With Hegel's observations in his Lectures on Aesthetics, on the dif ference between the epic poetry of the ancients and the novel as the dominant literary form of the present, we are at the center of these meditations. The great epic poems of antiquity, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, for instance, or Virgil's Aeneid, reflect not only the minds of certain poets; they are, at the same time, as are all great literary works, recognizable as the product of an age; and the age of Homer, the age of epic poetry, Hegel characterizes as a fundamentally poetic state of the world, that is a world in which poetry is not merely written, but, as it were, lived. The active intervention and par ticipation of gods in the lives of mortals; groves and springs and hills as the habitats of nymphs and fauns; the poetic comprehension of what is, was at that time not a matter of the poetic imagination at work in the minds of a few chosen individuals, of artists whose successors, much later in history, more often than not lamented their separation from their contemporary sur roundings, but was natural, a matter of fact, of ways of thinking and feel ing shared by the whole community. It is not absurd to say that in such a world our distinctions between imagination and fact were of little impor tance, if not unknown. It is this that led the young Nietzsche to accuse the first great analytical rationalist of Greece, Socrates, the indefatigable questioner, of having destroyed mythology (or what now goes by that name), of having helped to bring about the end of tragedy, indeed, of Greek art. But back to Hegel: of .his own epoch he said that it was the age of prose, and in this respect it certainly is still ours. The age of prose: this meant for him that prose had become the ruling mode of perception. Understanding is prosaic understanding. Our science is, of course, written in prose, and this implies not merely a manner of writing, but a style of comprehension, and prose is our psychology, our economics, our sociology?all our efforts intel ligently to grasp the nature of the world. For Hegel all articulate religious beliefs of the past, Greek mythology, for instance, are part and parcel of a poetic understanding of the world although the purified religion of the future would be, he asserted, beyond any kind of truth that can manifest itself entirely in images, or in works of art. Still, with regard to the past and the present he distinguishes between two spheres of hurflan consciousness: Poetry and Prose. Yes, of course, he was