While yet mingling in the excitements of progressive manhood, he became lost in a maze of mysticism, and to the end of his life he never recovered possession of himself. Not that self-mastery, the first necessity of correct conduct, was wholly gone; there was method in his madness; and he could deny the demons within him, but it was only to leave open the door and give himself up to yet other demons. In the centuries of battle now lately renewed between science and religion, Columbus fought on both sides. Never was a man more filled at once with the material and the spiritual, with the emotional and the intellectual. Mingling with beatified spirits in the garden of his moral paradise were naked wild men equally as glorious in their immoralities. His creed, which was his very life, was not in his eyes a bundle of supernatural abstractions, but concrete reality as much as were any of his temporal affairs. Himself an honest devotee of science, and believing science the offspring of religion, science and himself must therefore finally be forever laid upon the same altar. He had no thought of work apart from religion, or of religion apart from work. He had ready a doctrine for every heavenly display, a theory for every earthly phenomenon. When pictures of other lands rose in his imagination, he knew them to be real, just as Juan Diego of Mexico knew to be real the apparition of our Lady of Guadalupe at Tepeyacac. By the gnawing hunger of temporal and spiritual ambition he was enabled to see the new lands suggested by science, just as the imprisoned monk, starved and scourged into the beholdings of insanity, sees angels of every incarnation.