And when the Civilisation-period has passed away, the old Nature-religion--perhaps greatly grown--will come back. This immense stream of religious life which, beginning far beyond the horizon of earliest history, has been deflected into various metaphysical and other channels--of Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and the like--during the historical period, will once more gather itself together to float on its bosom all the arks and sacred vessels of human progress. Man will once more _feel_ his unity with his fellows, he will feel his unity with the animals, with the mountains and the streams, with the earth itself and the slow lapse of the constellations, not as an abstract dogma of Science or Theology, but as a living and ever-present fact. Ages back this has been understood better than now. Our Christian ceremonial is saturated with sexual and astronomical symbols; and long before Christianity existed, the sexual and astronomical were the main forms of religion. That is to say, men instinctively felt and worshiped the great life coming to them through Sex, the great life coming to them from the deeps of Heaven. They deified both. They placed their gods--their own human forms--in sex, they placed them in the sky. And not only so, but wherever they felt this kindred human life--in the animals, in the ibis, the bull, the lamb, the snake, the crocodile; in the trees and flowers, the oak, the ash, the laurel, the hyacinth; in the streams and water-falls, on the mountain-sides or in the depths of the sea--they placed them. The whole universe was full of a life which, though not always friendly, was _human_ and kindred to their own, _felt_ by them, not reasoned about, but simply perceived. To the early man the notion of his having a separate individuality could only with difficulty occur; hence he troubled himself not with the suicidal questionings concerning the whence and whither which now vex the modern mind.[16] For what causes these questions to be asked is simply the wretched feeling of isolation, actual or prospective, which man necessarily has when he contemplates himself as a separate atom in this immense universe--the gulf which lies below seemingly ready to swallow him, and the anxiety to find some mode of escape. But when he feels once more that he, that _he_ himself, is absolutely indivisibly and indestructibly a part of this great whole--why then there is no gulf into which he can possibly fall; when he is sensible of the fact, why then the _how_ of its realisation, though losing none of its interest, becomes a matter for whose solution he can wait and work in faith and contentment of mind. The Sun or Sol, visible image of his very Soul, closest and most vital to him of all mortal things, occupying the illimitable heaven, feeding all with its life; the Moon, emblem and nurse of his own reflective thought, the conscious Man, measurer of Time, mirror of the Sun; the planetary