has never lent
itself to any such barefaced deception as that. No doubt it shrieked
against the doctrine then, as loud as it has always shrieked, so that
even a Posidonian or a Pythagorean, his ears straining for the music of
the spheres, was sometimes forced to listen. And what was his answer?
It is repeated in all the literature of these sects. 'Our human
experience is so small: the things of the earth may be bad and more than
bad, but, ah! if you only went beyond the Moon! That is where the true
Kosmos begins.' And, of course, if we did ever go there, we all know
they would say it began beyond the Sun. Idealism of a certain type will
have its way; if hard life produces an ounce or a pound or a million
tons of fact in the scale against it, it merely dreams of infinite
millions in its own scale, and the enemy is outweighed and smothered. I
do not wish to mock at these Posidonian Stoics and Hermetics and
Gnostics and Neo-Pythagoreans. They loved goodness, and their faith is
strong and even terrible. One feels rather inclined to bow down before
their altars and cry: _Magna est Delusio et praevalebit._

Yet on the whole one rises from these books with the impression that all
this allegory and mysticism is bad for men. It may make the emotions
sensitive, it certainly weakens the understanding. And, of course, in
this paper I have left out of account many of the grosser forms of
superstition. In any consideration of the balance, they should not be
forgotten.

If a reader of Proclus and the _Corpus Hermeticum_ wants relief, he will
find it, perhaps, best in the writings of a gentle old Epicurean who
lived at Oenoanda in Cappadocia about A. D. 200. His name was
Diogenes.[169:1] His works are preserved, in a fragmentary state, not on
papyrus or parchment, but on the wall of a large portico where he
engraved them for passers-by to read. He lived in a world of
superstition and foolish terror, and he wrote up the great doctrines of
Epicurus for the saving of mankind.

'Being brought by age to the sunset of my life, and expecting
at any moment to take my departure from the world with a glad
song for the fullness of my happiness, I have resolved, lest I
be taken too soon, to give help to those of good temperament.
If one person or two or three or four, or any small number you
choose, were in distress, and I were summoned out to help one
after another, I would do all in my power to give the bes