le myself about it," replied Nebsecht. "Whether my
observations seem good or evil, right or heinous, useful or useless, I
want to know how things are, nothing more."

"And so for mere curiosity," cried Pentaur, "you would endanger the
blissful future of thousands of your fellow-men, take upon yourself the
most abject duties, and leave this noble scene of your labors, where we
all strive for enlightenment, for inward knowledge and truth."

The naturalist laughed scornfully; the veins swelled angrily in
Pentaur's forehead, and his voice took a threatening tone as he asked:

"And do you believe that your finger and your eyes have lighted on the
truth, when the noblest souls have striven in vain for thousands
of years to find it out? You descend beneath the level of human
understanding by madly wallowing in the mire; and the more clearly you
are convinced that you have seized the truth, the more utterly you are
involved in the toils of a miserable delusion."

"If I believed I knew the truth should I so eagerly seek it?" asked
Nebsecht. "The more I observe and learn, the more deeply I feel my want
of knowledge and power."

"That sounds modest enough," said the poet, "but I know the arrogance to
which your labors are leading you. Everything that you see with your own
eyes and touch with your own hand, you think infallible, and everything
that escapes your observation you secretly regard as untrue, and pass
by with a smile of superiority. But you cannot carry your experiments
beyond the external world, and you forget that there are things which
lie in a different realm."

"I know nothing of those things," answered Nebsecht quietly.

"But we--the Initiated," cried Pentaur, "turn our attention to them
also. Thoughts--traditions--as to their conditions and agency have
existed among us for a thousand years; hundreds of generations of men
have examined these traditions, have approved them, and have handed
them down to us. All our knowledge, it is true, is defective, and yet
prophets have been favored with the gift of looking into the future,
magic powers have been vouchsafed to mortals. All this is contrary to
the laws of the external world, which are all that you recognize, and
yet it can easily be explained if we accept the idea of a higher order
of things. The spirit of the Divinity dwells in each of us, as in
nature. The natural man can only attain to such knowledge as is common
to all; but it is the divine capacity for