Such contrasts are due, not to a faltering imagination, nor to the depravity of the human heart. They are the recognition by the dark Unconscious, which in sincerity of vision ever transcends the Conscious, that in man's life truth dwells not with felicity, that to the soul imprisoned in Time and Space, whether amongst the stars or on this earth, perfect peace is a mockery. But in Time, misery is the soul's familiar, anguish is the gate of truth, and the highest moments of bliss are, as the Socrates of Plato affirms, negative. They are the moments of oblivion, when the manacles of Time fall off, whether from stress of agony or delight or mere weariness. Therefore with stammering lips man congratulates joy, but the response of grief to grief is quick and from the heart, sanctioned by the Unconscious; therefore in the portraiture of Heaven art fails, but in that of Hell succeeds. It is not in Time that the eternal can find rest, nor in Space that the infinite can find repose, and as illusion follows lost illusion, the soul of man does but the more completely realize the wonder ineffable of the only reality, the Eternal Now. § 3. THE FOUR PERIODS OF MODERN HISTORY AND THEIR IDEALS The deepening of this conception of man's destiny as beginning in the Infinite and in the Infinite ending, is one of the profoundest and most significant features of the present age. Its dominion over art, literature, religion, can no longer escape us. It is the dominant note of the last of the four great ages or epochs into which the history of the thought of modern Europe, in an ever-ascending scale, divides itself. A brief review of these four epochs will best prepare us for a consideration of the present position of Britain, and of the relations of its empire to the actual conditions of Europe and humanity. The First Age is controlled by the Saintly Ideal. The European of that age is a visionary. The unseen world is to him more real than the seen, and art and poetry exist but to decorate the pilgrimage of the soul from earth to heaven. The new Jerusalem which Tertullian saw night by night descend in the sunset; the city of God, whose shining battlements Saint Augustine beheld gleam through the smoke of the world-conflagration of the era of Alaric and Attila, of Vandal and Goth, Frank and Hun; the Day of Wrath and Judgment which later times looked forward to as certainly as to the coming of spring, are but phases of one pervading aspiration, one passioning cry of the soul. But the illusion which lures on that age fades when the ascetic zeal of the saint is frustrated by the joy of life, and the crusader's valour is broken on the Moslem lances, and the scholastic's indefatigable pursuit of a harmonizing, a reconciling word of reason and of faith, his ardour not less lofty than the crusader's to pierce the ever-thickening host of doubts, discords, fears, fall all in ruins, in accepted defeat or in formulated despair.