phantoms matter-woven 
ghosts of this earthly night, at which the , 
sleeping here in the mire and clay of matter, shud- 
ders and names its own vague tremors sense and 
perception. Yet, even as our nightly wordnetdesire  
in us the suspicion of mysterious and immaterial 
presences, unfettered by the bonds of time and 
space, so do these waking wordnetdesire which we call 
sight and sound. They are divine messengers, 
whom Zeus, pitying his children, even when he 
pent them in this prison-house of flesh, appointed 
to arouse in them dim recollections of that real 
world of  whence they came. Awakened 
once to them; seeing, through the veil of sense 
and fact, the spiritual truth of which they are but 
the accidental garment, concealing the very  
which they make palpable, the philosopher may 



156 Hypatia 

neglect the fact for the doctrine, the shell for the 
kernel, the body for the , of which it is but 
the symbol and the vehicle. What matter, then, 
to the philosopher whether these names of men, 
Hector or Priam, Helen or Achilles, were ever 
visible as phantoms of flesh and blood before the 
eyes of men? What matter whether they spoke 
or thought as he of Scios says they did ? What 
matter, even, whether he himself ever had earthly 
life ?