If we except medicine, which aims to cure our bodily ills, those sciences which are concerned with discoveries useful to industry, and those arts which entertain the public, all other branches of intellectual activity are to-day in dire confusion. Is there a pious clergyman who has not asked himself in moments of discouragement what good it is to preach the virtues of the Christian faith in a century whose dynamic power springs from an exaltation of pride and an emancipation of passion which amount almost to delirium? What intelligent historian is there who does not now and then ask himself why he persists in telling over again the events of the past to a generation which no longer looks ahead, and which rushes violently on the future, head down like a bull? What philosopher is there who, as he pursues his transcendental preoccupation, does not feel himself sometimes hopelessly adrift, like a being fallen upon the earth, from another planet, in an age which no longer is passionately interested in anything except economic reality? What artist is there who seeks not only to make money, but to reach the perfection of his ideal, who has not cursed a thousand times this frenzied hurly-burly in the midst of which we live? From time to time, it is true, there seems to be a genuine revival of the ancient ideal; men suddenly appear who seem to interest themselves afresh in the progress of religion, in the future of morality, in the history of the past, in the problems of metaphysics, in the artistic records of civilisation long since dead. These are, however, only passing phenomena, and they are not enduring enough to give artists and philosophers the definite consciousness of playing a well-thought-out and useful part. If all intellectual activities of to-day tend to become either lucrative professions or government careers; it is because nowadays such careers aim either at the acquisition of money or the attainment of social position, and no longer find their end in the careers themselves. And yet—how many times as he travelled across the territory of the two Americas, watching all day fields of wheat and rye, or plantations of maize or coffee, extending to the very edge of the solitary horizon, how many times has the historian of antiquity brooded over those fragments of marble wrought by the Greeks in such perfection, which we admire in our museums, and pondered upon the fragments of the great Roman system of jurisprudence preserved in the “_Corpus juris_.” Did not the Greeks and Romans succeed in reaching this marvellous perfection in the arts and laws because there came a time when they were willing to cease extending the limits of their empire over the earth and all the treasures it contains? Have we not conquered vast deserts with our railroads just because we have been able to renounce almost all the artistic and moral perfections which were the glory of the ancients?