ght for him. Only
I have no more regard for his little crowings on his own little
dunghill. Myself, I am not so sure that I am one of the
one-and-onlies. I like the wide world of centuries and vast
ages--mammoth worlds beyond our day, and mankind so wonderful in his
distances, his history that has no beginning yet always the pomp and
the magnificence of human splendor unfolding through the earth's
changing periods. Floods and fire and convulsions and ice-arrest
intervene between the great glamorous civilizations of mankind. But
nothing will ever quench humanity and the human potentiality to evolve
something magnificent out of a renewed chaos.

I do not believe in evolution, but in the strangeness and
rainbow-change of ever-renewed creative civilizations.

So much, then, for my claim to remarkable discoveries. I believe I am
only trying to stammer out the first terms of a forgotten knowledge.
But I have no desire to revive dead kings, or dead sages. It is not
for me to arrange fossils, and decipher hieroglyphic phrases. I
couldn't do it if I wanted to. But then I can do something else. The
soul must take the hint from the relics our scientists have so
marvelously gathered out of the forgotten past, and from the hint
develop a new living utterance. The spark is from dead wisdom, but the
fire is life.

And as an example--a very simple one--of how a scientist of the most
innocent modern sort may hint at truths which, when stated, he would
laugh at as fantastic nonsense, let us quote a word from the already
old-fashioned "Golden Bough." "It must have appeared to the ancient
Aryan that the sun was periodically recruited from the fire which
resided in the sacred oak."

Exactly. The fire which resided in the Tree of Life. That is, life
itself. So we must read: "It must have appeared to the ancient Aryan
that the sun was periodically recruited from life."--Which is what the
early Greek philosophers were always saying. And which still seems to
me the real truth, the clue to the cosmos. Instead of life being drawn
from the sun, it is the emanation from life itself, that is, from all
the living plants and creatures which nourish the sun.

Of course, my dear critic, the ancient Aryans were just doddering--the
old duffers: or babbling, the babes. But as for me, I have some
respect for my ancestors, and believe they had more up their sleeve
than just the marvel of the unborn me.

One last weary little word. This pseudo-philoso