The ideals remain, but the forms of
their expression change, advancing from cruder to finer and from more
fanciful to more exactly true, with the advance of thought and culture.
Meanwhile, the ideals are above the world,--dwelling, like Plato's, in
heaven,--and there are always two alternatives for every man. He may go
back either with deliberate intellectual assent, or passion-led in
sensual moods, to the powers of nature and the actual human stories in
their crude and earthly form; or he may follow the idealisation of human
experience, and discover and adopt the ideals of which the earthly
stories and the nature processes are but shadows and hints. In the
former case he will be a pagan; in the latter, a spiritual idealist. In
what remains of this lecture, we shall consider four of the most famous
Greek legends--those of Prometheus, Medusa, Orpheus, and Apollo--in the
light of what has just been stated.
Prometheus, in the early story, is a Titan, who in the heavenly war had
fought on the side of Zeus. It is, however, through the medium of the
later story that Prometheus has exercised his eternal influence upon the
thought of men.
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