There is, however, a weighty criticism of the validity of human progress. Granted that human science and invention have made enormous strides, that knowledge has increased and convenience multiplied--is _man_, the living, feeling, personal human being, any the better in essentials for all of this--has it not merely made life more complex at the expense of its depth, more rapid at the expense of its tranquillity and suavity? This is especially obvious in the field of art. It is impossible to maintain that any one of a certain number--a hundred, or perhaps a thousand--of great poets, painters, sculptors, or musicians is greater or has achieved finer things than any other of the number. What is more, in most arts--notably sculpture, painting, and poetry, the possibilities of expression and achievement do not increase, and once a certain pitch of skill is reached, tend to extinguish themselves in technique and virtuosity. When this happens, new ideas generally come upon the scene and work up again from a relatively primitive to a complicated technique along a more or less different path--and so on and so forth _ad infinitum_. This is not so true of architecture, and still less so of music. In intellectual matters it is clearly not true of mathematics, where each advance provides the foundation for the solution of more complex problems, nor, similarly, of much of science. But even in this intellectual domain, where the accumulation of knowledge is so evident, where the increasing difficulty and complexity of the problems soluble and solved is so remarkable--even here the individual achievement can scarcely be properly said to increase, certainly not the individual merit or the individual satisfaction. Newton’s achievement was no less splendid because to-day any fourth-rate mathematician can use the calculus, nor Euclid’s for that his discoveries can be explained to every schoolboy; while for Harvey to discover the circulation of the blood or for Dalton to demonstrate the particulate nature of matter was certainly no slighter task than that needed to show the reality of internal secretion or to discover the infra-atomic world of electrons. The task occupied all their powers, its accomplishment satisfied them; and the powers themselves have not increased--only the ways in which men have learned to use them.