If everybody
is satisfied about how it is done, why does not everybody do it?
Why does not a cultivated clergyman in Cornwall make a casual remark
to an old friend of his at the University of Aberdeen? Why does
not a harassed commercial traveller in Barcelona settle a question
by merely thinking about his business partner in Berlin? The common
sense of it is, of course, that the name makes no sort of difference;
the mystery is why some people can do it and others cannot;
and why it seems to be easy in one place and impossible in another.
In other words it comes back to that very mystery which of all
mysteries the modern world thinks most superstitious and senseless;
the mystery of locality. It works back at last to the hardest of
all the hard sayings of supernaturalism; that there is such a thing
as holy or unholy ground, as divinely or diabolically inspired people;
that there may be such things as sacred sites or even sacred stones;
in short that the airy nothing of spiritual essence, evil or good,
can have quite literally a local habitation and a name.
It may be said in passing that this _genius loci_ is here very much
the presiding genius.
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