“‘This crown of the laughter, this rose-garland crown--to you, my brethren, do I cast this crown! Laughing have I consecrated: ye higher men, _learn_, I pray you--to laugh!’” It needs intoxication--of one Dionysian sort or another--to find such incitements mirth-provoking. It is necessary to abandon all reasonable grounds for comfort except the rather chilly one that we are physically made of stardust, and therefore should rejoice to dissolve our living complexity back into it. _Lazarus Laughed_ indeed arouses a fair measure of the necessary intoxication, so imaginative and emotional is it. But its comfort can last, I fear, only while we actually hear the laughter of Lazarus. V Thus our most gifted American dramatist, together with other finer spirits of to-day, is unable to accept traditional modes or satisfy the desire for admiration and worship. Romanticism, in identifying man with nature, hastened the decay of a heroic tradition which it at first attempted to foster; and under scientific naturalism the decay ended in dissolution. Whether the author uses a so-called “naturalistic” technique after Ibsen or Maupassant; or whether, like Wedekind or Jeffers or Cabell, he seeks other modes of expression, so long as he thinks of man as in no way superior to the outer world or different from it, he is none the less subject to the naturalistic point of view.[41] Recently, to be sure, certain developments of science have given rise to hopes of mysticism within a naturalistic monism. The argument, so far as an unscientific reader understands it, seems to run thus: Einstein has offered proof that time and space form a continuum and that events are “relative.” Studies of the atom have upset orthodox conceptions of physics, and physicists themselves are beginning to talk about matter in terms that sound for all the world like Bishop Berkeley. Science admits a mysterious enveloping Unknown. The new hypotheses, of course, merely re-enforce the acknowledgment of ultimate mystery which thoughtful people have always made. The novelty of the new mysticism is that it builds not on theology or metaphysics but mathematics and laboratory experiment. The next step in its argument is the dubious one. If science grants an enveloping Unknown, the man who would explain that Unknown in terms of his desires is as likely to be right as one who explains it in inhuman terms. And if there is a chance that one’s desires may be true, it needs no psychologist to assure us that plenty of people will immediately assume that they are true. For them science seems to justify mysticism and open the door for the hosts of dreams, so long shut out of a rationalistic universe. But the weakness of such wishful thinking seems obvious; and to the humanist the whole argument is beside the point because it would vindicate human values by naturalistic data.