For the sensible, palpable fact can, by the nature of things, exist for us only in the Present.  But, my dear reader, it is just here, in this Present, that the tenure by which we have hold upon life is the most frail and shadowy.  For, by the strictest analysis, there is no Present.  The formula, It is, even before we can give it utterance, by some subtile chemistry of logic, is resolved into It was and It shall be.  Thus by our analysis do we retreat into the ideal.  In the deepest reflection, all that we call external is only the material basis upon which our dreams are built; and the sleep that surrounds life swallows up life,—­all but a dim wreck of matter, floating this way and that, and forever evanishing from sight.  Complete the analysis, and we lose even the shadow of the external Present, and only the Past and the Future are left us as our sure inheritance.  This is the first initiation,—­the veiling of the eyes to the external.  But, as epoptae, by the synthesis of this Past and Future in a living nature, we obtain a higher, an ideal Present, comprehending within itself all that can be real for us within us or without.  This is the second initiation, in which is unveiled to us the Present as a new birth from our own life.

Thus the great problem of Idealism is symbolically solved in the Eleusinia.  For us there is nothing real except as we realize it.  Let it be that myriads have walked upon the earth before us,—­that each race and generation has wrought its change and left its monumental record upon pillar and pyramid and obelisk; set aside the ruin which Time has wrought both upon the change and the record, levelling the cities and temples of men, diminishing the shadows of the Pyramids, and rendering more shadowy the names and memories of heroes,—­obliterating even its own ruin;—­set aside this oblivion of Time, still there would be hieroglyphics,—­still to us all that comes from this abyss of Time behind us, or from the abyss of Space around us, must be but dim and evanescent imagery and empty reverberation of sound, except as, becoming a part of our own life, by a new birth, it receives shape and significance.  Nothing can be unveiled to us till it is born of us.  Thus the epoptae are both creators and interpreters.  Strength of knowledge and strength of purpose, lying at the foundation of our own nature, become also the measure of our interpretation of all Nature.  Therefore in each successive cycle of human history, as we realize more completely the great Ideal, our appreciation of the Past increases, and our hope of the Future.  The difference lies not in the data of history, but in what we make of the data.