Beautiful, sad, craving, reproachful, indignant, awful.... Hypatia could bear no more: and sprang to her feet with a shriek, to experience in its full bitterness the fearful revulsion of the mystic, when the human reason and will which he has spurned reassert their God-given rights; and after the intoxication of the imagination, come its prostration and collapse.
And this, then, was the answer of the gods! The phantom of her whom she had despised, exposed, spurned from her! 'No, not their answer—the answer of my own soul! Fool that I have been! I have been exerting my will most while I pretended to resign it most! I have been the slave of every mental desire, while I tried to trample on them! What if that network of light, that blaze, that globe of darkness, have been, like the face of Pelagia, the phantoms of my own imagination—ay, even of my own senses? What if I have mistaken for Deity my own self? What if I have been my own light, my own abyss?.... Am I not my own abyss, my own light—my own darkness?' And she smiled bitterly as she said it, and throwing herself again upon the couch, buried her head in her hands, exhausted equally in body and in mind.
At last she rose, and sat, careless of her dishevelled locks, gazing out into vacancy. 'Oh for a sign, for a token! Oh for the golden days of which the poets sang, when gods walked among men, fought by their side as friends! And yet.... are these old stories credible, pious, even modest? Does not my heart revolt from them? Who has shared more than I in Plato's contempt for the foul deeds, the degrading transformations, which Homer imputes to the gods of Greece? Must I believe them now? Must I stoop to think that gods, who live in a region above all sense, will deign to make themselves palpable to those senses of ours which are whole aeons of existence below them? Degrade themselves to the base accidents of matter? Yes! That, rather than nothing!.... Be it even so. Better, better, better, to believe that Ares fled shrieking and wounded from a mortal man—better to believe in Zeus's adulteries and Hermes's thefts—than to believe that gods have never spoken face to face with men! Let me think, lest I go mad, that beings from that unseen world for which I