ve men attributed phenomena
to a god in human form in order to explain them, because his mind in
its sullen limitation could not reach any further than his own clownish
existence. The thunder was called the voice of a man, the lightning
the eyes of a man, because by this explanation they were made more
reasonable and comfortable. The final cure for all this kind of
philosophy is to walk down a lane at night. Any one who does so will
discover very quickly that men pictured something semi-human at the
back of all things, not because such a thought was natural, but because
it was supernatural; not because it made things more comprehensible,
but because it made them a hundred times more incomprehensible and
mysterious. For a man walking down a lane at night can see the
conspicuous fact that as long as nature keeps to her own course, she
has no power with us at all. As long as a tree is a tree, it is a
top-heavy monster with a hundred arms, a thousand tongues, and only one
leg. But so long as a tree is a tree, it does not frighten us at all.
It begins to be something alien, to be something strange, only when it
looks like ourselves. When a tree really looks like a man our knees
knock under us. And when the whole universe looks like a man we fall
on our faces.

XII Paganism and Mr. Lowes Dickinson

Of the New Paganism (or neo-Paganism), as it was preached flamboyantly
by Mr. Swinburne or delicately by Walter Pater, there is no necessity
to take any very grave account, except as a thing which left behind it
incomparable exercises in the English language. The New Paganism is no
longer new, and it never at any time bore the smallest resemblance to
Paganism. The ideas about the ancient civilization which it has left
loose in the public mind are certainly extraordinary enough. The term
"pagan" is continually used in fiction and light literature as meaning
a man without any religion, whereas a pagan was generally a man with
about half a dozen. The pagans, according to this notion, were
continually crowning themselves with flowers and dancing about in an
irresponsible state, whereas, if there were two things that the best
pagan civilization did honestly believe in, they were a rather too
rigid dignity and a much too rigid responsibility. Pagans are depicted
as above all things inebriate and lawless, whereas they were above all
things reasonable and respectable. They are praised as disobedient when
they had only one grea