity shall have grown and will have to take upon
itself the heavy burden of knowledge. But you need not fear that that
will be in our day, nor in a thousand years.

"Meanwhile leave us our childish fancies, our little imaginings, our
hope--children that we are--of those impossible mysteries beyond the
hills...."

THE END

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