Long ago Edith Simcox (in a passage of her _Natural Law_ which chanced to strike my attention very soon after the episode above narrated) well described “conversion” as a “spiritual revolution,” not based on any single rational consideration, but due to the “cumulative evidence of cognate impressions” resulting, at a particular moment, not in a change of belief, but in a total rearrangement and recolouring of beliefs and impressions, with the supreme result that the order of the universe is apprehended no longer as hostile, but as friendly. This is the fundamental fact of “conversion,” which is the gate of mysticism. Footnote 82: How we are to analyse the conception of “universe”—apart from its personal emotional tone, which is what mainly concerns us—is, of course, a matter that must be left altogether open and free. Sir James Frazer at the end of his _Golden Bough_ (“Balder the Beautiful,” vol. II, p. 306) finds that the “universe” is an “ever-shifting phantasmagoria of thought,” or, he adds, suddenly shifting to a less idealistic and more realistic standpoint, “shadows on the screen.” That is a literary artist’s metaphysical way of describing the matter and could not occur to any one who was not familiar with the magic lantern which has now developed into the cinema, beloved of philosophers for its symbolic significance. Mr. Bertrand Russell, a more abstract artist, who would reject any such “imaginative admixture” as he would find in Frazer’s view, once severely refused to recognise any such thing as a “universe,” but has since less austerely admitted that there is, after all, a “set of appearances,” which may fairly be labelled “reality,” so long as we do not assume “a mysterious Thing-in-Itself behind the appearances.” (_Nation_, 6th January, 1923.) But there are always some people who think that an “appearance” must be an appearance of _Something_, and that when a “shadow” is cast on the screen of our sensory apparatus it must be cast by _Something_. So every one defines the “universe” in his own way, and no two people—not even the same person long—can define it in the same way. We have to recognise that even the humblest of us is entitled to his own “universe.” Footnote 83: