"Instead of traditions, unarticulated tendencies, latent _sous-entendus_, and delicate imponderables, there are only machines, ledgers, and registers, articulated with a vengeance, cryingly explicit and loud and indelicate. Everything is bound in the leather of reasonableness, in the hide of method, and in the wooden boards of Logic. Instead of on the rich soup of sentiments, men and women in the States are fed on scientific tabloids containing sentiments reduced to their ultimate chemical essences. A woman laughs at romance; her relations to men are 'reasonable.' A child laughs at piety; his or her relations to parents are tanned by 'sense'! A servant sneers at loyalty; her relations to the masters are macerated in the vinegar of 'inalienable right of reason.' "All this is excellent--for me. For, what happens? "The Americans indulging in too many orgies of Reasonableness; the Americans having thrown over-board all motives of historic truth in order to live under the banner of reasoned truth only, have long since become sick of Reason. They resemble a crew on a big ship that has stored its pantries and larders with nothing else than meat-extracts and tabloids. That crew, after a month's journey or so, will unfailingly sink or else eat the most loathsome fish rather than continue feeding on its scientific food. "After all, when all is said and done, the Americans too are humans. They too want more than tabloids and meat-extracts. Tons of tins will not replace one fresh cabbage. On this eternal truth my disciples go to work in the States. "Fully aware, as they are, that the Americans must be and are deadly 'tired' of Reason, they hasten to give the people of the States the most exciting devices of Unreason. One of them invents Mormonism; the other, Spiritualism; the third, Zionism; the fourth, Oneidaism, or general Promiscuity; the fifth, Christian Science; the sixth, Incarnationism; and so forth, and so on, _ad infinitum_. "Can my triumph be greater? I will carefully avoid telling them that by worshipping Apollo extravagantly while neglecting the great god Dionysus, they have fallen wretched victims to the wrath of the latter. Just let them go on writing contemptuous reflections on Greek Mythology, and glory in the 'wonderful century' in which Dionysus is declared to be a mere myth. As long as they do that, I shall not lack plenty of successful disciples, and my name will wax greater and greater, until nobody shall be able to find, even did he use the latest Edison lamp, a single well-balanced human in all the States.