ATHERTON. By carrying down with them into those depths the results of the understanding, of experience, of external culture, and then bringing them up to light again as though they had newly emerged from the recesses of the Infinite. This intuitional metal, in its native state, is mere fluent, formless quicksilver; to make it definite and serviceable you must fix it by an alloy; but then, alas! it is _pure_ Reason no longer, and, so far from being universal truth, receives a countless variety of shapes, according to the temperament, culture, or philosophic party, of the individual thinker. So that, in the end, the result is merely a dogmatical investiture of a man’s own notions with a sort of divine authority. You dispute with Schelling, and he waves you away as a profane and intuitionless laic. What is this but the sacerdotalism of the philosopher? The fanatical mystic who believes himself called on to enforce the fantasies of his special revelation upon other men, does not more utterly contemn argument than does the theosophist, when he bids you kick your understanding back into its kennel, and hearken in reverend awe to _his_ intuitions. WILLOUGHBY. Telling you, too, that if your inward witness does not agree with his, you are, philosophically speaking, in the gall of bitterness and the bond of iniquity. ATHERTON. You are catching the approved style of expression so much in vogue with our modern religious infidelity. This is the artifice—to be scriptural in phrase, and anti-scriptural in sense: to parade the secret symbols of Christianity in the van of that motley army which marches to assail it. GOWER. The expedient reminds me of the device of Cambyses, who, when he drew out his forces against the Egyptians, placed a row of ibises in front of his line, and the Egyptians, it is said, suffered defeat rather than discharge an arrow which might wound the birds they worshipped. WILLOUGHBY. To go back to Plotinus.[25] That doctrine of the Epistrophe—the return of all intelligence by a law of nature to the divine centre—must inevitably be associated with the unhealthy morality always attendant on pantheism. It is an organic process godward, ending in loss of personal existence, no moral or spiritual elevation. GOWER. His abstract Unity has no character, only negation of all conceivable attributes—so will and character can have no place in his theory of assimilation to God. Self-culture is self-reduction. What a plan of the universe!—all intelligence magnetically drawn to the Centre, like the ships to the Mountain of the Loadstone in the _Arabian Nights_—as they approach, the nails which hold them together are withdrawn, they fall apart, and all the fabric is dissolved.