Nevertheless Mr. Lippmann among others has articulated what will probably be the fundamental position of American criticism in the next decade, namely, the conviction that we are thinking and acting chaotically and senselessly, and the deep surmise that man can “learn to desire the kind of happiness which is possible.” The brilliant but eccentric Mr. Waldo Frank has dwelt for some time on the dissolution of the Mediæval Synthesis of Europe. America he announces is the grave of Europe and he hopes for a kind of miracle: a generation within the grave of a mystical revival. He too has had his thoughts turned to the all-important question of a method of realising Wholeness in fact as well as in concept. You will find his method outlined at the close of _The Re-discovery of America_ (1929). It is, I fear, hastily constructed, and more than smacks of amateurishness and of the armchair. One wishes that he had not rushed in where sages fear to tread, but he has at least thrown the question of a method for the development of human potentialities into open discussion.[72] The most impressive of the contemporary critics who offer us “a way out” is Mr. T. S. Eliot, but before examining him, it is proper to repeat here that I am excluding from this paper any consideration of the formidable opposition party to all that has been described thus far, the new humanists whom the romanticists have found raised up against them. In passing, I may say that I have before this dipped my freelance pen to the humanists in salutations of great respect mingled with a few misgivings, and I have not the least hesitation in volunteering to defend them against the oblique attack of Mr. T. S. Eliot.