Swept away, overthrown in the chaos and turmoil of the incomprehensible sea, lost in the churning abyss, mortal man with all his strength clutches at something that may prove solid in his grasp. That is why he accords the permanence of wood, metal, or stone to the human figure, and makes it the object of his devotion and his prayer. Besides their common names, he gives proper names to the forces of nature; and, by means of a concrete image which symbolizes them like a syllable, still mysteriously conscious in his abasement of the superior authority of the Word, he calls upon it in his necessities. Thus, like a child who constructs the history of his doll from everything around him, humanity in its memories unites all that it discovers with all that it dreams, and so composes the romance of mythology. Here beside me is this poor little old woman, who makes her salutation by striking her hands carefully together before a colossal female statue, in whose bosom an ancient prince, when led by a toothache and a dream to honor the skull of an ancestor, inserted the worn sphere after finding it wedged by the jawbone in the roots of a willow. At my right and at my left, all the length of the dark cavern, the three thousand golden Kwannon, each one resembling the others in the embellishment of arms that frame it, are aligned in rows of a hundred, in ranks fifteen deep. A ray of sunlight flickers over this barrier built of goddesses. Seeking the reason for uniformity in this multitude, and from what bulb all these identical stalks have sprung, I find that the worshiper here doubtless wishes a wider sounding-board for his prayers, and imagines that in multiplying the object of his entreaty he increases its efficacy. But not for long did the sages rest their eyes on the eyes of these crude likenesses. Having perceived the unity of all things, they found the basis of their philosophy in that fact. Though each individual were transitory and capricious, the richness of the common fund remained inexhaustible. No need that Man should apply his hatchet to the tree, or his cleaver to the rock; in the grain of millet and the egg, alike in the immobility and the convulsions of sun and sea, he found the same principle of plastic energy; and the earth sufficed for the construction of its own idols. Further, admitting that the whole is formed of homogeneous parts; if, to better pursue their analysis, the Sages turned it back upon themselves, they discovered that the fugitive, blameworthy, unjustifiable thing in them was the fact of their presence in the world,--and that the element in them which was free of space and limitless of duration was the very conception they had formed of this contingent character.