The “thought” escapes us. Somewhere beyond the boundary of the physical flits this elusive, this tantalising ghost. How it is acted upon and how it reacts we know to some extent. But what the nature of its action may be is more than we can determine.

Nay! A moment ago we lightly spoke of passing out of the magic circle into which we have been born, and we forthwith proceeded to talk as if we had in reality escaped from this our prison. But there is no escape for us, of course. No man can jump out of his skin. There undoubtedly are such things as “waves,” or “undulations,” or “oscillations,” or “vibrations,” or whatever we like to call them. But they are not what we imagine them to be. There is, we may suppose, a four-dimensioned universe of “space-time.” But it is beyond our conception. There is “objective reality,” in a word. But it is no reality to us. Those very expressions, glibly used though they be, are but metaphors—“pretendings” a child would call them—attempts to bring the remote a little nearer to us, to clothe the uncouth in the garments we ourselves wear; all of which is nothing but Maya—illusion—shadowplay.

Let us not deceive ourselves. Along with the recent revelations of physical science there comes, say certain modern philosophers, the suspicion that the universe is irrational. At every point we are brought up short by the unknowable.

For example, Einstein tells us that what we call the “ether” has no existence. It is merely a “void.”—But how can we call that void which contains something—undulations, to wit?

“Nay!” you argue; “the undulations traverse the ether, but they are not it. The ether is a non-entity. It has no existence. It is nothing.”

To which I reply: “But ‘nothing’ is an absolute term. It means ‘no thing.’ How, then, can undulations, or anything else for that matter, pass through nothing?”

“What nonsense!” you cry; “this kind of verbal poser is just the silly old metaphysicians’ parlour game of playing with words.”

I know it is. But the word-play has its uses. It demonstrates to us that words, language, logic, all alike, fail our thought, not so much because those instruments are limited in power as because the thought itself is lacking in precision and comprehensiveness.

It is when our word-play probes the expression that the vagueness of the idea is made manifest. Our foil, even with the button on, goes clean through the phantom.

The mind, in short, has not absorbed, nor can it absorb, the fact. We seize a glass of water to drain it, and presently, like Alice, we find ourselves swimming about in an ocean! Obviously the universe is beyond our comprehension, a conclusion desperate if you like, yet undeniable.

But how very annoying it is, after all our heavy labour, to hear the ancient scoff of Zophar the Naamathite still ringing triumphant:

“Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection?”

(Still we mean to go on trying!)

Yet of all the senses none surely is so mysterious as that of smell. For, as we have shown, the nature of the emanations that stir it to activity is still unknown; the simple structure of its end-organ confronts us, like a sphinx, with silence; and after the reception of the stimulus in the olfactory lobe of the brain its further connections and communications still remain unsurveyed, albeit, as I have already so amply displayed, its effects upon the psyche are both wide and deep, at once obvious and subtle.