“An ounce of civet, good apothecary!” Why it should be so with me I cannot say.  I am as indifferent to the facts or fancies of spiritualism as I am, for instance, to the latest mechanical application of electricity.  Edisons and Marconis may thrill the world with astounding novelties; they astound me, as every one else, but straightway I forget my astonishment, and am in every respect the man I was before.  The thing has simply no concern for me, and I care not a volt if to-morrow the proclaimed discovery be proved a journalist’s mistake or invention.

Am I, then, a hidebound materialist?  If I know myself, hardly that.  Once, in conversation with G. A., I referred to his position as that of the agnostic.  He corrected me.  “The agnostic grants that there may be something beyond the sphere of man’s knowledge; I can make no such admission.  For me, what is called the unknowable is simply the non-existent.  We see what is, and we see all.”  Now this gave me a sort of shock; it seemed incredible to me that a man of so much intelligence could hold such a view.  So far am I from feeling satisfied with any explanation, scientific or other, of myself and of the world about me, that not a day goes by but I fall a-marvelling before the mystery of the universe.  To trumpet the triumphs of human knowledge seems to me worse than childishness; now, as of old, we know but one thing—­that we know nothing.  What!  Can I pluck the flower by the wayside, and, as I gaze at it, feel that, if I knew all the teachings of histology, morphology, and so on, with regard to it, I should have exhausted its meanings?  What is all this but words, words, words?  Interesting, yes, as observation; but, the more interesting, so much the more provocative of wonder and of hopeless questioning.  One may gaze and think till the brain whirls—­till the little blossom in one’s hand becomes as overwhelming a miracle as the very sun in heaven.  Nothing to be known?  The flower simply a flower, and there an end on’t?  The man simply a product of evolutionary law, his senses and his intellect merely availing him to take account of the natural mechanism of which he forms a part?  I find it very hard to believe that this is the conviction of any human mind.  Rather I would think that despair at an insoluble problem, and perhaps impatience with those who pretend to solve it, bring about a resolute disregard of everything beyond the physical fact, and so at length a self-deception which seems obtuseness.

X.

It may well be that what we call the unknowable will be for ever the unknown.  In that thought is there not a pathos beyond words?  It may be that the human race will live and pass away; all mankind, from him who in the world’s dawn first shaped to his fearful mind an image of the Lord of Life, to him who, in the dusking twilight of the last age, shall crouch before a deity of stone or wood; and