man, but only enquired in what this eternal element
consisted and how man can nourish and cherish it in himself. For from
the outset it was clear to him that man is an intermediate creation
between the earthly and the divine. It was not a question of a divine
being outside and beyond the world. The divine lives in man but lives
in him only in a human way. It is the force urging man to make himself
ever more and more divine. Only one who thinks thus can say with
Empedocles:

When leaving thy body behind thee, thou
soarest into the ether,
Then thou becomest a god, immortal, not
subject to death.

What may be done for a human life from this point of view? It may be
introduced into the magic circle of the eternal. For in man there must
be forces which merely natural life does not develop. And the life
might pass away unused if the forces remained idle. To open them up,
thereby to make man like the divine,--this was the task of the
Mysteries. And this was also the mission which the Greek sages set
before themselves. In this way we can understand Plato's utterance,
that "he who passes unsanctified and uninitiated into the world below
will lie in a slough, but that he who arrives there after initiation
and purification will dwell with the gods." We have to do here with a
conception of immortality, the significance of which lies bound up
within the universe. Everything which man undertakes in order to
awaken the eternal within him, he does in order to raise the value of
the world's existence. The fresh knowledge he gains does not make him
an idle spectator of the universe, forming images for himself of what
would be there just as much if he did not exist. The force of his
knowledge is a higher one, it is one of the creative forces of nature.
What flashes up within him spiritually is something divine which was
previously under a spell, and which, failing the knowledge he has
gained, must have lain fallow and waited for some other exorcist. Thus
a human personality does not live in and for itself, but for the
world. Life extends far beyond individual existence when looked at in
this way. From within such a point of view we can understand
utterances like that of Pindar giving a vista of the eternal: "Happy
is he who has seen the Mysteries and then descends under the hollow
earth. He knows the end of life, and he knows the beginning promised
by Zeus."

We understand the proud traits and solitary nature of s