or a brave man to
attack; but there are some things too big for a man to patronise.

And I must say that the historical method seems to me excessively
unreasonable. I have no knowledge of history, but I have as much
knowledge of reason as Anatole France. And, if anything is irrational,
it seems to me that the Renan-France way of dealing with miraculous
stories is irrational. The Renan-France method is simply this: you
explain supernatural stories that have some foundation simply by
inventing natural stories that have no foundation. Suppose that you are
confronted with the statement that Jack climbed up the beanstalk into
the sky. It is perfectly philosophical to reply that you do not think
that he did. It is (in my opinion) even more philosophical to reply that
he may very probably have done so. But the Renan-France method is to
write like this: "When we consider Jack's curious and even perilous
heredity, which no doubt was derived from a female greengrocer and a
profligate priest, we can easily understand how the ideas of heaven and
a beanstalk came to be combined in his mind. Moreover, there is little
doubt that he must have met some wandering conjurer from India, who told
him about the tricks of the mango plant, and how t is sent up to the
sky. We can imagine these two friends, the old man and the young,
wandering in the woods together at evening, looking at the red and level
clouds, as on that night when the old man pointed to a small beanstalk,
and told his too imaginative companion that this also might be made to
scale the heavens. And then, when we remember the quite exceptional
psychology of Jack, when we remember how there was in him a union of the
prosaic, the love of plain vegetables, with an almost irrelevant
eagerness for the unattainable, for invisibility and the void, we shall
no longer wonder that it was to him especially that was sent this sweet,
though merely symbolic, dream of the tree uniting earth and heaven."
That is the way that Renan and France write, only they do it better.
But, really, a rationalist like myself becomes a little impatient and
feels inclined to say, "But, hang it all, what do you know about the
heredity of Jack or the psychology of Jack? You know nothing about Jack
at all, except that some people say that he climbed up a beanstalk.
Nobody would ever have thought of mentioning him if he hadn't. You must
interpret him in terms of the beanstalk religion; you cannot merely
interpret