knowledge of how to proceed and do, it might at once set out to undo him. The fable of Prometheus and of Adam and Eve may not be so impossible, after all. Yet should his “God” not be able to completely destroy him he may yet well imitate his Creator and create. But will he be allowed so to do? LIFE, ART AND AMERICA I do not pretend to speak with any historic or sociologic knowledge of the sources of the American ethical, and therefore critical, point of view, though I suspect the origin, but I am at least convinced that, whatever its source or sense, it does not accord with the facts of life as I have noted or experienced them. To me the average or somewhat standardized American is an odd, irregularly developed soul, wise and even froward in matters of mechanics, organizations and anything that relates to technical skill in connection with material things, but absolutely devoid of true spiritual insight, correct knowledge of the history of literature or art, and confused by and mentally lost in or overcome by the multiplicity of the purely material and inarticulate details by which he finds himself surrounded. As a boy in the small towns of the middle West I had no slightest opportunity to get a correct or even partially correct estimate of what might be called the mental A B abs of life. I knew nothing of history, and there was not a book in any of the schools which I attended, labeled either history or science or art, containing the least suggestion of the rationale which I subsequently came to feel to be relatively true, or at least acceptable to me. If I remember correctly, in the history of the world which was labeled Swinton’s, the defeat of Napoleon, not his career, was pointed out as having had a great moral if not Christian value to the world. His end on St. Helena, not the Code Napoleon or the hieratic and ultra-economic arrangement of his material forces, was supposed to have achieved something for society! Similarly Socrates and his death were descanted upon as having almost a religious if not a Christian import. His death was painted as having been brought about by his low private deeds, not his higher moral views. The true significance of the man as illustrated by the exact details of his life were utterly ignored.