THE OCEAN

The Ocean! What is its mystic significance? A question as
fraught with living issues as its physical object is spacious and
profound. Infinitely varied and yet unchanging; gentle and yet
terrible; radiant and yet awful;

"Calm or convulsed, in breeze, or gale, or storm,
Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime
Dark heaving"--

there is not a mood with which the ocean cannot link itself, nor
a problem to which it cannot hint, albeit darkly, a solution. To
attempt a description of its external phenomena were a hardy
task--much more to grapple with its protean influences on the
souls of men.

Let the approach be by way of mythology. It was shown how
that Thales was partly guided to his choice of Water as the
_Welt-stoff_ by its place and function in the ancient
cosmologies. Numerous and widely diffused were the myths of
a primeval ocean out of which the structured universe arose.
The Babylonian tablet tells of the time before the times "when
above were not raised the heavens, and below on the earth a
plant had not grown up; the abyss also had not broken up its
boundary. The chaos, the sea, was the producing mother of
them all." A passage from the Rig Veda speaks likewise of the
time, or rather the no-time, which preceded all things. "Death
was not then, nor immortality; there was no distinction of day or
night. Only _Something_ breathed without breath, inwardly