r, of a world free from war and
devoted to agriculture and commerce, or of the philosophic
evolutionist, of a world peopled by myriads of happy altruists bounding
from bath to breakfast-room, illumined and illumining by their healthy
and mutual smiles, differs from the earlier fancies of Asgard and the
Isles of the Blest, not in heightened nobility and reasonableness, but
in diminished beauty and poetry. The dream of unending progress is
vain as the dream of unending regress.[4]

Critics of literature and philosophy have often remarked how sterile
are the efforts to delineate a state of perfect and long-continued
bliss, even when a Dante or a Milton undertakes the task, compared with
delineations of torment and endless woe. And Aeschylus has remarked,
and La Rochefoucauld and Helvetius bear him out, how much easier a man
finds the effort to sympathize with another's misery than to rejoice in
his joy.

Such contrasts are due, not to a faltering imagination, nor to the
depravity of the human heart. They are the recognition by the dark
Unconscious, which in sincerity of vision ever transcends the
Conscious, that in man's life truth dwells not with felicity, that to
the soul imprisoned in Time and Space, whether amongst the stars or on
this earth, perfect peace is a mockery. But in Time, misery is the
soul's familiar, anguish is the gate of truth, and the highest moments
of bliss are, as the Socrates of Plato affirms, negative. They are the
moments of oblivion, when the manacles of Time fall off, whether from
stress of agony or delight or mere weariness. Therefore with
stammering lips man congratulates joy, but the response of grief to
grief is quick and from the heart, sanctioned by the Unconscious;
therefore in the portraiture of Heaven art fails, but in that of Hell
succeeds.

It is not in Time that the eternal can find rest, nor in Space that the
infinite can find repose, and as illusion follows lost illusion, the
soul of man does but the more completely realize the wonder ineffable
of the only reality, the Eternal Now.

Sec. 3. THE FOUR PERIODS OF MODERN HISTORY AND THEIR IDEALS

The deepening of this conception of man's destiny as beginning in the
Infinite and in the Infinite ending, is one of the profoundest and most
significant features of the present age. Its dominion over art,
literature, religion, can no longer escape us. It is the dominant note
of the last of the four great ages or epochs into