In reality it is a cross between a philosophic treatise and a popular polemic, with the technical abstruseness of the one and the passion of the other, and its purpose is to show that all philosophy is vain and should make way for action. Although it indicates wide and attentive reading and a certain erudition, the only indication of constructive thought that it reveals is a rudimentary attempt to adjust the philosophic system of each man to the temperamental bias of the author. Others, Santayana for instance, have done this so much better that there is scarcely justification for his pride. He could have carried his point quite as successfully by stating it as by laboring it through a whole volume devoted largely to railing both at philosophers and at their philosophy. From the point of view of the philosopher this book is "popular." From the standpoint of the people it is "philosophical." It is really a testimonial to the author's breathless state of emotional unrest. He is like a bird in a cage and he feels that he must beat down the barriers in order to accomplish freedom, but when they are fractured and he is apparently free there is no sense of liberation. He is in a far more secure prison than he was before, and to make matters worse he cannot now distinguish the barriers that obstacle his freedom. The wonder is not that a man of the temperament and intellectual endowment of Signor Papini has this feeling, but that he can convince himself that any one else should be interested in his discovery. He that hath knowledge spareth his words, and the mistake is to consider words linked up as subject, predicate, and object, especially if the substantives are qualified by lurid adjectives, the equivalent of knowledge. He knows the "ars scrivendi" as Aspasia knew the "ars amandi"; Papini knows the value of symbolic, eye-arresting, suggestive titles. He realizes the importance of overstatement and of exaggerated emphasis; he is cognizant of the insatiateness of the average human being for gossip and particularly gossip about the great; he recognizes that there is no more successful way of flattering the mediocre than by pointing out to him the shortcomings of the gods, for thus does he identify their possessions with his own and convince himself that he also is a god. Papini's sensitive soul whispers to him that the majority of people will think him brave, courageous, valorous, resolute, virtuous, and firm if he will adopt a certain pose, a certain manner, a certain swagger that will convey his grim determination to carry his mission to the world though it takes his last breath, the last glow of his mortal soul.