om the Animals and the animal-natured,
unself-conscious human beings of a preceding age, then the parable
unfolds itself perfectly naturally and convincingly. THAT birth
certainly was sleep and a forgetting; the grace and intuition and
instinctive perfection of the animals was lost. But the forgetfulness
was not entire; the memory lingered long of an age of harmony, of an
Eden-garden left behind. And trailing clouds of this remembrance
the first tribal men, on the edge of but not yet WITHIN the
civilization-period, appear in the dawn of History.

As I have said before, the period of the dawn of Self-consciousness was
also the period of the dawn of the practical and inquiring Intellect; it
was the period of the babyhood of both; and so we perceive among these
early people (as we also do among children) that while in the main the
heart and the intuitions were right, the intellect was for a long period
futile and rambling to a degree. As soon as the mind left the ancient
bases of instinct and sub-conscious racial experience it fell into
a hopeless bog, out of which it only slowly climbed by means of the
painfully-gathered stepping-stones of logic and what we call Science.
"Heaven lies about us in our infancy." Wordsworth perceived that
wonderful world of inner experience and glory out of which the child
emerges; and some even of us may perceive that similar world in which
the untampered animals STILL dwell, and OUT of which self-regarding Man
in the history of the race was long ago driven. But a curse went
with the exile. As the Brain grew, the Heart withered. The inherited
instincts and racially accumulated wisdom, on which the first men
thrived and by means of which they achieved a kind of temporary
Paradise, were broken up; delusions and disease and dissension set
in. Cain turned upon his brother and slew him; and the shades of the
prison-house began to close. The growing Boy, however, (by whom we may
understand the early tribes of Mankind) had yet a radiance of Light and
joy in his life; and the Youth--though travelling daily farther from the
East--still remained Nature's priest, and by the vision splendid was on
his way attended: but

At length the Man perceived it die away.
And fade into the light of common day.

What a strangely apt picture in a few words (if we like to take it
so) of the long pilgrimage of the Human Race, its early and pathetic
clinging to the tradition of the Eden-garden, its careless