spiritualists.  I am not dealing with doctrines but with doubts; with the mere fact that all these things have grown deeper and more bewildering.  Some people really are throwing their medicine bottles out of the window; and some of them at least are working purely psychological cures of a sort that would once have been called miraculous healing.  I do not say we know how far this could go; it is my whole point that we do not know, that we are in contact with numbers of new things of which we know uncommonly little.  But the vital point is, not that science deals with what we do not know, but that science is destroying what we thought we did know.  Nearly all the latest discoveries have been destructive, not of the old dogmas of religion, but rather of the recent dogmas of science.  The conservation of energy could not itself be entirely conserved.  The atom was smashed to atoms.  And dancing to the tune of Professor Einstein, even the law of gravity is behaving with lamentable levity.

And when the man looks at the portrait of himself he really does not see himself.  He sees his Other Self, which some say is the opposite of his ordinary self; his Subconscious Self or his Subliminal Self, said to rage and rule in his dreams, or a suppressed self which hates him though it is hidden from him; or the Alter Ego of a Dual Personality.  It is not to my present purpose to discuss the merit of these speculations, or whether they be medicinal or morbid.  My purpose is served in pointing out the plain historical fact; that if you had talked to a Utilitarian and Rationalist of Bentham’s time, who told men to follow “enlightened self-interest,” he would have been considerably bewildered if you had replied brightly and briskly, “And to which self do you refer; the sub-conscious, the conscious, the latently criminal or suppressed, or others that we fortunately have in stock?” When the man looks at his own portrait in his own bedroom, it does really melt into the face of a stranger or flicker into the face of a fiend.  When he looks at the bedroom itself, in short, it becomes clearer and clearer that it is exactly this comfortable and solid part of the vision that is altering and breaking up.  It is the walls and furniture that are only a dream or memory.  And when he looks again at the incongruous rose-bush, he seems to smell as well as see; and he stretches forth his hand, and his finger bleeds upon a thorn.

It will not be altogether surprising if the story ends with the man recovering full consciousness, and finding he has been convalescing in a hammock in a rose-garden.  It is not so very unreasonable when you come to think of it; or at least when you come to think of the whole of it.  He was not wrong in thinking the whole must be a consistent whole, and that one part seemed inconsistent with the other.  He was only wrong about which part was wrong through being inconsistent with the other.  Now the whole of the rationalistic doubt about the Palestinian legends,