Cold reason decrees it from her awful throne: and we in
fairyland submit. If the three brothers all ride horses, there are six
animals and eighteen legs involved: that is true rationalism, and
fairyland is full of it. But as I put my head over the hedge of the
elves and began to take notice of the natural world, I observed an
extraordinary thing. I observed that learned men in spectacles were
talking of the actual things that happened--dawn and death and so on--as
if _they_ were rational and inevitable. They talked as if the fact that
trees bear fruit were just as _necessary_ as the fact that two and one
trees make three. But it is not. There is an enormous difference by the
test of fairyland; which is the test of the imagination. You cannot
_imagine_ two and one not making three. But you can easily imagine trees
not growing fruit; you can imagine them growing golden candlesticks or
tigers hanging on by the tail. These men in spectacles spoke much of a
man named Newton, who was hit by an apple, and who discovered a law. But
they could not be got to see the distinction between a true law, a law
of reason, and the mere fact of apples falling. If the apple hit
Newton's nose, Newton's nose hit the apple. That is a true necessity:
because we cannot conceive the one occurring without the other. But we
can quite well conceive the apple not falling on his nose; we can fancy
it flying ardently through the air to hit some other nose, of which it
had a more definite dislike. We have always in our fairy tales kept this
sharp distinction between the science of mental relations, in which
there really are laws, and the science of physical facts, in which there
are no laws, but only weird repetitions. We believe in bodily miracles,
but not in mental impossibilities. We believe that a Bean-stalk climbed
up to Heaven; but that does not at all confuse our convictions on the
philosophical question of how many beans make five.

Here is the peculiar perfection of tone and truth in the nursery tales.
The man of science says, "Cut the stalk, and the apple will fall"; but
he says it calmly, as if the one idea really led up to the other. The
witch in the fairy tale says, "Blow the horn, and the ogre's castle will
fall"; but she does not say it as if it were something in which the
effect obviously arose out of the cause. Doubtless she has given the
advice to many champions, and has seen many castles fall, but she does
not lose either her wonder o