lations. Oh, it was too great! He could not
look on the face of his own God and live. Without the stereoscopic
illusions which made his father's life solid, he could not continue to
exist. His point of view was hopelessly cosmic. All was equally great
and mysterious? Yes; but all was equally small and commonplace. Kant's
_Starry Infinite Without?_ Bah! Mere lumps of mud going round in a
tee-totum dance, and getting hot over it; no more than the spinning of
specks in a drop of dirty water. Size was nothing in itself. There
were mountains and seas in a morsel of wet mud, picturesque enough
for microscopic tourists. A billion billion morsels of wet mud were no
more imposing than one. Geology, chemistry, astronomy--they were all
in the splashes of mud from a passing carriage. Everywhere one law and
one futility. The human race? Strange marine monsters crawling about
in the bed of an air-ocean, unable to swim upwards, oddly tricked out
in the stolen skins of other creatures. As absurd, impartially
considered, as the strange creatures quaintly adapted to curious
environments one saw in aquaria. Kant's _Moral Law Within!_ Dissoluble
by a cholera germ, a curious blue network under the microscope, not
unlike a map of Venice. Yes, the cosmic and the comic were one. Why be
bullied into the Spinozistic awe? Perhaps Heine--that other Jew--saw
more truly, and man's last word on the universe into which he had been
projected unasked, might be a mockery of that which had mocked him, a
laugh with tears in it.

And he, he foreshadowed the future of all races, as well as of his
own. They would all go on struggling, till they became self-conscious;
then, like children grown to men, the scales falling from their eyes,
they would suddenly ask themselves what it was all about, and,
realizing that they were being driven along by blind forces to labor
and struggle and strive, they too would pass away; the gross childish
races would sweep them up, Nature pouring out new energies from her
inexhaustible fount. For strength was in the unconscious, and when a
nation paused to ask of itself its right to Empire, its Empire was
already over. The old Palestine Hebrew, sacrificing his sheep to
Yahweh, what a granite figure compared with himself, infinitely subtle
and mobile! For a century or two the modern world would take pleasure
in seeing itself reflected in literature and art by its most decadent
spirits, in vibrating to the pathos and picturesqueness