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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
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