All things
indeed went on as before, yet all seemed different to him from whose
eyes the old scales had fallen. For he could no longer cherish the
pleasing illusion that it was he who guided the earth and the heaven
in their courses, and that they would cease to perform their great
revolutions were he to take his feeble hand from the wheel. In the
death of his enemies and his friends he no longer saw a proof of the
resistless potency of his own or of hostile enchantments; he now
knew that friends and foes alike had succumbed to a force stronger
than any that he could wield, and in obedience to a destiny which he
was powerless to control.
Thus cut adrift from his ancient moorings and left to toss on a
troubled sea of doubt and uncertainty, his old happy confidence in
himself and his powers rudely shaken, our primitive philosopher must
have been sadly perplexed and agitated till he came to rest, as in a
quiet haven after a tempestuous voyage, in a new system of faith and
practice, which seemed to offer a solution of his harassing doubts
and a substitute, however precarious, for that sovereignty over
nature which he had reluctantly abdicated.
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