ad filled the world. Of these
gods the greater number were merely the effects of causes that reposed
in ourselves. As we progress we shall discover that many a force that
mastered us and aroused our wonder was only an ill-understood fragment
of our own power; and this will probably become more apparent every day.

And though we shall not have conquered the unknown force by bringing it
nearer or enclosing it within us, there yet shall be gain in knowing
where it abides and where we may question it. Obscure forces surround
us; but the one that concerns us most nearly lies at the very centre of
our being. All the others pass through it: it is their trysting-place:
they re-enter and congregate there; and only in the degree of their
relation to it have they interest for us.

To distinguish this force from the host of others we have called it
unconsciousness. And when we shall have succeeded in studying this
unconsciousness more closely, when its mysterious adroitness, its
antipathies and preference, its helplessness, shall be better known to
us, we shall have most strangely blunted the teeth and nails of the
monster who persecutes us under the name of Fortune, Destiny or Chance.
At the present hour we are feeding it still as a blind man might feed
the lion that at last shall devour him. Soon perhaps the lion will be
seen by us in its true light, and we shall then learn how to subdue him.

Let us therefore unweariedly follow each path that leads from our
consciousness to our unconsciousness. We shall thus succeed in hewing
some kind of track through the great and as yet impassable roads that
lead from the seen to the unseen, from man to God, from the individual
to the universe. At the end of these roads lies hidden the general
secret of life. In the meanwhile let us adopt the hypothesis that
offers the most encouragement to our existence in this life; in this
life which has need of us for the solution of its own enigmas, seeing
that in us its secrets crystallise the most limpidly and most rapidly.

THE END

[1] His history is concisely summed up by Dr. Foissac as follows:--"On
the eighth Floreal of the year IV. the courier and postillion who were
taking the mail from Paris to Lyons were attacked and murdered, at nine
in the evening, in the forest of Senart. The assassins were Couriol,
who had taken a seat in the cabriolet by the side of the courier;
Durochal, Rossi, Vidal, and Dubosq, who had come to m