The mysteries, on the other hand, had essentially a spirit of self-consciousness and propaganda. They came as revelations or as reforms; they pretended to disclose secrets handed down from remote antiquity, from the primeval revelation of God to man, or truths recovered by the inspiration of later prophets supernaturally illumined. The history of these movements is, accordingly, the history-of sects. They never constituted the normal and common religion of the people, and never impressed their spirit on the national literature. Æschylus or Plato may have borrowed something from them; but they did so most when they assumed an attitude of open opposition to the exoteric religion of their country. Thus when Plato makes his Socrates propound a Pythagorean or Orphic doctrine of transmigration, he represents the very members of the Socratic circle as surprised, or as incredulous: and when they are finally silenced by the proofs advanced, it is only because they are overawed by the dogmatic unction of a dying sage, who stimulates their imagination with poetic myths, and confuses their intellect with verbal equivocations. When the mist of the argument has cleared away, like incense after the sacrifice, there remains indeed a profound emotion, a catharsis produced by the sublimity and pathos, so artfully mingled, of both scene and argument; but the bare doctrine enunciated, true and profound as it is in its deeper meaning, is quite incapable of appealing to an undisciplined mind, and could not pass for a religious dogma except for the priestly robes in which it is dressed. Thus the function of the mysteries of which Plato's Phædo may be regarded as a philosophic echo, was to be the vehicle of revolutionary tendencies, tendencies which a philosopher might privately shape in one way and a superstitious man in another. Both could find in the spell of an occult ceremonial and in the prophecies of an oracular creed an escape from the limitations of the official religion. Mysticism and the claim to illumination found in these mysteries their natural expression. The many fundamental questions left unanswered and unasked by Paganism, the many potentialities of religious emotion left unexercised by it, were thus allowed to appear.