where theoretical units subjected to motion. That is truly dynamic and Faustian, for in no other Culture have men imagined history thus. The Greek, with his thoroughly corporeal understanding of the world, would never have traced "effects" of pure expression-units like "Attic drama" or "Egyptian art."
Originally what happens is that a name is given to a system of expression-forms conjuring up in our minds a particular complex of relations. But this does not last long, and soon one is suppositing under the name a being, and under the relation an effect. When we speak to-day of Greek philosophy, or Buddhism, or Scholasticism, we mean something that is somehow living, a power-unit that has grown and grown until it is mighty enough to take possession of men, to subject their waking-consciousness and even their being, and in the end to force them into an active conformity, which prolongs the direction followed by its own "life." It is a whole mythology, and, significantly, it is only men of the Western Culture — the only mankind that lives with and in this picture is the Western — whose myth contains plenty of dæmons of this sort — "electricity" and "positional energy," for example.
In reality these systems only exist in the human waking-consciousness, and they exist as modes of activity. Religion, science, art, are activities of waking-consciousness that are based on a being. Faith, meditation, creation, and whatever of visible activity is required as outcome of these invisibles — as sacrifice, prayer, the physical experiment, the carving of a statue, the statement of an experience in communicable words — are activities of the waking-consciousness and nothing else. Other men see only the visible and hear only words. In so doing they experience something in themselves, but they cannot give any account of the relation between this experience and that which the creator lived in himself. We see a form, but we do not know what in the other's soul begat that form; we can only have some belief about the matter, and we believe by putting in our own soul. However definitely and distinctly a religion may express itself in words, they are words, and the hearer puts his own sense into them. However impressive the artist's notes or colours, the beholder sees and hears in them only himself, and if he cannot do so, the work is for him meaningless. (The extremely rare and highly modern gift, possessed by a few intensely historical men, of "putting oneself in the other's place" need not be considered in this connexion.) The German whom Boniface converted did not transfer himself into the missionary's soul. It was a spring-tide quiver that passed in those days through the whole young world of the North, and what it meant was that each man found suddenly in conversion a language wherein to express his own religiousness. Just so the eyes of a child light up when we tell it the name of the object in its hand.
It is not, then, microcosmic units that move, but cosmic entities that pick amongst them and appropriate them. Were it otherwise — were these systems very beings that could exercise an activity (for "influence" is an organic
