Ulysses and his companions are outside the cave, having gotten rid of those dark and fearful limits which walled them in with a monster. Mind, thought has released them; soon they are on their ship in a free element. But the end is not yet; even Polyphemus, the natural man, must come to know who and what has subjected him, he too is in the grand discipline of the time. 4. Two things Ulysses is now to tell to the Cyclops in the distance. The first is the wrong and the penalty thereof: "Amply have thy evil deeds been returned to thee," namely, his treatment of men. "Zeus and the other Gods have punished thee," there is a divine order in the world, which looks after the wrong-doer. Thus Polyphemus the anarchist, atheist, and cannibal gets a short missionary sermon on justice, religion and humanity. But he does not receive it kindly, he "hurls a fragment of a mountain peak," and almost strikes the ship. The line of danger is not yet passed. Still Ulysses must tell something else though his frightened companions try to dissuade him. But he must, he cannot help it: "If any one ask thee, say it was Ulysses, the city-destroyer, who put out thine eye." A great light this word brings to the poor blind Cyclops, almost the light of self-consciousness. He recalls, he knows his conqueror, and therein begins to know himself, to recognize his error. "Ah, woe is me! the ancient oracles about me are fulfilled!" Of old there had been prophecies concerning his destiny, but he did not understand them, seemingly did not regard them. How could he, with his bent toward the godless? The prophet Telemus had foretold "that I would lose my sight at the hands of Ulysses." How shall we consider this prophecy? A dim, far-off presentiment among the Cyclops themselves that they were to be subjected to a higher influence; their limited, one-eyed vision was to vanish through a more universal, two-eyed vision. Such a presentiment nature everywhere shows, a presentiment of the power beyond her, of the spiritual. What else indeed is Gravitation? A longing, a seeking which even the clod manifests in its fall earthward, a prophetic intimation; so the Cyclops, the natural man, had his prophet whom he now begins rightly to recognize; truly he is getting religious, quite different is his present utterance from his previous blasphemy: "we are better than the Gods." Nay, he offers to intercede with his father Neptune, praying the God to give a sending of the stranger over the sea. Moreover he recognizes his divine father as the only one who can heal him in his present distress. Possibly the words are spoken to beguile, but Polyphemus here offers to do his duty to the stranger on his shores, and he recognizes the Gods.