Man found painful barriers of time, space, and physical decay fencing him out of his Eden of gratified desire, and like a child he straightway fell to dreaming of flying carpets, of magic lamps, of transmutable metals, of fountains of youth and elixirs of life. At first these miracles were thought to be the gifts of shadowy, higher powers, who were happily superior to the cruel limits of material existence, and might give their assistance according to their capricious elfin fancy. Later, man began to believe that in himself lay the powers which were to break the chains that bound him the unhappy slave of distance, of the need for labour, of the tyrannies of nature, with her resistless heat and cold, storm and flood, pain and age. A glimmering of the truth, this, at last, but only a faint reflection on the horizon of the rising sun, on which he had turned his back. There followed a period of fasts and macerations whose courage and persistency was to make the gods tremble in respectful terror--a triumph over material passions which should give an occult power over material limitations. The Buddhists stood moveless and speechless until the birds reared their young in their hair, and thereby were supposed to grow so mighty that the mountains rocked beneath the weight of their thoughts, and space and time were annihilated. Superb energies, passionate patience and ardour, master intellects, were wasted in the long endeavour to find some means by which nature could be conquered and man made master of circumstance--all given fruitlessly; thrown into that bottomless pit of error never to be filled. And these earnest, misguided travellers--so blinded were they--when one of their number turned about in the other direction promptly fell upon him and beat him into submission, as one who would check the struggle towards light and knowledge. Even now that the fact is accepted that nature is to be conquered by her own natural means only, and that supernaturalism is a waste and quaking morass upon which no edifice of truth is to be reared, there are many--sadly many--descendants of Lot's wife casting longing glances back to the Sodom of their intellectual sins. It is nothing to them that having once faced about in the right direction the same amount of effort, properly directed, has achieved that for which the supernaturalists had for ages striven in vain.