318 SCIENCE AND MYSTICISM 



the skeleton. Having woven an impression the mind 

 surveyed all that it had made and decided that it was 

 very good. The critical faculty was lulled. We ceased 

 to analyse and were conscious only of the impression 

 as a whole. The warmth of the air, the scent of the 

 grass, the gentle stir of the breeze, combined with the 

 visual scene in one transcendent impression, around us 

 and within us. Associations emerging from their store- 

 house grew bolder. Perhaps we recalled the phrase 

 "rippling laughter". Waves — ripples — laughter — glad- 

 ness — the ideas jostled one another. Quite illogically we 

 were glad; though what there can possibly be to be glad 

 about in a set of aethereal vibrations no sensible person 

 can explain. A mood of quiet joy suffused the whole 

 impression. The gladness in ourselves was in Nature, 

 in the waves, everywhere. That's how it was. 



It was an illusion. Then why toy with it longer? 

 These airy fancies which the mind, when we do not 

 keep it severely in order, projects into the external world 

 should be of no concern to the earnest seeker after truth. 

 Get back to the solid substance of things, to the material 

 of the water moving under the pressure of the wind and 

 the force of gravitation in obedience to the laws of 

 hydrodynamics. But the solid substance of things is 

 another illusion. It too is a fancy projected by the mind 

 into the external world. We have chased the solid 

 substance from the continuous liquid to the atom, from 

 the atom to the electron, and there we have lost it. But 

 at least, it will be said, we have reached something real 

 at the end of the chase — the protons and electrons. Or 

 if the new quantum theory condemns these images as 

 too concrete and leaves us with no coherent images at 

 all, at least we have symbolic co-ordinates and momenta 

 and Hamiltonian functions devoting themselves with 



