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Now although this attitude is utterly repugnant to me, I can yet easily understand and sympathise with the state of mind which occasions it. I, too, feel that if there is one thing above all others to which one's intellect must cling at all costs it is the general proposition of the coherence and continuity of the universe—in other words the great Law of Causation. If ever we let go of that we find ourselves in chaos—which is insanity.

Within the "ring-fence," so to speak, of matter and energy the law holds good, but anything outside appears to the scientist as "discontinuous" and therefore, quite rightly, revolting. As against this point of view my contention is that it is quite possible to form an intelligible concept of Reality, different from and yet perfectly continuous with, the physical reality of the scientist.

This first purely materialistic school admits of fairly easy delimitation whereas the other two schools mingle together and diverge within themselves in so complex a manner that it is much more difficult to distinguish them from each other than to separate either of them from the first. But I think the difference is something of this kind. The school of which the Occultists are typical seem to me to tend to replace logically coherent explanation by mere descriptive nomenclature. On the other hand the Orthodox Theologians, while dogmatically asserting the existence of spirit and constantly emphasising the supreme importance of the spiritual life, are apt to ignore the intellectual demand for intelligible explanation altogether.