them even by falling over them.  It is Huxley’s method that has upset Huxley’s conclusion.  As I have said, that conclusion itself is completely reversed.  What he thought indisputable is disputed; and what he thought impossible is possible.  Instead of Christian morals surviving in the form of humanitarian morals, Christian demonology has survived in the form of heathen demonology.  But it has not survived by scholarly traditionalism in the style of Gladstone, but rather by obstinate objective curiosity according to the advice of Huxley.  We in the West have “followed our reason as far as it would go,” and our reason has led us to things that nearly all the rationalists would have thought wildly irrational.  Science was supposed to bully us into being rationalists; but it is now supposed to be bullying us into being irrationalists.  The science of Einstein might rather be called following our unreason as far as it will go, seeing whether the brain will crack under the conception that space is curved, or that parallel straight lines always meet.  And the science of Freud would make it essentially impossible to say how far our reason or unreason does go, or where it stops.  For if a man is ignorant of his other self, how can he possibly know that the other self is ignorant?  He can no longer say with pride that at least he knows that he knows nothing.  That is exactly what he does not know.  The floor has fallen out of his mind and the abyss below may contain subconscious certainties as well as subconscious doubts.  He is too ignorant even to ignore; and he must confess himself an agnostic about whether he is an agnostic.

That is the coil or tangle, at least, which the dragon has reached even in the scientific regions of the West.  I only describe the tangle; I do not delight in it.  Like most people with a taste for Catholic tradition, I am too much of a rationalist for that; for Catholics are almost the only people now defending reason.  But I am not talking of the true relations of reason and mystery, but of the historical fact that mystery has invaded the peculiar realms of reason; especially the European realms of the motor and the telephone.  When we have a man like Mr. William Archer, lecturing mystically on dreams and psychoanalysis, and saying it is clear that God did not make man a reasonable creature, those acquainted with the traditions and distinguished record of that dry and capable Scot will consider the fact a prodigy.  I confess it never occurred to me that Mr. Archer was of such stuff as dreams are made of; and if he is becoming a mystic in his old age (I use the phrase in a mystical and merely relative sense) we may take it that the occult oriental flood is rising fast, and reaching places that are not only high but dry.  But the change is much more apparent to a man who has chanced to stray into those orient hills where those occult streams have always risen, and especially in this land that lies between Asia, where the occult is almost the obvious, and Europe, where it is always returning with a fresher and younger vigour.  The truth becomes strangely luminous in this wilderness between two worlds, where the rocks stand out stark like the very bones of the Dragon.