man asserts his own inherent strength of imagination and faith over
against the external fact. Whatsoever is facile to Imagination is also
facile to Faith. Easy, therefore, in our thoughts, is the transition
from the Cinder-wench in the ashes to the Cinderella of the palace; easy
the apotheosis of the slave, and the passage from the weary earth to the
fields of Elysium and the Isles of the Blessed.

This flight of the Imagination, this vision of Faith,--_these_, reader,
are only for the _epoptae_. It matters not, that, by naked analysis, you
can prove that the palaces of our fancy and the temples of our faith are
but the baseless fabric of a dream. It may be that the greater part of
life is made up of dreams, and that wakefulness is merely incidental as
a relief to the picture. It may be, indeed, in the last analysis, that
the _ideal_ is the highest, if not the only _real_.

For the sensible, palpable fact can, by the nature of things, exist for
us only in the Present. But, my dear reader, it is just here, in this
Present, that the tenure by which we have hold upon life is the most
frail and shadowy. For, by the strictest analysis, _there is no
Present_. The formula, _It is_, even before we can give it utterance, by
some subtile chemistry of logic, is resolved into _It was_ and _It
shall be_. Thus by our analysis do we retreat into the ideal. In the
deepest reflection, all that we call external is only the material basis
upon which our dreams are built; and the sleep that surrounds life
swallows up life,--all but a dim wreck of matter, floating this way and
that, and forever evanishing from sight. Complete the analysis, and we
lose even the shadow of the external Present, and only the Past and the
Future are left us as our sure inheritance. This is the first
initiation,--the veiling of the eyes to the external. But, as _epoptae_,
by the synthesis of this Past and Future in a living nature, we obtain a
higher, an ideal Present, comprehending within itself all that can be
real for us within us or without. This is the second initiation, in
which is unveiled to us the Present as a new birth from our own life.

Thus the great problem of Idealism is symbolically solved in the
Eleusinia. For us there is nothing real except as we _realize_ it. Let
it be that myriads have walked upon the earth before us,--that each race
and generation has wrought its change and left its monumental record
upon pillar and pyramid and obelisk; s