The story of Proteus itself is Protean, and must be grasped in its essence through all its appearances. The whole Odyssey is veritably a Protean poem as already said, whose study is to seize the one truth which is underneath all these shifting shapes and manifold events. What are we doing now but trying to grasp Proteus in this exposition? There is no mythus in Homer which has wound itself so deeply and so variously into the literature of the world. It would be an interesting history to trace its employment by later poets, and see how it has mirrored itself in the consciousness of the ages. The last world-poet, Goethe, takes the figure of Proteus from his eldest brother, the first world-poet, and transplants it into the Second Part of Faust, where it has its place in the development of the modern man. The Mythus of Evolution the tale of Proteus becomes in Goethe's hands, and hints of Darwinism long before Darwin. Still the most significant historical fact of this Fourth Book is the connection which it makes between Egypt and Greece. In another Greek legend, that of OEdipus, the same connection is made through the Sphinx, whose riddle the Greek hero solves, whereat the Egyptian monster destroys itself. The Sphinx, the grand symbol of Egypt and chief product of its Art, may be taken as the Egyptian starting-point for both Greece and Judea. The Sphinx is half human, half animal; the two are put together in stone and thus stand a fixed, unreconciled contradiction. Such was just the Sphinx-riddle of humanity to the old Egyptian: man is a beast and a spirit, linked together without any true mediation. Both the Hebrew and the Greek sought to solve this grand riddle, each in his own way. The Hebrew attempted to extirpate the sensuous element; he would have no graven image, no idolatry, he would worship only the pure spirit, and obey only the divine law. The Greek reconciled the two sides, by making the sensuous element the bearer and the revealer of the spiritual. The animal must be subordinated to the spirit, then it can live, nay can have a new and higher existence. Thus Art arose in Greece, and not in Judea.