Could one of our aviators have landed in ancient Athens, doubtless
he would have been given a place in the Greek Pantheon, for the old
idea of a demigod was a man with wings. Why, then, does a flying man
so little amaze us? Because we know about engines, and the smell of
gasoline has dulled our sense of the sublime. The living voice of a
dead man leaves us unterrified if only we can be sure that it comes
from a phonograph; but let that voice speak to us out of vacancy and
we fall a prey to the same order of alarm that is felt by a savage
at the report of a gun that he has never seen.
This illustration very well defines the nature of a miracle: it is a
manifestation of power new to experience, and counter to the current
thought of the time, Miracles are therefore always in order, they
always happen. It is nothing that the sober facts of to-day are more
marvellous than the fictions of Baron Munchausen, so long as we
understand them: it is everything that phenomena are multiplying,
that we are unable to understand. This increasing pressure upon
consciousness _from a new direction_ has created a need to found
belief on something firmer than a bottomless gullibility of mind.
This book is aimed to meet that need by giving the mind the freedom
of new spaces; but before it can even begin to do so, the reader
must be brought to see the fallacy of attempting to measure the
limits of the possible by that faculty known as common sense. And by
common sense is meant, not the appeal to abstract reason, but to
concrete experience.