complete cosmos.  For the furniture fitted in bit by bit and better and better; and the bedroom seemed to grow more and more solid.  The man recognised the portrait of himself over the mantelpiece or the medicine bottles on the table, like the dying lover in Browning.  In other words, science so far had steadily solidified things; Newton had measured the walls and ceiling and made a calculus of their three dimensions.  Darwin was already arranging the animals in rank as neatly as a row of chairs, or Faraday the chemical elements as clearly as a row of medicine bottles.  From the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth, science was not only making discoveries, but all the discoveries were in one direction.  Science is still making discoveries; but they are in the opposite direction.

For things are rather different when the man in the bed next looks at the bedroom.  Not only is the rose-bush still very obvious; but the other things are looking very odd.  The perspective seems to have gone crooked; the walls seem to vary in measurement till the man thinks he is going mad.  The wall-paper has a new pattern, of strange spirals instead of round dots.  The table seems to have moved by itself across the room and thrown the medicine bottles out of the window.  The telephone has vanished from the wall; the mirror does not reflect what is in front of it.  The portrait of himself over the mantelpiece has a face that is not his own.

That is something like a vision of the vital change in the whole trend of natural philosophy in the last twenty or thirty years.  It matters little whether we regard it as the deepening or the destruction of the scientific universe.  It matters little whether we say that grander abysses have opened in it, or merely that the bottom has fallen out of it.  It is quite self-evident that scientific men are at war with wilder and more unfathomable fancies than the facts of the age of Huxley.  I attempt no controversy about any of the particular cases:  it is the cumulative effect of all of them that makes the impression one of common sense.  It is really true that the perspective and dimensions of the man’s bedroom have altered; the disciples of Einstein will tell him that straight lines are curved and perhaps measure more one way than the other; if that is not a nightmare, what is?  It is really true that the clock has altered, for time has turned into the fourth dimension or something entirely different; and the telephone may fairly be said to have faded from view in favour of the invisible telepath.  It is true that the pattern of the paper has changed, for the very pattern of the world has changed; we are told that it is not made of atoms like the dots but of electrons like the spirals.  Scientific men of the first rank have seen a table move by itself, and walk upstairs by itself.  It does not matter here whether it was done by the spirits; it is enough that few still pretend that is entirely done by the