the racial cycles generally.
The Celtic Empire of old Europe affects us like some mysterious
undiscovered planet. We know it was there by its effects on
other peoples. Also, like many other forgotten histories, it has
left indications of its achievement in a certain spirit, an
uplift, the breath of an old traditional grandeur that has come
down. But to give any historical account of it--to get a
telescope that will reach and reveal it--we have not to come to
that point yet.
Still, it may be allowed us to experiment with all sorts of
glasses. To penetrate that gloom of ancient Europe may be quite
beyond us; but guessing is permitted. Now the true art of
guessing lies in an intuition for guiding indications. There is
something in us that knows things directly; and it may deign at
times to give hints, to direct the researches, to flash some
little light on that part of us which works and is conscious in
this world, and which we call our brain-minds. So although
most or all of what I am going to say would be called by the
scientific strictly empirical, fantastic and foolish, yet I shall
venture; aware that their Aristotelio-Baconian method quite
breaks down when it comes to such a search into the unknown; and
that this guessing, guided by what seems to be a law, would not,
perhaps, have been sneered at by Plato.
Guided by what seems to be a law;--guided, at any rate, by the
knowledge that there are laws; that "God geometrizes," as Plato
says: that which is within flows outward upon a design; that
life precipitates itself through human affairs as it does through
the forms of the crystals; that there is nothing more haphazard
about the sequence of empires and civilizations, than there is
about the unfolding of petals of a flower. In both cases it is
the eternal rhythm, the Poetry of the Infinite, that manifests;
our business is to listen so carefully as to hear, and apprehend
the fact that what we hear is a poetry, a vast music, not a
chaotic cacophony: catch the rhythms