It would be without special gain, however easy, to multiply illustrations of the princely place which the Mystic Sense holds in scientific research. Let us, therefore, turn for a moment to mathematics with its array of imperturbable digits and prosaic facts. No sooner does the mathematician begin to move, than he finds it necessary to call to his aid the self-same faculty, which furnishes the physicist with his ether and atoms, and enables the worshipper to pray. Else how could he explore the fifth dimension, and define a line as having length without breadth, or a plane superficies as having only length and breadth, or a point as having no parts? It is not astonishing that the mathematician, “Lewis Carroll,” was the author of those most delicious imaginative works of immortal fame, “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass.” His vocation prepared and trained him for his avocation, and his avocation gave him new efficiency in his vocation. That which made him able to write the story of dreamland equipped him as an able scholar—the use in proper relation to his other mental gifts of the Mystic Sense. Similarly it is not surprising, but to be expected that Bacon, Pasteur, and Kelvin were, each in his own degree, religious men. They are the normal men of science, La Place, Huxley, and Haeckel being eccentrics and developed in a lop-sided way. Invention, to turn to the department of practical science, relates the same story. Long before men saw, they dreamed. The locomotive was a vision before it was a fact; the aeroplane began as an idea, stinging men into adventurous experiment, before it spread its wings above the earth; men talked across vast spaces in thought before the earliest cable ticked its message, or the wireless system enthralled us by its wizardry. The Mystic Sense is prophetic and sees to-morrow as though it were to-day, dimly first and then with increasing clearness. “Without much dim apprehension, no dear perception; nothing is more certain than this.”[17] Still once more, when we turn to literature the Mystic Sense is a pole-star. History is a museum of the curios of yesterday, a pile of bones, a series of occurrences, a collection of bald facts as cold and bare as a heap of pebbles, until the Mystic Sense enters the sterile valley and brings with it the breath of life. An idiot with a memory can collect past facts as easily as a wee toddler can collect shells on the sea shore and to as good purpose. But it needs a man who, however vast his stock of information, possesses a developed Mystic Sense to classify facts and reveal their insides. Facts never tell the truth to an unimaginative mind. There is a higher form of accuracy and a deeper presentation of reality than a bare statement. Figures and prose, taken alone, are blind guides.