Of all those various religious fantasies, as so many forms of enthusiasm, he could well appreciate the picturesque; that was made easy by his natural Epicureanism, already prompting [125] him to conceive of himself as but the passive spectator of the world around him.

But it was to the severer reasoning, of which such matters as Epicurean theory are born, that, in effect, he now betook himself.

Instinctively suspicious of those mechanical arcana, those pretended "secrets unveiled" of the professional mystic, which really bring great and little souls to one level, for Marius the only possible dilemma lay between that old, ancestral Roman religion, now become so incredible to him and the honest action of his own untroubled, unassisted intelligence.

Even the Arcana Celestia of Platonism--what the sons of Plato had had to say regarding the essential indifference of pure soul to its bodily house and merely occasional dwelling-place--seemed to him while his heart was there in the urn with the material ashes of Flavian, or still lingering in memory over his last agony, wholly inhuman or morose, as tending to alleviate his resentment at nature's wrong.

It was to the sentiment of the body, and the affections it defined--the flesh, of whose force and colour that wandering Platonic soul was but so frail a residue or abstract--he must cling.