7o4 RENAISSANCES

A thousand ages in Thy sight

Are like an evening gone,
Short as the watch that ends the night

Before the rising Sun.

No doubt, in God's sight, the aeons in which the human historian has
to reckon the longevity of the Human Psyche's primordial abyss will
approach no nearer than the brief annals of recorded human history to
being comparable with an Eternity with which all Time is incommen-
surate and into which none of God's creatures can ever enter without
being first transfigured by God's grace; yet it is neither inaccurate nor
impious to ascribe a godlike timelessness to a subconscious underworld
of the Psyche that is merely one of God's creatures, when we find our-
selves impotent to plumb the thoughts of 'the human heart by which
we live', or to compass the range of 'an eye that hath kept watch o'er
Man's mortality', by applying to the Primordial Images the yard-measure
of the Intellect. The surface of a planet which in God's sight may loom
no larger than an orange would appear to be of an infinitely vast extent
to the mind of any human surveyor who set out to measure the Earth's
circumference with a measuring-rod of the dimensions of a match,

If these considerations move us to reject Perrault's thesis as well as
Spengler's, we shall be confirmed in our acceptance of Fontenelle's and
Gibbon's thesis that it is the privilege of Mathematics, Natural Science,
and Technology to be capable of progress on a Time-scale set by the pace
of the conscious Intellect, and the privilege of the Fine Arts to be
exempt from a servitude to Time which is the price of a capacity for
cumulative achievement. We shall also be able to repay part of our debt
to Fontenelle by underpinning his intuition with one of the empirical
discoveries made by Science in the course of its progress between Fon-
tenelle's day and ours. For, within the quarter of a century that had
elapsed between the year in which Bury had endorsed Shelley's tentative
approval of Perrault's argument and the year in which the present lines
were being written, Jung had demonstrated that the Fine Arts draw
their inspiration from creative depths of subconscious experience at
which, on the Intellect's Lilliputian scale of time-reckoning, there 'is no
variableness, neither shadow of turning',1 in the ageless presences of the
Primordial Images.

' Jas. i. 17.