In the first sense we find that Adrien Sixte has somewhere written, “All conscious beings must be looked upon by the scientist as experiments set up by nature. Among these experiments some are useful to society, and one hears of virtue; others are destructive, and one hears of vice and of crime.” And he adds, a little by way of flourish, “These last are nevertheless the most significant, and we should lack an essential datum for the science of mind if Nero, say, or such and such a tyrant of the fifteenth century had not existed.” Or again he has said, “To consider one’s destiny as a corollary of this living geometry which is nature, and therefore as an inevitable consequence of the eternal axiom whose indefinite development is prolonged through all time and all space, this is the unique way to emancipation.” * * * * * To show that human conduct is so necessitated as to be without moral aspects: “this is the unique way to emancipation.” It was just for the master’s aid over the last rough steps of the path to this emancipation that we left our Disciple crying, “De profundis.” Can the aid be given? Can it not? This is the singularly philosophical catastrophe of this singularly reflective novel. For us the issue depends upon an analysis of what our philosopher would regard as determinants of human conduct. That it is not meaningless to seek explanations of human acts all admit, for all alike are engaged in the search for them, and much that is of importance to daily life depends upon one’s ability correctly to explain and so to predict the conduct of one’s fellows. The only question is whether the laws by which we explain and predict could conceivably be increased in precision until they completely determined conduct. To judge this we must consider of what nature these laws are, _i.e._, in the present context, with what illustrations of such laws our author furnishes us. We are familiar with the idea that the explanation of a fact consists in pointing out its likeness to others. We are not surprised, then, to find our young analyst, following the guide of a master who, we have heard, regarded “our most exquisite sensibilities” as “the development of very simple instincts,” looking upon his relations with a singularly pure young woman as not without likeness to the battle of life throughout the animal kingdom. “It is the law of the world,” he reasons, “that all existence is a conquest carried on and maintained by the stronger at the expense of the weaker. This is as true of the moral universe as of the physical. There are souls of prey as there are wolves, tiger-cats, and hawks,” and he kept repeating to himself, “I am a soul of prey, a soul of prey,” with a furious access of what the mystics call _the pride of life_.