philosopher in the old and noble sense of the word; but they sharpen
his sense for many a psychological problem, and make him the spokesman
of many an inarticulate soul. Animal timidity and animal illusion are
deep in the heart of all of us. Practice may compel us to bow to the
conventions of the intellect, as to those of polite society; but
secretly, in our moments of immersion in ourselves, we may find them
a great nuisance, even a vain nightmare. Could we only listen
undisturbed to the beat of protoplasm in our hearts, would not that
oracle solve all the riddles of the universe, or at least avoid them?

To protect this inner conviction, however, it is necessary for the
mystic to sally forth and attack the enemy on his own ground. If he
refuted physics and mathematics simply out of his own faith, he might
be accused of ignorance of the subject. He will therefore study it
conscientiously, yet with a certain irritation and haste to be done
with it, somewhat as a Jesuit might study Protestant theology. Such a
student, however, is apt to lose his pains; for in retracing a free
inquiry in his servile spirit, he remains deeply ignorant, not indeed
of its form, but of its nature and value. Why, for instance, has M.
Bergson such a horror of mechanical physics? He seems to think it a
black art, dealing in unholy abstractions, and rather dangerous to
salvation, and he keeps his metaphysical exorcisms and antidotes
always at hand, to render it innocuous, at least to his own soul. But
physical science never solicited of anybody that he should be wholly
absorbed in the contemplation of atoms, and worship them; that we must
worship and lose ourselves in reality, whatever reality may be, is a
mystic aberration, which physical science does nothing to foster. Nor
does any critical physicist suppose that what he describes is the
whole of the object; he merely notes the occasions on which its
sensible qualities appear, and calculates events. Because the
calculable side of nature is his province, he does not deny that
events have other aspects--the psychic and the moral, for
instance--no less real in their way, in terms of which calculation
would indeed be impossible. If he chances to call the calculable
elements of nature her substance, as it is proper to do, that name is
given without passion; he may perfectly well proclaim with Goethe that
it is in the accidents, in the _farbiger Abglanz_, that we have our
life. And if it be for his