however, is not an easy nor a tolerable thing,
unless you are naturally well pleased with what falls to your share.
However the Absolute may feel, a moral creature has to hate some forms
of being; and if the age has thrust these forms before a man's eyes, and
imposed them upon him, not being suffered by his pantheism to blame the
Absolute he will (by an inconsistency) take to blaming himself. It will
be his finitude, his inordinate claims, his enormous effrontery in
having any will or any preference in particular, that will seem to him
the source of all evil and the single blot on the infinite lucidity of
things. Pantheism, under these circumstances, will issue in a
post-rational morality. It will practise asceticism and look for a
mystical deliverance from finite existence.

Under these circumstances myth is inevitably reintroduced. Without it,
no consolation could be found except in the prospect of death and,
awaiting that, in incidental natural satisfactions; whereby absorption
in the Absolute might come to look not only impossible but distinctly
undesirable. To make retreat out of human nature seem a possible
vocation, this nature itself must, in some myth, be represented as
unnatural; the soul that this life stifles must be said to come from
elsewhere and to be fitted to breathe some element far rarer and finer
than this sublunary fog.

[Sidenote: A supernatural world made by the Platonist out of dialectic.]

A curious foothold for such a myth was furnished by the Socratic
philosophy. Plato, wafted by his poetic vision too far, perhaps, from
the utilitarianism of his master, had eulogised concretions in discourse
at the expense of existences and had even played with cosmological
myths, meant to express the values of things, by speaking as if these
values had brought things into being. The dialectical terms thus
contrasted with natural objects, and pictured as natural powers,
furnished the dogmas needed at this juncture by a post-rational
religion. The spell which dialectic can exercise over an abstracted mind
is itself great; and it may grow into a sacred influence and a positive
revelation when it offers a sanctuary from a weary life in the world.
Out of the play of notions carried on in a prayerful dream wonderful
mysteries can be constructed, to be presently announced to the people
and made the core of sacramental injunctions. When the tide of vulgar
superstition is at the flood and every form of quackery is w