of a correlative member in a
relative couple--those, namely, connected with the designation,
"Mystery," a term greatly abused, in various ways, and especially by
disregarding its relative character. Mystery supposes certain things
that are plain, intelligible, knowable, revealed; and, by contrast to
these, refers to certain other things that are obscure, unintelligible,
unknowable, unrevealed. When a man's conduct is entirely plain,
straightforward, or accounted for, we call that an intelligible case;
when we are perplexed by the tortuosities of a crafty, double-dealing
person, we say it is all very mysterious. So, in nature, we consider
that we understand certain phenomena: such as gravity, and all its
consequences, in the fall of bodies, the flow of rivers, the motions of
the planets, the tides. On the other hand, earthquakes and volcanoes are
very mysterious; we do not know what they depend upon, how or in what
circumstances they are produced. Some of the operations of living bodies
are understood,--as the heart's action in the mechanical propulsion of
the blood; others, and the greater number, are mysterious, as the whole
process of germination and growth. Now the existence of the contrast
between things plainly understood, and things not understood, gives one
distinct meaning to the term Mystery. In some cases, a mystery is formed
by an apparent contradiction, as in the Theological mystery of Free-will
and Divine Foreknowledge; here, too, there is a contrast with the great
mass of consistent and reconcilable things. But now, when we are told by
sensational writers, that _everything is mysterious;_ that the simplest
phenomenon in nature--the fall of a stone, the swing of a pendulum, the
continuance of a ball shot in the air--are wonderful, marvellous,
miraculous, our understanding is confounded; there being then nothing
plain at all, there is nothing mysterious. The wonderful rises from the
common; as the lofty is lofty by relation to something lower: if there
is nothing common, then there is nothing wonderful; if all phenomena are
mysterious, nothing is mysterious; if we are to stand aghast in
amazement because three times four is twelve, what phenomenon can we
take as the type of the plain and the intelligible? You must always keep
up a standard of the common, the easy, the comprehensible, if you are to
regard other things as wonderful, difficult, inexplicable.

[LOCKE ON THE LIMITS OF THE UNDERSTANDING.]

The re