"We should not be surprised if we met with Demeter, clad in blue raiment, in a cornfield, as the dawn was breaking. It would not seem strange to see her, plucking the golden ears, and weaving them into a garland for her head; or resting beside a well of bright water, and looking over the misty fields with quiet, thoughtful eyes. It would not seem strange if Dionysos appeared suddenly to us, coming through the shadowy woods between the straight stems of the pines, light in his eyes, and the wind lifting the hair from his cool brow; or to meet him leading his troop of delirious worshippers by the banks of Asopus, or up the steep glens of Cithæron. If she, Earth, be a mother to us, he is like an elder brother, born of a mortal woman, and so closer to us. It is true, Socrates, that the myths dealing with him contain much that is revolting, and are full of tragic and sinister episodes; but behind the veil of man's weaving is a figure of singular beauty, wild but gentle; a divinity who promises to the restless and troubled spirit of man joy in life and peace after death."
His words made an impression upon the company. There was silence for the moment.
"Well, Euripides, I shall not question you any further to-night," said Socrates. "We have agreed that the idea of divinity is exclusive of all evil; and now Protagoras will probably tell us that the philosophic question of the present time is not whether the gods are good or evil, but whether they exist at all."
Protagoras made no further delay. He had a roll of parchment in his hand, but scarcely referred to it. There was a movement among the guests as he began, for all were curious to hear what he had to say.
"We cannot know whether the gods exist or do not exist; the matter is too obscure, and man's life too short. If they exist, it must be in some manner peculiar to themselves, for we cannot find any trace of their presence in the world. They are not present to us as objects to be perceived by the senses; if they move among us at all it is by stealth, and without leaving so much trace as a ship leaves upon the waves. But man has always believed that they are close to him, and has come to imagine them as haunting every green corner of the earth, each well, and wood, and hill, the blue depths of the sea and the wide regions of the air. We have a God to preside at our sowing and at our harvest, at our setting-forth and at our home-coming; there are gods of flocks and herds, of vineyards and olive groves, of rivers and of the sea. Poetry has peopled the air with them, and given to Aphrodite a team of sparrows, and to Hera a team of peacocks, and to grey-eyed Athene an owl. Indeed, it is strange, so familiar and frequent are they in our thoughts, that we should ever question their existence; yet the moment we seek for any tangible evidence of their presence in the world we are at fault, and the more we consider them the more shadowy and elusive they become. The whole notion of divinity is constantly changing in our minds, adapting itself to new conditions of life, varying its form as our knowledge becomes deeper; but always becoming more spiritual, less tangible, until it seems to be nothing but that wandering breath which quickens all things into life.
"At first we imagined the gods as the incarnation of some natural force, like Aphrodite, the foam-born, whom all living creatures obey; or Demeter, the Earth-mother, who produces all the fruits and harvests, and the grass and flowers of the field. Stripped of the mystery and beauty with which the poets have clothed them, these are but the conditions of man's life, his begetting and sustenance; we must seek behind them for that idea of the supreme reason, who is not only the cause but the end of all things, not only the source of existence but the principle from which spring our notions of truth, of wisdom, of justice, and all those ideals which reconcile us to life and bid us hope in the ultimate realisation of the good. It is not sufficient for us to find a cause from which existence is derived, for even if that were laid bare to us we could not find in it our ultimate satisfaction, unless it conformed to the idea of divinity, which, as Socrates and Euripides have agreed, is exclusive of all elements of evil. Is it possible to have this knowledge? There are two insuperable difficulties.
"The first is in the nature of man's knowledge, which is not constant or common, but variable and peculiar to each individual. Each man is the measure of all things. To him, things are what they seem; truth, what he thinks true; justice, what he thinks just; good, what he thinks good. Coldness or heat, light or darkness, colour, sound, smell, touch, taste, are all equally matters of opinion. There is no truth external to the individual. The second difficulty is that even if all men had a fixed and common standard of truth, we can find no evidence of the action of any divinity in the world, no evidence of a supreme reason dominating all things. The world seems to obey certain blind and unreasonable laws; but the life of man, the life of all things, outside the mere routine of tides and seasons, seems to be subject only to chance: and whether we live or die, our fate is the result of an accident. We are merely the idle foam upon the surface of the waves of being; an accident, and not the reason of the waves. Perhaps the whole reason of life is unconcerned with us; having a different aim to what we imagine, we ourselves being only the dust of a sculptor's workshop, the superfluous marble which he chips off from the hidden image of his desire.
"It is certain, that if there be a God he is careless of the fate of man. For, if there were a God, since he must be just and good, we should find the prayers of the good man answered, and evil would be punished in the world. As it is the evil men prosper, and the good gain no reward; evil and good, what are they but our points of view? It is for this reason that we doubt the existence of any but a mechanical cause for the universe; because we have had no experience of good triumphing in the external world. Diagoras of Melos, being taken into the Temple of Poseidon and shown the offerings dedicated there as memorials of answered prayers and in fulfilment of vows, looked at them with tears: 'They reckon those who were saved,' he said; 'they forget those who perished.' Yes; one is more touched by the thought of what was not hung in the temple, than by the sight of what was. We think of the smallness of the temple, and of the largeness of the sea.
"Let us state our position with clearness. We are not concerned with the existence of the gods, but with our knowledge of their existence. It would be equally foolish in us to deny, as to affirm, their existence. There may be a supreme reason acting upon the world, whose ends we cannot understand, whose action we cannot comprehend. It may be that the world exists for some other purpose than for the realisation of our own dreams. Perhaps we are only the superfluities, the parings of ivory, the winnowed husks from the threshing, by-products in the creation of something more perfect; and perhaps the confused and obscure sense of an ideal, which works in us and is at once our desire and our despair, is a dim consciousness of the growth of this beauty, a desire and a despair of being one with it. But, if we could escape for a moment from the tyranny of our own selves, the illusion of our own momentary existence, we might learn to rejoice in the knowledge, that beauty exists, if not in us, at least somewhere in the world. If that knowledge were ever present with us, I think that we might be content. Content even to suffer, to realise that everything that ever lived has died for an idea, that all life is a martyrdom; but, alas! we have not even this knowledge. Our life is a dream of shadows. Our knowledge is but a focus of wandering ideas, burning a moment in a white heat, ere they pass again, diffused widely, into the unknown.