Of the two passions which moved Disraeli, the one for mastery, the other for the mysterious, the last was perhaps the strongest. The mysteries that fascinated him were real, and did not render him a mystic, still less a quietist. It is a mistake so to regard him. His strength alike and his weakness resided in the practical energy of his imagination. The whole of existence was for him a standing miracle. “Contarini” finds his fate by a vision in a church; “Venetia” receives a miraculous answer to her prayer of agony. He delights to depict, even in the short biography of his father, providential coincidences. What is deemed bizarre in his works, is really the sense of magic wonder in all we experience. His irony, too, contrasting show with substance and words with things, works by paradox.[93] That man is a spirit on earth was his firm conviction. We find it accentuated from his earliest utterances to his latest. “... There are some things I know,” said the Syrian in _Lothair_, according with the Syrian in _Tancred_, “and some things I believe. I know that I have a soul, and I believe that it is immortal....”[94] The riddle of life is not to be solved by theories, however true or ingenious of the processes of development, still less by the fashionable “prattle of protoplasm,” or the glib triflers with their “We once had fins, we shall have wings.” He was quite sincere and consistent in his famous “Ape or Angel” dilemma. He believed, both passionately and dispassionately, that man was divine. Science confesses that its discoveries are merely of recurrent facts called laws; it does not profess to account for them.