n's hold upon the things that make his life desirable.
Philosophy is sunk in the slough of ignorant, perversely subtle
disputation upon subjects destitute of actuality. Theological
fanaticism has extinguished liberal studies and the gropings of the
reason after truth in positive experience. Society lies prostrate
under the heel of tyrannous orthodoxy. We discern men in masses,
aggregations, classes, guilds--everywhere the genus and the species of
humanity, rarely and by luminous exception individuals and persons.
Universal ideals of Church and Empire clog and confuse the nascent
nationalities. Prolonged habits, of extra-mundane contemplation,
combined with the decay of real knowledge, volatilise the thoughts and
aspirations of the best and wisest into dreamy unrealities, giving a
false air of mysticism to love, shrouding art in allegory, reducing
the interpretation of texts to an exercise of idle ingenuity, and the
study of Nature (in Bestiaries, Lapidaries, and the like) to an insane
system of grotesque and pious quibbling. The conception of man's fall
and of the incurable badness of this world bears poisonous fruit of
cynicism and asceticism, that twofold bitter almond, hidden in the
harsh monastic shell. The devil has become God upon this earth, and
God's eternal jailer in the next world. Nature is regarded with
suspicion and aversion; the flesh, with shame and loathing, broken by
spasmodic outbursts of lawless self-indulgence. For human life there
is one formula:--

"Of what is't fools make such vain keeping?
Sin their conception, their birth weeping,
Their life a general mist of error,
Their death a hideous storm of terror."

The contempt of the world is the chief theme of edification. A charnel
filled with festering corpses, snakes, and worms points the preacher's
moral. Before the eyes of all, in terror-stricken vision or in
nightmares of uneasy conscience, leap the inextinguishable flames of
hell. Salvation, meanwhile, is being sought through amulets, relics,
pilgrimages to holy places, fetishes of divers sorts and different
degrees of potency. The faculties of the heart and head, defrauded of
wholesome sustenance, have recourse to delirious debauches of the
fancy, dreams of magic, compacts with the evil one, insanities of
desire, ineptitudes of discipline. Sexual passion, ignoring the true
place of woman in society, treats her on the one hand like a servile
instrument, on the other exalts her