all others abhorred science as an obstacle to poetry, Verhaeren celebrated it as the purest form of life. For he knows that everything changes, that 'ce qui fut hier le but est l'obstacle demain,'[9] and _vice versa_ that the obstacle of to-day may perhaps be the goal of the next generation. He had already recognised in his poetry what the architectural movement in the great cities in the last few years has realised, that huge shops, as emporia of intellectual life, as new centres of force, provide tasks for art as stupendous as the cathedrals of old; that in the reek and smoke of teeming cities new tones of colour were waiting for painters, new problems for philosophers; that all that in our own time looms bulky and unseemly will to the next generation be well-proportioned and have to be called beautiful. Verhaeren's enthusiasm for what is new overcomes the resistance of reverence for tradition. Verhaeren has rendered signal service to our time by being the first to recognise and proclaim the great impressionists and all innovators in art and poetry. For to reject nothing new, to be hostile to nothing the world can offer, this only is what he understands by knowing the world as it is and truly loving it. His ladder of values ends on high in this absolute ideal of admiration of the whole world, not only of that which is but of that which shall be, of the identity of every ego with the time and its forms: L'homme n'est suprême et clair que si sa volonté Est d'être lui en même temps qu'il est monde. And since this boundless admiration turns selfishness to dust--selfishness, the eternal obstacle to all purely human relations--since, in a word, it produces a kind of brotherly relationship to all things, it also opens out the possibility of levelling the relationship between man and man. The book _La Multiple Splendeur_, which has given definite expression to these ethical ideas, was originally intended to be called _Admirez-vous les Uns les Autres_. In this book self-surrender is considered as the highest ideal, the gift of oneself to the whole world, the distribution of oneself among all people. No longer, as in the earlier books, are energy, strength, and conquest by strength, the quelling of resistance, the ultimate sense of life, but goodness, scattering oneself broadcast, becoming the all by surrender to the all. Greatness in this new sense can only arise by ecstatic admiration. 'Il faut aimer pour découvrir avec génie.' Admiration and love are the strongest forces of the world. Love will be the highest form of the new relations--it will regulate all earthly relationships; love shall be the social levelling.