'Hast Thou sent the rain upon the desert where no man is?' This simple
sense of wonder at the shapes of things, and at their exuberant
independence of our intellectual standards and our trivial definitions,
is the basis of spirituality as it is the basis of nonsense. Nonsense
and faith (strange as the conjunction may seem) are the two supreme
symbolic assertions of the truth that to draw out the soul of things
with a syllogism is as impossible as to draw out Leviathan with a hook.
The well-meaning person who, by merely studying the logical side of
things, has decided that 'faith is nonsense,' does not know how truly he
speaks; later it may come back to him in the form that nonsense is
faith.


* * * * *

A DEFENCE OF PLANETS


A book has at one time come under my notice called 'Terra Firma: the
Earth not a Planet.' The author was a Mr. D. Wardlaw Scott, and he
quoted very seriously the opinions of a large number of other persons,
of whom we have never heard, but who are evidently very important. Mr.
Beach of Southsea, for example, thinks that the world is flat; and in
Southsea perhaps it is. It is no part of my present intention, however,
to follow Mr. Scott's arguments in detail. On the lines of such
arguments it may be shown that the earth is flat, and, for the matter of
that, that it is triangular. A few examples will suffice:

One of Mr. Scott's objections was that if a projectile is fired from a
moving body there is a difference in the distance to which it carries