'The Centaur', Chapter 14, by Algernon Blackwood

"It is a lovely imagination responding to the deepest desires, instincts, cravings of spiritual man, that spiritual rapture should find an echo in the material world; that in mental communion with God we should find sensible communion with nature; and that, when the faithful rejoice together, bird and beast, hill and forest, should be not felt only, but seen to rejoice along with them. It is not the truth; between us and our environment, whatever links there are, this link is wanting. But the yearning for it, the passion which made Wordsworth cry out for something, even were it the imagination of a pagan which would make him 'less forlorn,' is natural to man; and simplicity leaps at the lovely fiction of a response. Just here is the opportunity for such alliances between spiritualism and superstition as are the daily despair of seekers after truth."

-Dr. Verrall

----

Catania: a city on the east coast of the island of Sicily

Bellini: Vincenzo Salvatore Carmelo Francesco Bellini, an Italian opera composer known as the Swan of Catania. He had died in 1835; an opera house named after him (Teatro Massimo Bellini) was opened in 1890.

the volcano, unnamed in this chapter, is the same Mount Etna mentioned in a previous chapter.

lighterman: a man who operates a lighter. A lighter being a type of flat-bottomed barge. The term is most famously applied in the context of the port of London, but is not exclusive to London.

donkey-engine: a steam-powered winch

N-rays: a hypothesized form of radiation described by French physicist Prosper-René Blondlot in 1903. They were initially confirmed by others, but subsequently found to be illusory. (X-rays had been discovered in 1895, radioactivity in 1896, electrons in 1897 - the whole science was moving quickly at this point in time!)

William James: 19th century American philosopher and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States. He did a Hibbert Lecture in 1908 entitled "A Pluralistic Universe".

Hibbert Lecture: an annual series of non-sectarian lectures on theological issues. They are sponsored by the Hibbert Trust, which was founded in 1847 by the Unitarian Robert Hibbert with a goal to uphold "the unfettered exercise of private judgement in matters of religion." It appears Hibbert Lectures may still be a thing, although no longer annual, indeed they have become fairly sporadic. There were lectures published in 2003 (Religion without God: Methodological Agnosticism and the Future of Religious Studies) and 2005 (Spirituality and Global Citizenship). They were reasonably consistent until 1937, but since WW2 there's only been nine. Yikes.

The picture used is an AI generated image using "Weltgehirn" as the prompt.