Such, then, is our author’s understanding of what it means so to explain a human act that it shall appear to follow inevitably from recognized laws of nature. If it do so follow, we ask again: Can it in the end be regarded as either good or bad? It is not to our author that we may turn for an answer. M. Bourget is an artist, and owes his allegiance to the interests of the heart, not to the curiosities of the intellect. For him it is sufficient to have shown that to have lived out a Spinozistic philosophy would in extreme cases lead to very ugly results. He is addressing himself, as he tells us in his preface, to the youth of France, and it may not be without interest to note the place he gives to the type of philosophy we have just been considering among the influences dangerous to the young France of his day. “There are two types of young men,” he says, “that I see before me at the present moment, which are before you too, as two forms of temptation equally redoubtable and dangerous. The one is cynical and by preference jovial. He has, since his twentieth year, discounted life, and his religion is contained in the single word, _to enjoy_,--which is translated by this other, _to succeed_. Whether he go into politics or business, literature or art, sport or industry, whether he be an officer, diplomat, or lawyer, he has only himself for god, for beginning and for end. This young man is a monster, is he not? For it is to be a monster, to have lived but twenty-five years and to have by way of a soul a calculating machine at the service of a pleasure-machine. Yet I fear him less for you than I do a certain other type. This one has all the aristocratic traits of nervous organization, all those of mentality. He is an intellectual and refined epicure, as the first was a brutal and scientific epicure. This delicate nihilist, how unpleasant he is to encounter, and how he abounds in the land! At twenty-five years he has made the tour of all ideas. His critical spirit, precociously awakened, has grasped the last results of the most subtle philosophy of this age. Do not speak to him of impiety or materialism. He knows that the word _matter_ has no very precise sense. He is, on the other hand, too intelligent not to admit that all religions may have been legitimate in their time, only he has never believed and never will believe any one of them any more than he will ever believe in anything in particular, if not in the amusing play of his mind which he has transformed into an instrument of elegant perversity. Good and evil, beauty and ugliness, vice and virtue appear to him objects of simple curiosity. The human soul is for him a clever mechanism which it amuses him to take apart by way of experiment. To him nothing is true, nothing is false; nothing is moral, nothing is immoral. He is an egoist, subtle and refined, whose one occupation lies in adorning his Self, in dressing it out with new sensations.