In his beliefs the normal man passes through a similar series of reactions from the acceptance of the marvellous in his childhood and youth to the sceptical rejection of the miraculous and the acceptance of only the literal and material in his buoyant manhood, thence to the profounder philosophy and mystical speculations of riper age. The old, old conflict between _materialism_ and _idealism_, between _seeing-knowing_ and _thinking-feeling_, between the cruder actualities of the senses and the finer actualities of the imagination! It is not that all men at a given time are idealists and at another realists, any more than all painters in one decade are Impressionists, in another Post-Impressionists. Life does not move that way. * * * * * Between 1874 and 1900 Impressionism forged to the front and monopolized the attention of the art world, yet during that period there were painted more pictures of the Pre-Impressionist schools than ever before. The Impressionists made all the noise, the Pre-Impressionists did most of the work. The net result was a large amount of absorption by the older schools of the good things in Impressionism, and a noticeable improvement in painting generally. Just now the Post-Impressionists occupy the center of the stage and are making themselves so conspicuous the public is almost led to believe that both Impressionists and Pre-Impressionists no longer exist, that everything once considered good in art is being relegated to the storehouse. Again, as a matter of fact, with all the noise made by the Post-Impressionists, it is beyond question true that never before were so many Impressionist and Pre-Impressionist pictures painted as now. The stream of Pre-Impressionist and Impressionist pictures goes right on and in time history will repeat itself, the good in Post-Impressionism will be absorbed and the main current that supplies the great public with art will be _Pre_-impressionist + _Impressionist_ + _Post_-impressionist, with as many more prefixes as the ingenuity of the artist can devise to describe his vagaries. * * * * * Painters are a good deal like inventors, each of whom thinks his invention sure to revolutionize the world, to find in the end that his supposed invention is either not new or if new not valuable. Now and then a painter like an inventor does do something that is revolutionary, but these geniuses are not common, and with even them critical research invariably finds they have simply built upon the labors of others. An Edison, a Bell, a Marconi appears only when electrical science has reached a stage where the inventions rather than the men are inevitable. All this is statistically demonstrated in the records of patent offices. * * * * *