490 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. |PT. m. 



have felt such a task to be simply an impossibility. The 

 secret of Caesar s greatness, and of his success, lay in tha 

 wondrous common-sense with which he perceived the true 

 significance of contemporary events, and in the unflinching 

 perseverance with which he wrought out the political system 

 for which society was already yearning, and which the cir 

 cumstances of the times rendered indispensable to the main 

 tenance of civilization. This has been the secret of the 

 success of all statesmen of the highest order; of Charles the 

 Great and Hildebrand, as well as of William the Silent, 

 Edward I. of England, Henr}^ IV. of France, and Eichelieu. 

 By a sagacious instinct these great men felt, though they 

 could not scientifically explain, the direction in which 

 human affairs were naturally tending ; and it was because 

 they shaped their efforts with a view to assist, and not to 

 check or warp, the resistless tendencies of society, that they 

 succeeded in stamping their individualities so powerfully 

 upon history. It is from the lack of this sagacity that the 

 ablest retrograde statesmen have either failed utterly, or at 

 best succeeded only in working wanton mischief. Julian, 

 and Philip II. of Spain, occupied positions which enabled 

 them to wield enormous power, and the former was a man of 

 signal ability and undoubtedly good intentions. Yet Julian 

 wholly failed to see that Platonic Paganism, however well 

 adapted it may have been to the sporadic, municipal civiliza 

 tion of antiquity, was no longer adapted to the intellectual 

 and moral needs of men living under the Eoman Empire. 

 Hence his insensate attempt to destroy the only religious 

 organization capable of holding society together during the 

 perilous times that were coming; an attempt which his 

 early death fortunately frustrated before it had been per- 

 .sisted in long enough to work much social disturbance. 

 Philip II., a man of mediocre ability and hopelessly vulgar 

 egoism, might yet have done a good work, could he ever have 

 been brought to understand the way in which the world was 



