Boon maintained that there was a spreading thought process, clearly perceptible nowadays, and that those detachments of Wilkins' were not complete. He instanced the cheap editions of broad-thinking books, the variety of articles in the modern newspaper, the signs of wide discussions. Wilkins, on the other hand, asserted a predominant intellectual degeneration.... Moreover, Wilkins declared, with the murmurous approval of Dodd, that much even of the Academic thought process was going wrong, that Bergson's Pragmatism for Ladies was a poor substitute even for Herbert Spencer, that the boom about "Mendelism" was a triumph of weak thinking over comprehensive ideas. "Even if we leave the masses out of account, it is still rather more than doubtful if there is any secular intellectual growth." And it is curious to recall now that as an instance of a degenerative thought process among educated people Wilkins instanced modern Germany. Here, he said, in the case of a Mind covering over a hundred million people altogether, was a real retrocession of intellectual freedom. The pretentious expression of instinctive crudity had always been the peculiar weakness of the German mind. It had become more and more manifest, he said, as nationalism had ousted foreign influence. You see what pretty scope for mutual contradiction there was in all this. "Let me get books," cried Wilkins, "and I will read you samples of the sort of thing that passes for thinking in Germany. I will read you some of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, some of Nietzsche's boiling utterance, some of Schopenhauer." "Let me," said Wilkins, "read a passage I have picked almost haphazard from Schopenhauer. One gets Schopenhauer rammed down one's throat as a philosopher, as a deep thinker, as the only alternative to the Hegelian dose. And just listen----" He began to read in a voice of deliberate malice, letting his voice italicize the more scandalous transitions of what was certainly a very foolish and ill-knit piece of assertion.