Poetry and wholesome fiction must find permanent place in the life of a normal man. Do not delude yourself into thinking that your chief or only guides in life are logic and sense perception. They are not. Intuition and sentiment lead you twice for every once these others do. It is so much more comfortable, not to say honest and reasonable, to acknowledge frankly the primacy of your leaders, than to follow them and pretend all the while that you are following other guides, which is a species of disloyalty. Scientist, inventor, mathematician, man of letters, alike are not quite true to fact when they claim that pure reason and an exclusive process of induction control their mental operations. I would raise the question whether there is any such thing as the exclusively inductive method. Is it not truer to speak of the deductive-inductive than of the inductive? The Mystic Sense, with its adventurous and sometimes blundering progress, holds so important a place that without it logic and induction would be as grist without a mill. To reach knowledge by “pure reason” is as impossible as to reach the sun with a stepladder. Even supposing it were possible to bring bare reason over against bald fact, the result would reach only a degree beyond the achievement of a pig that counts, or a jackdaw that gathers a store of glittering objects. I have heard scrupulous people complain of the effect of fairy lore, nursery fables, and imaginative traditions like that of Santa Claus, upon child life. It may be a question to consider, but it is dealing with a mote rather than with a beam. Cheap current literature, and the psychologically false story, which is characteristic of many of our magazines, are far more of an injury to heart and mind than the imaginative excesses of the nursery. The objection to the latter is not in the substance, but in the unnecessary attempts to deceive and to confuse objective and subjective in the child mind. Santa Claus is a harmless creature viewed as the Spirit of Christmas. When he is turned into a chimney god to whom written or spoken prayers are offered, it is another matter. Who can withstand the pathos of the little sister’s death, resulting from her petition before the fireplace for a new toy for her baby brother? The flames took her and turned her into a burnt sacrifice to Santa Claus.