s made. For, as Schiller says:

"the elements are hostile
To the work of human hand."

For such are but some out of the many forms in which man has
struggled to give expression to his intuitions that there is
something wrong in nature--to his deep sense of division and
conflict in the cosmic process. Heracleitus, as we saw, held that
conflict is an essential condition of existence. At any rate, it is
true, that order is only won by severe conflict with destructive
and irregular powers. An ancient expression of this experience
is found in the long contest waged between Zeus and the other
children of Cronos. A modern expression is found in Huxley's
illustration of the fenced garden that, if untended, speedily
returns to its wild condition. In the framing and moulding of
this experience, the hostile aspects of fire have played no
insignificant part.

In this context it would be natural to treat of the Sun as the
predominant manifestation of fire, of which Shelley, in his
hymn to Apollo, has said:

"I am the eye with which the Universe
Beholds itself and knows itself divine."

The various sun-gods would be passed in review, Ra of the
Egyptians, Apollo of the Greeks, and the various forms of
sun-worship, from the most primitive times down through the
Persian religion, that of the Peruvians, the "children of the sun,"
to that of the modern Parsees--and that of the unnamed
multitudes who in substance have echoed the words which
Moore puts into the mouths of the Hyperboreans:

"To the Sun-god all our hearts and lyres
By day, by night belong;
And the breath we draw from his living fires
We give him back in song."

But the subject is too great and is deserving of special
treatment. Certain of the more essential conceptions involved
will come before us in the chapter on light. Mirabeau on his
death-bed would seem to have put the whole matter in the
briefest space--"Si ce n'est pas la Dieu, c'est du moins son
cousin-german." Turner, on his deathbed, was briefer and
bolder still--"The sun is God." Knowing the man and knowing
his work, we can understand what he meant. Put it the other
way round, we have the same, and yet the fuller truth--"the Lord
God is a Sun."

CHAPTER XXIX

LIGHT AND DARKNESS

Robert Fludd, the English Rosicrucian, who died in 1637, wrote
a treatise on the universe, in which he taught that man was a
microcosm of the macrocosm, and that light and d