REALITY AND MYSTICISM 327 



everything in the universe is merely ideal", he answered, 

 "striking his foot with mighty force against a large 

 stone, till he rebounded from it, — 'I refute it thus* ". 

 Just what that action assured him of is not very obvious; 

 but apparently he found it comforting. And to-day the 

 matter-of-fact scientist feels the same impulse to recoil 

 from these flights of thought back to something kick- 

 able, although he ought to be aware by this time that 

 what Rutherford has left us of the large stone is scarcely 

 worth kicking. 



There is still the tendency to use "reality" as a word 

 of magic comfort like the blessed word "Mesopotamia". 

 If I were to assert the reality of the soul or of God, 

 I should certainly not intend a comparison with 

 Johnson's large stone — a patent illusion — or even with 

 the p's and qs of the quantum theory — an abstract 

 symbolism. Therefore I have no right to use the word 

 in religion for the purpose of borrowing on its behalf 

 that comfortable feeling which (probably wrongly) has 

 become associated with stones and quantum co-ordi- 

 nates. 



Scientific instincts warn me that any attempt to 

 answer the question "What is real?" in a broader sense 

 than that adopted for domestic purposes in science, is 

 likely to lead to a floundering among vain words and 

 high-sounding epithets. We all know that there are 

 regions of the human spirit untrammelled by the world 

 of physics. In the mystic sense of the creation around 

 us, in the expression of art, in a yearning towards God, 

 the soul grows upward and finds the fulfilment of 

 something implanted in its nature. The sanction for 

 this development is within us, a striving born with our 

 consciousness or an Inner Light proceeding from a 

 greater power than ours. Science can scarcely question 



