The same process was applied to the world itself. Something like it is habitually applied by the religious idealists of all ages. A fundamental doctrine of Stoicism and most of the idealist creeds was the perfection and utter blessedness of the world, and the absolute fulfilment of the purpose of God. Now obviously this belief was not based on experience. The poor world, to do it justice amid all its misdoings, has never lent itself to any such barefaced deception as that. No doubt it shrieked against the doctrine then, as loud as it has always shrieked, so that even a Posidonian or a Pythagorean, his ears straining for the music of the spheres, was sometimes forced to listen. And what was his answer? It is repeated in all the literature of these sects. 'Our human experience is so small: the things of the earth may be bad and more than bad, but, ah! if you only went beyond the Moon! That is where the true Kosmos begins.' And, of course, if we did ever go there, we all know they would say it began beyond the Sun. Idealism of a certain type will have its way; if hard life produces an ounce or a pound or a million tons of fact in the scale against it, it merely dreams of infinite millions in its own scale, and the enemy is outweighed and smothered. I do not wish to mock at these Posidonian Stoics and Hermetics and Gnostics and Neo-Pythagoreans. They loved goodness, and their faith is strong and even terrible. One feels rather inclined to bow down before their altars and cry: _Magna est Delusio et praevalebit._ Yet on the whole one rises from these books with the impression that all this allegory and mysticism is bad for men. It may make the emotions sensitive, it certainly weakens the understanding. And, of course, in this paper I have left out of account many of the grosser forms of superstition. In any consideration of the balance, they should not be forgotten. If a reader of Proclus and the _Corpus Hermeticum_ wants relief, he will find it, perhaps, best in the writings of a gentle old Epicurean who lived at Oenoanda in Cappadocia about A. D. 200. His name was Diogenes.[169:1] His works are preserved, in a fragmentary state, not on papyrus or parchment, but on the wall of a large portico where he engraved them for passers-by to read. He lived in a world of superstition and foolish terror, and he wrote up the great doctrines of Epicurus for the saving of mankind.