When they made a story out of what they knew and saw, they went on to make more.

Creation, invention, art--this, independent entirely of the religious desire, makes the infinite gulf which divides man from the highest animals.
I do not mean, in this book, to speak of the theology of Caliban, though the part of the poem which concerns the origin of sacrifice is well worth our attention.

But the poem may be recommended to those theological persons who say there is no God; and to that large class of professional theologians, whose idea of a capricious, jealous, suddenly-angered God, without any conscience except his sense of power to do as he pleases, is quite in harmony with Caliban's idea of Setebos.
The next of these "imaginative representations" is the poem called _Cleon_.

Cleon is a rich and famous artist of the Grecian isles, alive while St.Paul was still making his missionary journeys, just at the time when the Graeco-Roman culture had attained a height of refinement, but had lost originating power; when it thought it had mastered all the means for a perfect life, but was, in reality, trembling in a deep dissatisfaction on the edge of its first descent into exhaustion.

Then, as everything good had been done in the art of the past, cultivated men began to ask "Was there anything worth doing ?" "Was life itself worth living ?"; questions never asked by those who are living.