It is good for our Nebuchadnezzars, the kings of the world, and conceited, successful people generally, to measure themselves against the great powers of the universe, to humble their pride by contemplation of the fixed stars; but a too humble attitude toward the Infinite, a too constant pondering upon eternity, is not good for us, unless, so to say, we can live with them as friends, with the inspiring feeling that, little as we may seem, there is that in us which is no less infinite, no less cosmic, and that our passions and dreams have, as Mr. William Watson puts it, ‘a relish of eternity.’

Readers of Amiel’s ‘Journal’ will know what a sterilising, petrifying influence his trance-like contemplation of the Infinite had upon his life.  Amiel was simply hypnotised by the universe, as a man may hypnotise himself by gazing fixedly at a star.

Mr. Pater, you will remember, has a remarkable study of a similar temperament in his Imaginary Portraits.  Sebastian van Storck, like Amiel, had become hypnotised by the Infinite.  It paralysed in him all impulse or power ‘to be or do any limited thing.’

‘For Sebastian, at least,’ we read, ’the world and the individual alike had been divested of all effective purpose.  The most vivid of finite objects, the dramatic episodes of Dutch history, the brilliant personalities which had found their parts to play in them, that golden art, surrounding one with an ideal world, beyond which the real world was discernible indeed, but etherealised by the medium through which it came to one; all this, for most men so powerful a link to existence, only set him on the thought of escape—­into a formless and nameless infinite world, evenly grey....  Actually proud, at times, of his curious, well-reasoned nihilism, he could but regard what is called the business of life as no better than a trifling and wearisome delay.’

This mood, once confined to a few mystics is likely to become a common one, is already, one imagines, far from infrequent—­so the increase of suicide would lead us to suppose.  Robbed of his hope of a glorious immortality, stripped of his spiritual significance, bullied and belittled by science on every hand, man not unnaturally begins to feel that it is no use taking his life seriously, that, in fact, it betrays a lack of humour to do so.  While he was a supernatural being, a son of God, it was with him a case of noblesse oblige; and while he is happy and comfortable he doesn’t mind giving up the riddle of the world.  It is only the unhappy that ever really think.  But what is he to do when agony and despair come upon him, when all that made his life worth living is taken from him?  How is he to sustain himself? where shall he look for his strength or his hope?  He looks up at the sky full of stars, but he is told that God is not there, that the city of God is long since a ruin, and that owls hoot to each other across its moss-grown fanes and battlements; he looks down on the earth, full