But as Jean Lahor is only a pseudonym for the man, so the sympathy with India which that name indicates is only one phase of the thinker. Our poet pursued the study of medicine; he realized in the concrete the orderly complexities of natural law and the sordid realities of human life. The vague, sensuous enthusiasm with which he had followed the flux of images in his fancy was now sobered by an accurate knowledge of the miseries, the defeats, the shames that lie beneath. His poetic sense of illusion was deepened into a moral sense of wrong. The same keenness of perception, the same power of graphic expression, which had made him dwell on the luxuriance of Nature now made him paint the irony and brutality of life. There is here and there a touch of bitterness and exaggeration in the satire, as if the man of science felt a personal resentment against a world that had so cheated the poet. Yet the two descriptions are far from inconsistent; we have merely learned to understand as a process and to conceive as an inner experience what before we had admired as a spectacle. A scientific view has come to give definition and coherence to phenomena which a poetical pantheism merely saluted as they passed and disappeared into the primordial darkness, or, if you like, into the primordial light. The two systems differ in tone and in method, but not in result. Natural science, like pantheism, presents us with a universal flux, in which something, we known not what, moves, we know not why, we know not whither. The method of this transformation may be more or less accurately described, the general sense of continuity and necessity may find a more or less specific expression in the various fields of experience; yet the outcome is still the same whirligig. We find ourselves in either case confronted by the same _gloire du néant_, by a nothing that lives and that is beautiful in its nothingness.