pause for a moment in conclusion upon its relations to
the destiny of man.

To the ancient world, man in his march across the deserts of Time had
left felicity and the golden age far beyond him, and Rousseau's vision
of Humanity as starting upon a wrong track, and drifting ever farther
from the path of its peace, had charmed the melancholy or the despair
of Virgil and his great master in verse and speculation, Titus
Lucretius.

This conception of man's destiny as an infinite retrogression, Eden
receding behind Eden, lost Paradise behind lost Paradise, in the
dateless past, encounters us, now as a myth, now as a religious or
philosophic tenet, throughout the earlier history of humanity from the
Baltic to the Indian Sea, from the furthest Orient to the Western
Isles. Besides this radiant past even the vision of the abode which
awaits the soul at death seems dusky and repellent, a land of twilight,
as in the Etruscan legend, or that dominion over the shades which
Achilles loathed beyond any mortal misery.

But the memory or the imagination of this land far behind, upon which
Heaven's light for ever falls, the Asgard of the Goths, the Akkadian
dream of Sin-land ruled by the Yellow Emperor, the reign of Saturn and
of Ops, diminishes in power and living energy as the ages advance, and,
perishing at last, is embalmed in the cold and crystal loveliness of
poetry. In its place bright mansions, elysian groves, await the soul
at death. Heaven closes around earth like a protecting smile, and from
this hope of a recovered Paradise and new Edens amongst the stars,
which to Dante and his time are but the earth's appanage, man advances
swiftly to the desire, the hope, the certainty of a terrestrial
Paradise waiting his race in the near or remote future. Thus, as the
immanence of the Divine within the soul of man has deepened, and the
desire of his heart has grown nearer the desire of the world-soul, so
has the power of memory decreased and been transformed into hope. Man,
tossed from illusion to illusion, has grown sensitive to the least
intimations of Reality.

But these visions of Eden, whether located in a remote past, or in the
interstellar spaces, or in the near future, have certain
characteristics in common. From far behind to far in front the dream
has shifted, as if the Northern Lights had moved from horizon to
horizon, but it remains one dream. The earthly Paradise of the social
reformer, a Saint-Simon or a Fourie