But as he grows he gathers much,
And learns the use of 'I' and 'me,'
And finds, 'I am not what I see,
And other than the things I touch.'
So rounds he to a separate mind
From whence clear memory may begin,
As thro' the frame that binds him in
His isolation grows defined.
This use may lie in blood and breath,
Which else were fruitless of their due,
Had man to learn himself anew
Beyond the second birth of Death.
Now if we extend the process of growth here described as of a single child passing through a single life to the collective process of growth effected by humanity from age to age, we have quite clearly the principle whose light I wish to shed upon our comparison of the works I have named. Just as the child learns to know himself—"that I am I"—so man comes in the course of time to feel more and more distinctly I am I; and the growth of this feeling continually uproots his old relations to things and brings about new relations with new forms to clothe them in.
One may say indeed that this recognition of the supreme finality of the ego feeling among modern men seems a curious and not unrelated counterpart of the theory by which the modern physicist, in order to explain his physical world, divides it into atoms which atoms are themselves indivisible. We have here the perplexing problem which in the poem De Profundis, partially read to you, was poetically called "the pain of this divisible, indivisible world." To explain the world, whether the moral or the physical world, we must suppose it divisible into atoms; to explain the atom, we must suppose that indivisible. Let us see then in what form this "pain of the divisible, indivisible world" with all its attendant pains of contradiction between fate and free will,—between the Infinite Personality, which should seem boundless, and the finite personality which nevertheless seems to bound it,—let us see, I say under what explicit forms this pain appears in the Prometheus Bound, for alas it was an old grief when Æschylus was a baby. Here, then, in the centre of the stage lies the gigantic figure of Prometheus, (let us fancy) stark, prostrate, proud, unmoving throughout the whole action. Two ministers of Jove, Might and Force, have him in charge and Hephæstus—the god more commonly known as Vulcan—stands by with chain, hammer and bolt. Might acquaints us at once with what is toward.
At length the utmost bound of earth we've reached,
This Scythian soil, this wild untrodden waste.
Hephæstus, now Jove's high behests demand
Thy care; to these steep, cliffy rocks bind down
With close-linked chains of during adamant
This daring wretch. For he the bright rayed fire,
Mother of arts....
Filched from the gods and gave to mortals. Here
Let his pride learn to bow to Jove supreme;
And love men well but love them not too much.
Hephæstus proceeds to chain him, but with many protests, not only because Prometheus' act seems over-punished, but because he is Prometheus' kinsman.
Would that some other hand