"The Hermetic... mythological fantasy: not just a rejection of the physical universe in light of pessimsism, but the idea of an entirely new idea of human freedom, very different from the moral conception of... the Greek philosophers... However profoundly man is determined by nature... there still remains an innermost center which is not of nature's realm and by which he is above all its promptings and necessities. ...It is the first time in history that the radical ontological difference of man and nature has been discovered and the powerfully moving experience of it given expression... This rift between man and nature was never to close again, and protesting his hidden but essential otherness became in many variations an abiding theme in the quest for truth concerning man."