count on the ordinary course of things. We do not count on it; we bet
on it. We risk the remote possibility of a miracle as we do that of a
poisoned pancake or a world-destroying comet. We leave it out of
account, not because it is a miracle, and therefore an impossibility,
but because it is a miracle, and therefore an exception. All the terms
used in the science books, "law," "necessity," "order," "tendency," and
so on, are really unintellectual, because they assume an inner synthesis
which we do not possess. The only words that ever satisfied me as
describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, "charm,"
"spell," "enchantment." They express the arbitrariness of the fact and
its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a _magic_ tree. Water runs
downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is
bewitched.

I deny altogether that this is fantastic or even mystical. We may have
some mysticism later on; but this fairy-tale language about things is
simply rational and agnostic. It is the only way I can express in words
my clear and definite perception that one thing is quite distinct from
another; that there is no logical connection between flying and laying
eggs. It is the man who talks about "a law" that he has never seen who
is the mystic. Nay, the ordinary scientific man is strictly a
sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he
is soaked and swept away by mere associations. He has so often seen
birds fly and lay eggs that he feels as if there must be some dreamy,
tender connection between the two ideas, whereas there is none. A
forlorn lover might be unable to dissociate the moon from lost love; so
the materialist is unable to dissociate the moon from the tide. In both
cases there is no connection, except that one has seen them together. A
sentimentalist might shed tears at the smell of apple-blossom, because,
by a dark association of his own, it reminded him of his boyhood. So the
materialist professor (though he conceals his tears) is yet a
sentimentalist, because, by a dark association of his own,
apple-blossoms remind him of apples. But the cool rationalist from
fairyland does not see why, in the abstract, the apple tree should not
grow crimson tulips; it sometimes does in his country.

This elementary wonder, however, is not a mere fancy derived from the
fairy tales; on the contrary, all the fire of the fairy tales is derived
from this. Just as we all like love t