d by its
opposite, so is excessive abstinence; they co-operate, like two valves,
for the destruction of the one-sided extremist. Truly Greek is the
thought, for the Greek maxim above all others was moderation, no
over-doing. Such then are the Plangctae, which Ulysses must avoid
wholly, if he wishes to escape. Still, even the danger is by no means
over.

There is the second way which introduces a new alternative; the path of
moderation has its difficulty, it too forks and produces perplexity and
peril to the voyager. Here is the point where Scylla and Charybdis
appear, a new set of extremes, between which the mean is to be sought,
then the passage can be made. Yet even thus it costs, Ulysses will lose
six of his companions; the penalty has to be paid, just the penalty of
moderation. _Es raecht sich alles auf Erden._ Two sets of extremes
always; if you shun one set and take the middle path, just this act of
shunning produces a second set; cut the magnet in twain with its two
poles, then each part will at once have two poles of its own. Such is
indeed the very dialectic of life, the dualism of existence, which the
heroic voyager is to overcome with suffering, with danger, with many
penalties.

Fault has often been found with this duplication of the alternative,
but when rightly seen into, it will show itself as the central fact of
the entire description. It casts an image of the never-ceasing
differentiation both in the mind and in the world; it hints the
recurring contradiction in all thought and in all conduct, always to be
solved, yet never quite solved. What else indeed has man to do? To
master the contradiction gives him life, movement, energy, and it must
be mastered every day. The old poet is going to the bottom of the
matter. The above mentioned repetition of the alternative has its
correspondence with the repetition which we have seen to be the
fundamental form into which the whole Book is cast.

Plainly the Double Alternative here mythically set forth, springs out
of the conflict with the Sirens, and is a deepening of the same to the
very bottom. Indulgence kills, abstinence kills, in their excess; and
the middle path bifurcates into two new extremes with their problem.
Prophetic Circe can tell all this, for does it not lie just in the
domain of her experience, which has also been twofold? Pure forms of
spirit, wholly non-natural, are these figures representing the Double
Alternative, created by the Imaginati