“Wonderful it was, but terrible, too; for what struck me with a kind of chill, even while I was wrapt in admiration, was the fact that though everything was in constant change, and in the change there was clearly an order and routine, yet I could not detect anything that seemed like purpose.  Direction there was, but not direction to an end; for the end was no better than the beginning, it was only different; the idea of Good, in short, did not apply.  And this fact, which was striking enough in the case of the phenomena I have described, made itself felt with even more insistence when I turned to consider the course of human history.  For that too I saw unrolled before me, not only on our own, but on innumerable other worlds, in various phases and in various forms, both those which we know, and others of which we have no conception, and which I am now quite unable to recall.  Men I saw housing in caves, or on piles in swamps and lakes, dwellers in wagons and tents, hunters, or shepherds under the stars, men of the mountain, men of the plain, of the river-valley and the coast, nomad tribes, village tribes, cities, kingdoms, empires, wars and peace, politics, laws, manners, arts and sciences.  Yet in all this, so far as I could observe, although, through all vacillations, there appeared to be a steady trend in a definite direction, there was nothing to indicate what we call purpose.  Men, I saw, had ideas about Good, but these ideas of theirs, though they were part of the efficient causes of events, were in no sense the explanation of the process.  There was no explanation, for there was no final cause, no purpose, end, or justification at all.  Man, like nature, was the plaything of a blind fate.  The idea of Good had no application.

“The horror I felt as this truth (for so I thought it) was borne in upon me was proportioned to my previous delight.  I had now but one desire, to escape, even though it were only back to what I had left.  And as the Angel-Boys in ‘Faust’ cry out to Pater Seraphicus for release, when they can no longer bear the sights they see through his eyes, so I, in my anguish, cried, ‘Let me out!  Let me out!’ And instantly I found myself standing again at the foot of the tower, in that land of twilight, silence, and infinite space, with the souls going down the river, in and out, in and out, futile, trivial, tedious, monotonous, and vain.  Looking up, I saw written over the door from which I had emerged, and which was opposite to that by which I had entered, words whose sense was: 

  “‘Eye hath not seen.’

“I walked round the Tower, and found a third door facing the river; and over that was written: 

  “‘Turris scientiae.’

“But all these doors were now closed; nor indeed, had they been open, should I have felt any inclination to renew the experience from which I had escaped.  I therefore turned away sadly enough and made my way along the bank towards the second tower.