be allowed to pass unchallenged out of respect
for the essential truths thus fortified in pious minds. The power of
habit and convention, by which the most crying inconsistencies and
hypocrisies are soon put to sleep, would facilitate these accommodations
and render them soon instinctive; while the world at large, entirely
hypnotised by the ceremonious event and its imaginative echoes, could
never come to close quarters with the facts at all, but could view them
only through accepted preconceptions. Thus elaborate machinery can arise
and long endure for the magical service of man's interests. How deeply
rooted such conventions are, how natural it is that they should have
dominated even civilised society, may best be understood if we consider
the remnants of such habits in our midst--not among gypsies or
professional wonder-workers but among reflecting men.

[Sidenote: Genius may use them to convey an inarticulate wisdom.]

Some men of action, like Caesar and Napoleon, are said to have been
superstitious about their own destiny. The phenomenon, if true, would be
intelligible. They were masterful men, men who in a remarkable degree
possessed in their consciousness the sign and sanction of what was
happening in the world. This endowment, which made them dominate their
contemporaries, could also reveal the sources and conditions of their
own will. They might easily come to feel that it was destiny--the total
movement of things--that inspired, crowned, and ruined them. But as they
could feel this only instinctively, not by a systematic view of all the
forces in play, they would attach their voluminous sense of fatality to
some chance external indication or to some ephemeral impulse within
themselves; so that what was essentially a profound but inarticulate
science might express itself in the guise of a superstition.

In like manner Socrates' Demon (if not actually a playful fable by which
the sage expressed the negative stress of conscience, the "thou shalt
not" of all awe-inspiring precepts) might be a symbol for latent wisdom.
Socrates turned a trick, played upon him by his senses, into a message
from heaven. He taught a feeble voice--senseless like all ghostly
voices--to sanction precepts dictated by the truly divine element within
himself. It was characteristic of his modest piety to look for some
external sign to support reason; his philosophy was so human, and man is
obviously so small a part of the world, that he cou