“Books, periodicals, especially the newspapers, have in our time become great financial undertakings for the success of which the largest possible number of purchasers is needed. The interests and tastes, however, of the largest possible number of purchasers are always low and vulgar. For the success of the press it is necessary that the productions should respond to the demands of the great majority of the purchasers, that is, that they should touch upon the low interests and correspond to the vulgar tastes. The press fully satisfies these demands, which it is quite able to do, since among the number of workers for the press there are many more people with the same low interests and vulgar tastes as the public than men with high interests and refined taste. “The worst thing about it is that the reading of poor works corrupts the understanding and taste. Good works can no longer be appreciated. “In proportion as newspapers, periodicals, and books become more and more disseminated, the value of what is printed falls lower and lower, and the class of the so-called cultured public sinks more and more into a most hopeless, self-contented, incorrigible ignorance.... “A striking example is that of the English prose writers. From the great Dickens we descend at first to George Eliot, then to Thackeray, to Trollope; and then begins the indifferent manufacture of a Rider Haggard, Kipling, Hall Caine, and so forth. “Still more striking is this fall noticed in American literature. After the great galaxy, Emerson, Thoreau, Lowell, Whittier, and others, everything breaks off suddenly, and there appear beautiful editions with beautiful illustrations and with beautiful stories and novels which are impossible to read on account of absence of all meaning. “The ignorance of the cultured crowd of our times has reached such a pass that great thinkers and writers of former times no longer satisfy the highly refined demands of new men (and new women). “The last word of philosophy is the immoral, coarse, inflated, disconnected babbling of Nietzsche. Senseless, artificial conglomeration of words of decadent poems is regarded as poetry of the highest rank. The theatres give dramas, the meaning of which is not known to any one, not even to the author.” What would Tolstoy have said had he witnessed the full blown art of our movies? What the movies and literature accomplish in the world of art and letters, that is what psychoanalysis and mental tests achieve in normal and abnormal psychology. The mediocrity of the modern man is akin to the vulgarity of the ancient freedman, so well described by Petronius in his type of Trimalchio. Both, the greedy freedman and the “efficient” freeman, have the same deleterious influence on the course of civilization. Our age is not the age of Democracy, but of Mediocrity. It is in such an age that sensationalism, movies, and psychoanalysis are apt to flourish like green bay trees.