enaissance, nor in sculpture the age of
Phidias. In such perplexity is it not as if one heard again the threat
of Mummius, charging his crew to give good heed to the statues of
Praxiteles, on the peril of replacing them if broken!

Goethe, as the wrecks of his drama on Liberty prove, felt the might of
the ideal of the Third Age with all the vibrating emotion which genius
imparts.[6] But he was the first to discover its hollowness, and bade
the world, in epigram or in prose tale, in lyric or in drama, to seek
its peace where he himself had found it, in Art. So the labour of the
scientific theorist, negatively beneficent by the impulsion of man's
spirit beyond science, brings also a reward of its own to the devotee.
The sun of Art falls in a kind of twilight upon his soul, working
obscurely in words, and then does he most know the Unknowable when, in
the passion of self-imposed ignorance, he rises to a kind of eloquence
in proclaiming its unknowableness. Glimmerings from the Eternal visit
the obscure study where the soul in travail records patiently the
incidents of Time, and elaborates a theory of man's history as if it
were framed to end like an Adelphi melodrama or a three-volume novel.

Sec. 4. THE IDEAL OF THE FOURTH AGE

But from those very failures, those dissatisfactions, the ideal of the
Fourth Age is born, and the law of a greater progress divined. For the
soul, revolting at last against the fleeting illusions of time, the
deceiving Edens of saint, reformer, and revolutionist, freedom from the
body, freedom from religious, or freedom from political oppression,
sets steadily towards the lodestar of its being, whose rising is not in
Time nor its going down in Space. Nor is it in knowledge, whether of
the causes of things, or of the achievements of statesmen, warriors,
legislators, that the peace of the infinite is to be found, but in a
vision of that which was when Time and Cause were not. Then
instruction and the massed treasures of knowledge, established or
theoretic, concerning the past and the future of the planet on which
man plays his part, or of other planets on which other forms of being
play their parts, do indeed dissolve and are rolled together like a
scroll. The Timeless, the Infinite, like a burst of clear ether, an
azure expanse washed of clouds, lures on the delighted spirit, tranced
in ecstasy.

For the symbol of this universe and of man's destiny is not the
prolongation of a line,