horrible human affair, the ideal become like an octopus with a ghastly eye in the centre, and white arms enwreathing the world. Oh, then he wanted to be avenged.
But now, for the moment he felt he had cut himself clear. He exhausted and almost wrecked—but he felt clear again. If no other ghastly arm of the octopus should flash out and encircle him.
For the moment he felt himself lying inert, but clear, the dragon dead. The ever-renewed dragon of a great old ideal, with its foul poison-breath. It seemed as if, for himself, he had killed it.
That was now all he wanted: to get clear. Not to save humanity or to help humanity or to have anything to do with humanity. No—no. Kangaroo had been his last embrace with humanity. Now, all he wanted was to cut himself clear. To be clear of humanity altogether, to be alone. To be clear of love, and pity, and hate. To be alone from it all. To cut himself finally clear from the last encircling arm of the octopus humanity. To turn to the old dark gods, who had waited so long in the outer dark.
Humanity could do as it liked: he did not care. So long as he could get his own soul clear. For he believed in the inward soul, in the profound unconscious of man. Not an ideal God. The ideal God is a proposition of the mental consciousness, all-too-limitedly human. "No," he said to himself. "There is God. But forever dark, forever unrealisable: forever and forever. The unutterable name, because it can never have a name. The great living darkness which we represent by the glyph, God."
There is this ever-present, living darkness inexhaustible and unknowable. It is. And it is all the God and the gods.
And every living human soul is a well-head to this darkness of the living unutterable. Into every living soul wells up the darkness, the unutterable. And then there is travail of the visible with the invisible. Man is in travail with his own soul, while ever his soul lives. Into his unconscious surges a new flood of the God-darkness, the living unutterable. And this unutterable is like a germ, a fœtus with which he must travail, bringing it at last into utterance, into action, into being.
But in most people the soul is withered at the source,
