propensity with complete intellectual honesty. But science does not, and never has, brought forward sufficient evidence to justify a man turning materialist against his will. And perhaps no man has ever done so. Perhaps one can take the agonies of modern poets too seriously. Many artists, not only small ones, have no real indwelling force such as a man like Beethoven obviously possessed. They are merely very impressionable and _adopt_ an attitude towards life, and this attitude is accepted and maintained, not because they really think it is true, but because they derive strength from it. It gives them a centre from which they can work; it gives them a feeling of strength and completeness. The maintenance of their attitude towards life may become the condition that they exist and function as artists at all. Nevertheless, the attitude is maintained only by a constant effort of will, although, since the motive is self-preservation, the artist will nearly always think himself perfectly sincere. But I shall, without going into these refinements, take the unhappiness of our modern literary men at its face-value, those, that is, who believe that the universe is purposeless and think this belief is founded on scientific evidence. The point of view has been well put recently by Mr I. A. Richards,[3] a literary critic who thinks it possible that poetry may be destroyed by science. He speaks of the “neutralization of nature” which has been effected by science, and contrasts this with the “magical view” of the world that has hitherto been accepted by artists. What he means by this is that science reveals to us a universe quite indifferent to all human aspirations, whereas artists have hitherto assumed that man is of cosmic significance. The poet must learn to accept the scientific universe and give up believing in things like “inspiration”, “a reality deeper than the reality of science”, and so on. “Experience”, says Mr Richards, “is its own justification”, by which he appears to mean that experience just happens to be what it is by some kind of accident. It points to nothing beyond itself. The ground for this belief is not, in Mr Richards’ case, old-fashioned materialism. “It is not what the universe is made of but how it works, the law it follows, which makes knowledge of it incapable of spurring on our emotional responses.” This reminds one of the “iron laws” of the Victorian age, which many people found so depressing, although the logical connection between existence having conditions and existence being purposeless is a little hard to follow. But although the particular iron laws of the Victorians have gone, Mr Richards finds the theory of relativity no more cheering. “A god voluntarily or involuntarily subject to Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity does not make an emotional appeal and physics does not find it necessary to mention him.” Apparently it is the existence of any law at all that is resented: the poet can feel happy only in a