342 SCIENCE AND MYSTICISM 



I am standing on the threshold about to enter a room. 

 It is a complicated business. In the first place I must 

 shove against an atmosphere pressing with a force of 

 fourteen pounds on every square inch of my body. 

 I must make sure of landing on a plank travelling at 

 twenty miles a second round the sun — a fraction of a 

 second too early or too late, the plank would be miles 

 away. I must do this whilst hanging from a round 

 planet head outward into space, and with a wind of 

 aether blowing at no one knows how many miles a 

 second through every interstice of my body. The plank 

 has no solidity of substance. To step on it is like stepping 

 on a swarm of flies. Shall I not slip through? No, if 

 I make the venture one of the flies hits me and gives a 

 boost up again; I fall again and am knocked upwards 

 by another fly; and so on. I may hope that the net result 

 will be that I remain about steady; but if unfortunately 

 I should slip through the floor or be boosted too vio- 

 lently up to the ceiling, the occurrence would be, not 

 a violation of the laws of Nature, but a rare coincidence. 

 These are some of the minor difficulties. I ought really 

 to look at the problem four-dimensionally as concerning 

 the intersection of my world-line with that of the plank. 

 Then again it is necessary to determine in which direc- 

 tion the entropy of the world is increasing in order to 

 make sure that my passage over the threshold is an 

 entrance, not an exit. 



Verily, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye 

 of a needle than for a scientific man to pass through a 

 door. And whether the door be barn door or church 

 door it might be wiser that he should consent to be an 

 ordinary man and walk in rather than wait till all the 

 difficulties involved in a really scientific ingress are 

 resolved. 



