Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival... a survival of a hugely remote period when... con-sciousness was manifest, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity... forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds...

My Ideal Person The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to corre-late all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality and of our frightful po-sition therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.