This killing of his 'mythology' how could he survive it? His 'mythology' had been his escape from life, his escape into a world where machinery could… - John Cowper Powys

This is the whole secret of the practice of Elementalism: it obtains happiness by the most rigid and austere simplification of the means to happiness.

What they were aware of was the dumb, numb, cold, heavy downward drag of the vast undersea forces that are sub-human; chemical forces, that belong to that formless world of the half-created and the half-organic whereof bodies of lower dimensions than ours are composed and which has a mysterious weight that draws down, a pull, a tug, a centripetal gravitation, against which the soul within us struggles and upon the surface of which it swims, and over which, when the process of decomposition commences, it spreads its contemptuous wings.

As with all daring and successful men the tricks and devices of his subconscious nature were much more formidable than his rational schemes; and so by a sort of automatic protective instinct he kept them subconscious.