324 SCIENCE AND MYSTICISM 



But if some prophetic voice had warned us that it was 

 an illusion and therefore we had not troubled to investi- 

 gate further we should never have found the scientific 

 table. To reach the reality of the table we need to be 

 endowed with sense-organs to weave images and illusions 

 about it. And so it seems to me that the first step in a 

 broader revelation to man must be the awakening of 

 image-building in connection with the higher faculties 

 of his nature, so that these are no longer blind alleys 

 but open out into a spiritual world — a world partly of 

 illusion, no doubt, but in which he lives no less than in 

 the world, also of illusion, revealed by the senses. 



The mystic, if haled before a tribunal of scientists, 

 might perhaps end his defence on this note. He would 

 say, The familiar material world of everyday conception, 

 though lacking somewhat in scientific truth, is good 

 enough to live in; in fact the scientific world of pointer 

 readings would be an impossible sort of place to inhabit. 

 It is a symbolic world and the only thing that could live 

 comfortably in it would be a symbol. But I am not 

 a symbol; I am compounded of that mental activity 

 which is from your point of view a nest of illusion, so 

 that to accord with my own nature I have to transform 

 even the world explored by my senses. But I am not 

 merely made up of senses; the rest of my nature has to 

 live and grow. I have to render account of that environ- 

 ment into which it has its outlet. My conception of 

 my spiritual environment is not to be compared with 

 your scientific world of pointer readings; it is an every- 

 day world to be compared with the material world of 

 familiar experience. I claim it as no more real and no 

 less real than that. Primarily it is not a world to be 

 analysed, but a world to be lived in." 



Granted that this takes us outside the sphere of 



