arded
as the decisive mark of its supernatural origin. Indeed, were
inspiration not the faithful echo of plain conscience and vulgar
experience there would be no means of distinguishing it from madness.
Whatever poetic idea a prophet starts with, in whatever intuition or
analogy he finds a hint of salvation, it is altogether necessary that he
should hasten to interpret his oracle in such a manner that it may
sanction without disturbing the system of indispensable natural duties,
although these natural duties, by being attached artificially to
supernatural dogmas, may take on a different tone, justify themselves by
a different rhetoric, and possibly suffer real transformation in some
minor particulars. Systems of post-rational morality are not original
works: they are versions of natural morality translated into different
metaphysical languages, each of which adds its peculiar flavour, its own
genius and poetry, to the plain sense of the common original.

[Sidenote: A witness out of India.]

In the doctrine of Karma, for instance, experience of retribution is
ideally extended and made precise. Acts, daily experience teaches us,
form habits; habits constitute character, and each man's character, as
Heraclitus said, is his guardian deity, the artisan of his fate. We need
but raise this particular observation to a solitary eminence, after the
manner of post-rational thinking; we need but imagine it to underlie and
explain all other empirical observations, so that character may come to
figure as an absolute cause, of which experience itself is an attendant
result. Such arbitrary emphasis laid on some term of experience is the
source of each metaphysical system in turn. In this case the surviving
dogma will have yielded an explanation of our environment no less than
of our state of heart by instituting a deeper spiritual law, a certain
balance of merit and demerit in the soul, accruing to it through a
series of previous incarnations. This fabulous starting-point was
gained by an imaginary extension of the law of moral continuity and
natural retribution; but when, accepting this starting-point, the
believer went on to inquire what he should do to be saved and to cancel
the heavy debts he inherited from his mythical past, he would merely
enumerate the natural duties of man, giving them, however, a new
sanction and conceiving them as if they emanated from his new-born
metaphysical theory. This theory, apart from a natural consc