In answer to this passage we may say "No,--a thousand times No! there is no theory, philosophy, creed, system or formulated method which will meet or ever satisfy the demand of each separate item of the human whirlpool." And happy are we to know there is no such thing! How terrible if one of these bloodless 'systems' which strew the history of religion and philosophy and the political and social paths of human endeavor HAD been found absolutely correct and universally applicable--so that every human being would be compelled to pass through its machine-like maw, every personality to be crushed under its Juggernath wheels! No, thank Heaven! there is no theory or creed or system; and yet there is something--as Jefferies prophetically felt and with a great longing desired--that CAN satisfy; and that, the root of all religion, has been hinted at in the last chapter. It is the CONSCIOUSNESS of the world-life burning, blazing, deep down within us: it is the Soul's intuition of its roots in Omnipresence and Eternity. The gods and the creeds of the past, as shown in the last chapter--whatever they may have been, animistic or anthropomorphic or transcendental, whether grossly brutish or serenely ideal and abstract--are essentially projections of the human mind; and no doubt those who are anxious to discredit the religious impulse generally will catch at this, saying "Yes, they are mere forms and phantoms of the mind, ephemeral dreams, projected on the background of Nature, and having no real substance or solid value. The history of Religion (they will say) is a history of delusion and illusion; why waste time over it? These divine grizzly Bears or Aesculapian Snakes, these cat-faced Pashts, this Isis, queen of heaven, and Astarte and Baal and Indra and Agni and Kali and Demeter and the Virgin Mary and Apollo and Jesus Christ and Satan and the Holy Ghost, are only shadows cast outwards onto a screen; the constitution of the human mind makes them all tend to be anthropomorphic; but that is all; they each and all inevitably pass away. Why waste time over them?"