seemed still to survive, as a
principle of hieratic scrupulousness or integrity of thought, regarding
this new service to intellectual light.

At this time, by his poetic and inward temper, he might have fallen a
prey to the enervating mysticism, then in wait for ardent souls in many
a melodramatic revival of old religion or theosophy. From all this,
fascinating as it might actually be to one side of his character, he
was kept by a genuine virility there, effective in him, among other
results, as a hatred of what was theatrical, and the instinctive
recognition that in vigorous intelligence, after all, divinity was most
likely to be found a resident. With this was connected the feeling,
increasing with his advance to manhood, of a poetic beauty in mere
clearness of thought, the actually aesthetic charm of a cold austerity
of mind; as if the kinship of that to the clearness of physical light
were something more than a figure of speech. Of all those various
religious fantasies, as so many forms of enthusiasm, he could well
appreciate the picturesque; that was made easy by his natural
Epicureanism, already prompting [125] him to conceive of himself as but
the passive spectator of the world around him. But it was to the
severer reasoning, of which such matters as Epicurean theory are born,
that, in effect, he now betook himself. Instinctively suspicious of
those mechanical arcana, those pretended "secrets unveiled" of the
professional mystic, which really bring great and little souls to one
level, for Marius the only possible dilemma lay between that old,
ancestral Roman religion, now become so incredible to him and the
honest action of his own untroubled, unassisted intelligence. Even the
Arcana Celestia of Platonism--what the sons of Plato had had to say
regarding the essential indifference of pure soul to its bodily house
and merely occasional dwelling-place--seemed to him while his heart was
there in the urn with the material ashes of Flavian, or still lingering
in memory over his last agony, wholly inhuman or morose, as tending to
alleviate his resentment at nature's wrong. It was to the sentiment of
the body, and the affections it defined--the flesh, of whose force and
colour that wandering Platonic soul was but so frail a residue or
abstract--he must cling. The various pathetic traits of the beloved,
suffering, perished body of Flavian, so deeply pondered, had made him a
materialist, but with something of the t