Bygone Beliefs: being a series of excursions in the byways of thought by Redgrove, H. Stanley (Herbert Stanley), 1887-1943

[2a] NOVALIS: _Schriften_ (ed. by LUDWIG TIECK and FR. SCHLEGEL, 1805), vol. ii. p. 195

[1] For a discussion of the essentially magical character of inductive reasoning, see my _The Magic of Experience_ (1915)

[2] _Op. cit_., bk. i. chap. xxxvii. p. 119.

I would suggest, in conclusion, that there is nothing really opposed to the spirit of modern science in the thesis that "all experience is magic, and only magically explicable." Science does not pretend to reveal the fundamental or underlying cause of phenomena, does not pretend to answer the final Why? This is rather the business of philosophy, though, in thus distinguishing between science and philosophy, I am far from insinuating that philosophy should be otherwise than scientific. We often hear religious but non-scientific men complain because scientific and perhaps equally as religious men do not in their books ascribe the production of natural phenomena to the Divine Power. But if they were so to do they would be transcending their business as scientists. In every science certain simple facts of experience are taken for granted: it is the business of the scientist to reduce other and more complex facts of experience to terms of these data, not to explain these data themselves. Thus the physicist attempts to reduce other related phenomena of greater complexity to terms of simple force and motion; but, What are force and motion? Why does force produce or result in motion? are questions which lie beyond the scope of physics. In order to answer these questions, if, indeed, this be possible, we must first inquire, How and why do these ideas of force and motion arise in our minds? These problems land us in the psychical or spiritual world, and the term "magic" at once becomes significant.

"If, says THOMAS CARLYLE, . . . we . . . have led thee into the true Land of Dreams; and . . . thou lookest, even for moments, into the region of the Wonderful, and seest and feelest that thy daily life is girt with Wonder, and based on Wonder, and thy very blankets and breeches are Miracles,--then art thou profited beyond money's worth...."[1]

[1] THOMAS CARLYLE: _Sartor Resartus_, bk. iii. chap. ix.

VIII

ARCHITECTURAL SYMBOLISM