The wall-paper has a new pattern, of strange spirals instead of round dots.
The table seems to have moved by itself across the room and thrown the medicine bottles out of the window.

The telephone has vanished from the wall; the mirror does not reflect what is in front of it.
The portrait of himself over the mantelpiece has a face that is not his own.
That is something like a vision of the vital change in the whole trend of natural philosophy in the last twenty or thirty years.
It matters little whether we regard it as the deepening or the destruction of the scientific universe.
It matters little whether we say that grander abysses have opened in it, or merely that the bottom has fallen out of it.
It is quite self-evident that scientific men are at war with wilder and more unfathomable fancies than the facts of the age of Huxley.
I attempt no controversy about any of the particular cases: it is the cumulative effect of all of them that makes the impression one of common sense.

It is really true that the perspective and dimensions of the man's bedroom have altered; the disciples of Einstein will tell him that straight lines are curved and perhaps measure more one way than the other; if that is not a nightmare, what is?
It is really true that the clock has altered, for time has turned into the fourth dimension or something entirely different; and the telephone may fairly be said to have faded from view in favour of the invisible telepath.

It is true that the pattern of the paper has changed, for the very pattern of the world has changed; we are told that it is not made of atoms like the dots but of electrons like the spirals.

Scientific men of the first rank have seen a table move by itself, and walk upstairs by itself.
It does not matter here whether it was done by the spirits; it is enough that few still pretend that is entirely done by the spiritualists.
I am not dealing with doctrines but with doubts; with the mere fact that all these things have grown deeper and more bewildering.
Some people really are throwing their medicine bottles out of the window; and some of them at least are working purely psychological cures of a sort that would once have been called miraculous healing.