e supernatural machinery brings man back to nature through
mystical circumlocutions, and becomes itself a poetic echo of experience
and a dramatic impersonation of reason. The peculiar accent and emphasis
which it will not cease to impose on the obvious lessons of life need
not then repel the wisest intelligence. True sages and true
civilisations can accordingly flourish under a dispensation nominally
supernatural; for that supernaturalism may have become a mere form in
which imagination clothes a rational and humane wisdom.

[Sidenote: Moribund dreams and perennial realities.]

People who speak only one language have some difficulty in conceiving
that things should be expressed just as well in some other; a prejudice
which does not necessarily involve their mistaking words for things or
being practically misled by their inflexible vocabulary. So it
constantly happens that supernatural systems, when they have long
prevailed, are defended by persons who have only natural interests at
heart; because these persons lack that speculative freedom and dramatic
imagination which would allow them to conceive other moulds for morality
and happiness than those to which a respectable tradition has accustomed
them. Sceptical statesmen and academic scholars sometimes suffer from
this kind of numbness; it is intelligible that they should mistake the
forms of culture for its principle, especially when their genius is not
original and their chosen function is to defend and propagate the local
traditions in which their whole training has immersed them. Indeed, in
the political field, such concern for decaying myths may have a pathetic
justification; for however little the life of or dignity of man may he
jeopardised by changes in language, languages themselves are not
indifferent things. They may be closely bound up with the peculiar
history and spirit of nations, and their disappearance, however
necessary and on the whole propitious, may mark the end of some stirring
chapter in the world's history. Those whose vocation is not philosophy
and whose country is not the world may be pardoned for wishing to retard
the migrations of spirit, and for looking forward with apprehension to a
future in which their private enthusiasms will not be understood.

The value of post-rational morality, then, depends on a double
conformity on its part with the Life of Reason. In the first place some
natural impulse must be retained, some partial ideal must