It is by no means the purpose to affirm in the preceding remarks that Homer intended to make an allegorical psychology. He simply had a mind, and the essence of mind is to be able to look at mind. So Homer saw himself and his own process, and set it forth in an imaginative form. Very similar is the plan of Shakespeare in the _Tempest_. Prospero is the poet, not only as poet, but the poet making his drama in the drama. There is also a significant duplication both of structure and character: Prospero is at one time magician, that is, poet, and commands the elements and the spirits, especially Ariel; at another time he assumes his ordinary relations as parent and as king, and is as limited as other mortals. Shakespeare made many dramas, then he saw himself making dramas, then he put into a drama himself making dramas. That is, he in the end (Tempest is usually held to be the last of Shakespeare's plays) took up his own poetic process into a poem, and thus completed the arch of his great career. So much for the psychological aspect of these Books of Fableland. It must be stated again that abstract terms, so necessary for an exact science of mind, had not been elaborated to any extent in Homer's day. Reflective language is a later product of Greek spirit. Still the philosopher is anticipated and prophesied in the poet, and it certainly cannot be amiss to trace vague premonitions and promises of the coming Plato and Aristotle in the old poet. Homer has in him the germ of the whole Greek world, and for that matter, much of the modern world also; the best commentary upon him is the 2500 years since his time. IV. The slaying of the Oxen of the Sun has also its searching suggestiveness, and is found in one form or other in the World's greatest Books. Mind destroying mind may be shown as light extinguishing its own luminary; some such hint lies in the symbolism both of the act and its punishment. It is indeed the culminating point of negation--spirit denying spirit. This is the real sin against the Holy Spirit, unpardonable because repentance, all possibility of pardon is denied by the doer of the deed. As I understand him, this is the essence of the sin of Dante against Beatrice, with which she reproaches him in the last part of the Purgatorio. Suggestions of the same kind of guilt may be found in the characters of Shakespeare's Hamlet and Banquo, in whose cases the violation brings on a tragic fate; indeed every true tragedy has some touches of the light-denying or light-defying deed and its penalty. Above all rises in this respect the Faust of Goethe, the theme of which is explicitly intelligence denying intelligence, whereby the human mind becomes utterly negative, begets the Devil, and enters into compact with him for a life of indulgence. While such a state lasts, repentance is impossible.