“Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Spirit teacheth, comparing spiritual things with spiritual.”--Mystic! This word, spat out with contempt, like an insult or a reproach, seemed to be spoken into his ear, and so near, so clear, so distinct it was, that he involuntarily turned his head. And there at his side, not in the body, visible and tangible, but present in the spirit, was the prototype of the intellectual, with all his most exclusively intellectual attributes--there was the psychical man, the natural man _par excellence_. There he was repeating his physiological creed parrot-wise, while in his heart he rebelled against his poetic and creative impotence, against his unconfessed unspirituality.--He shrugged his shoulders, smiled and turned again to look at the slowly darkening sky. The sunset clouds now appeared like mountains of ashes, the remains of the solar conflagration. He turned on the electric switch and the wire thread glowed in the bulb--there was light, light of man’s making, light of applied science. “But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness into him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.” Foolishness ... madness ... he repeated to himself, while his eyes wandered over those familiar objects which the electric light had called forth out of the dark shadows. Madness ... and what is madness? There are alienists, phreno-pathologists, psychiatrists, and who knows by how many other names they are called?... But what is sanity? For perhaps one ought to begin with that. Health is that condition in which a man is free from every kind of disease; but what is disease? Health, others say, is “that condition in which the organism exercises all its faculties normally.”[5] Normally ... normally ... and what is the normal? He stretched out his hand for a book which he was just then reading, a book stored with a mass of data relating to the mysterious life of the spirit, the work of that noble mind that had been the soul of the Society for Psychical Research, and he read: “The word _normal_ in common speech is used almost indifferently to imply either of two things, which may be very different from each other--conformity to a standard and position as an average between extremes. Often, indeed, the average constitutes the standard--as when a gas is of average density; or is practically equivalent to the standard--as when a sovereign is of normal weight. But when we come to living organisms a new factor is introduced. Life is change; each living organism changes; each generation differs from its predecessor. To assign a fixed norm to a changing species is to shoot point-blank at a flying bird. The actual average at any given moment is no ideal standard; rather, the furthest evolutionary stage now reached is tending, given stability in the environment, to become the average of the future.”[6]