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Updated: May 16, 2025
If it is difficult for any educated or cultivated man to conceive how, if any condition or phase of supernaturalism be admitted, any other can be denied, how can the Indian be logically blamed for believing anything? But the greatest cause of all for a faith in magic is one which the white man talks about without feeling, and which the Indian feels without talking about it.
I can supply the reflections. I'm English if Colney 's right in saying we always come round to the story with the streak of supernaturalism. I don't ask for bloodshed: that's what his "brandy" means. 'But Mr. Durance is right, we require a shedding; I confess I expect it where there's love; it's part of the balance, and justifies one's excitement. How otherwise do you get any real crisis?
After the close of antiquity the pagan gods had receded to a distance, practically speaking, because they were not worshipped any more. No one troubled himself about them. But in theory one had got no further, i.e. no advance had been made on the ancients, and no advance could be made as long as supernaturalism was adhered to in connexion with the ancient view of the universe.
"It was Huxley and Herbert Spencer and Bradlaugh who brought me back to Orthodox theology." His supernaturalism, which he identifies with orthodox Christianity, I should prefer to call the Romance of Christianity Romance implying not falsity, but the desirable and the ideal. He deliberately takes that which he and other people admire or want as the standard of truth.
It works back at last to the hardest of all the hard sayings of supernaturalism; that there is such a thing as holy or unholy ground, as divinely or diabolically inspired people; that there may be such things as sacred sites or even sacred stones; in short that the airy nothing of spiritual essence, evil or good, can have quite literally a local habitation and a name.
It is not a mere accident that Christianity has been so helpless in the present crisis. In times of darkness, it is natural for the individual to seek ways of escape from the crushing load which has fallen upon him. The student of the history of religion knows that the most popular way of escape has been in terms of spiritualism and supernaturalism.
Atheism is, so to speak, implicit in the growth of knowledge; its complete expression is the consummation of a process that began with the first questionings of religion. And the completion of the process means the death of supernaturalism in all its forms.
Old Phelps, who sometimes made abrupt remarks in trying situations, was not included in this census; but he was the disciple of supernaturalism in a most charming form. I have heard of his opening his inmost thoughts to a lady, one Sunday, after a noble sermon of Robertson's had been read in the cathedral stillness of the forest.
Finally, the world itself at any moment was no more than the mood of impersonal life. It was, in fact, the Catholic idea with the supernatural left out, a union of earthly fortunes, an abandonment of individualism on the one side, and of supernaturalism on the other.
"The choice of the Chinese philosophy and the rejection of Buddhism was not because of any inherent quality in the Japanese mind. It was not the rejection of supernaturalism or the miraculous. The Chinese philosophy is as supernaturalistic as some forms of Buddhism. The distinction is not between the natural and the supernatural in either system, but between the seen and the unseen."
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