Supply is usually responsive to demand and the amount of imaginative literature and versifying in the journals of the day is a fair indication of the appetite for that which stimulates the Mystic Sense in letters. Also its hectic character is indicative of the wild state of the psychic life of the readers. The normal is counted uninteresting, and the abnormal, in incident and character, is portrayed. A steady diet of such reading leaves unhealthy blotches, indelible and disfiguring, on human life. Even in more serious literature the story of the abnormal may be given too great prominence. Valuable as the late Professor James’s _Varieties of Religious Experience_ may be, it has the fault of studying the abnormal as though it were the ordinary, leaving the great stretches of healthy religious experience practically untouched. If a physiologist were to give his main attention to men with one green and one brown eye, or with the heart on the right instead of the left side, or some kindred peculiarities, the sum total of his research would not contribute much to our knowledge of the normal man. To conclude: every man who respects his mind, be his vocation what it may, has need to guard his Mystic Sense from defilement, and afford it opportunity for development. In what is technically known as education great stress is laid on proportion and subject matter. This is no less a necessity in maturer life than it is in youth. The same result ensues upon reading anything that comes to hand, that ensues upon eating anything that comes to hand. So important a thing is it, not only that we should be able to create hypotheses, but also that our hypotheses should be sound, that we must furnish our Mystic Sense with the same safeguards and stimulus that we afford our physical senses. CHAPTER IV IN RELATION TO CHARACTER Good character is the reaction upon the whole self caused by the Mystic Sense as a habit visioning, and the will claiming, the excellent. It is the result on personality of a sustained effort to transcend the existing relation to life and its conditions, a state of chronic dissatisfaction with the progress and achievement of the moment, which makes the good mediocre by contrasting it with the superior and coveting the best conceivable as man’s right and heritage.