roteus in this exposition? There
is no mythus in Homer which has wound itself so deeply and so variously
into the literature of the world. It would be an interesting history to
trace its employment by later poets, and see how it has mirrored itself
in the consciousness of the ages. The last world-poet, Goethe, takes
the figure of Proteus from his eldest brother, the first world-poet,
and transplants it into the Second Part of Faust, where it has its
place in the development of the modern man. The Mythus of Evolution the
tale of Proteus becomes in Goethe's hands, and hints of Darwinism long
before Darwin.

Still the most significant historical fact of this Fourth Book is the
connection which it makes between Egypt and Greece. In another Greek
legend, that of OEdipus, the same connection is made through the
Sphinx, whose riddle the Greek hero solves, whereat the Egyptian
monster destroys itself.

The Sphinx, the grand symbol of Egypt and chief product of its Art, may
be taken as the Egyptian starting-point for both Greece and Judea. The
Sphinx is half human, half animal; the two are put together in stone
and thus stand a fixed, unreconciled contradiction. Such was just the
Sphinx-riddle of humanity to the old Egyptian: man is a beast and a
spirit, linked together without any true mediation. Both the Hebrew and
the Greek sought to solve this grand riddle, each in his own way. The
Hebrew attempted to extirpate the sensuous element; he would have no
graven image, no idolatry, he would worship only the pure spirit, and
obey only the divine law. The Greek reconciled the two sides, by making
the sensuous element the bearer and the revealer of the spiritual. The
animal must be subordinated to the spirit, then it can live, nay can
have a new and higher existence. Thus Art arose in Greece, and not in
Judea.

The interpretations which the story of Proteus has received are simply
infinite. Probably it appeals to every reader in a somewhat different
fashion; he pours into this marvelous form certain phases of his own
experience and is satisfied. Indeed Proteus is not only a Form, but a
Form of Forms for the human mind, hinting both the oneness and the
multiplicity of the Ego itself. We may go back to the Vedas and find
traces of it there in some sun-myth; we may go to the sea and find it a
miraculous legend in which the Greek sailor set forth his perils and
his escapes. It certainly connects Hellas with Egypt, and suggests the
mo