All the powers of the mere Intellect, that grey-haired deceiver whose name is Archimago, were his;--wit, mockery, analytic force, keen reasoning on the visible, the Understanding's absolute belief in itself; its close grasp on what it called facts, and its clear application of knowledge for clear ends.

God, too, had vanished in this intellectual satisfaction; and in the temple of his soul, where He had been worshipped, troops of shadows now knelt to the man whose intellect, having grasped all knowledge, was content; and hailed him as king.
The position he describes is like that Wordsworth states in the _Prelude_ to have been his, when, after the vanishing of his aspirations for man which followed the imperialistic fiasco of the French Revolution, he found himself without love or hope, but with full power to make an intellectual analysis of nature and of human nature, and was destroyed thereby.

It is the same position which Paracelsus attains and which is followed by the same ruin.

It is also, so far as its results are concerned, the position of the Soul described by Tennyson in _The Palace of Art_.
Love, emotion, God are shut out.

Intellect and knowledge of the world's work take their place.