, and
succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to
be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid. The determinist makes
the theory of causation quite clear, and then finds that he cannot say
"if you please" to the housemaid. The Christian permits free will to
remain a sacred mystery; but because of this his relations with the
housemaid become of a sparkling and crystal clearness. He puts the seed
of dogma in a central darkness; but it branches forth in all directions
with abounding natural health. As we have taken the circle as the symbol
of reason and madness, we may very well take the cross as the symbol at
once of mystery and of health. Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity
is centrifugal: it breaks out. For the circle is perfect and infinite in
its nature; but it is fixed for ever in its size; it can never be larger
or smaller. But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a
contradiction, can extend its four arms for ever without altering its
shape. Because it has a paradox in its centre it can grow without
changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens
its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travellers.

Symbols alone are of even a cloudy value in speaking of this deep
matter; and another symbol from physical nature will express
sufficiently well the real place of mysticism before mankind. The one
created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of
which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism
explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious
invisibility. Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a
popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is
secondary light, reflected from a dead world. But the Greeks were right
when they made Apollo the god both of imagination and of sanity; for he
was both the patron of poetry and the patron of healing. Of necessary
dogmas and a special creed I shall speak later. But that
transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much the position
of the sun in the sky. We are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid
confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze
and a blur. But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as
recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For
the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics
and has given to them