"This, then, is in my opinion the true perspective of our modern Cynics. As literature or truth, they exhibit little of value, except that Shaw appears to me (--if a Greek may be allowed to pass judgment on such a matter--) to be the only one amongst living writers in England who has real literary splendour in his style. As men, however, exercising an effect on a possible social Revolution, these writers are of the utmost importance. "Or to repeat it in my terms: _alethologically_ nil or nearly so, _effectologically_ very important or interesting; this is the true perspective of writers like Tolstoy, Shaw, and other modern Cynics. "Their influence is not on Thought, nor on Art, but on Action. "They may eventually, if Mars will continue trifling with wood-nymphs and other well-intended cordials, become a great power. They may beget Neo-Stoics, who may beget Neo-Christians. They themselves may then appear only as the tiny drum-pages running in front or beside the real fighters in battle. Yet their importance will be little impaired thereby. "The Church Fathers have frequently endeavoured to honour me with the name of one of the lay protagonists of Christianity. But I know much better than that. The true protagonists were Antisthenes or Diogenes; and that is why the Roman Catholic Church has at no time countenanced me. And just as we now do not mind the jokes, burlesques and _boutades_ of Diogenes any more, admitting freely, as we do, that behind them was the _aurora borealis_ of a new creed, a new movement, a new world; even so we must not mind the grotesque _boutades_ of Tolstoy, Ibsen, Shaw, Anatole, and other modern Cynics, for behind them is the magnetic fulguration of new electric currents in the social world. "This, the public indistinctly feel; that's why they continue to read and criticise or revile these men. The public feels that while there may not be much in what these men yield for the present, the future, possibly, is theirs. "The little ones below do not as yet know, that there is no future; nor that all that is or can be, has long been. Therefore they do not turn to us who might point out to them what things are driving at; but they want the oldest things in ever new forms. "We, however, know that _plus cela change, plus c'est la même chose_, as one of the modern Athenians in Paris has put it. "Do not frown on me, Heraclitus; I well know that you hold the very reverse, and that you would say: '_plus c'est la même chose, plus cela change_.' "I have gladly accepted that in my earthly time when I made a sharp distinction between phenomena and super-phenomena, or _noumena_. But I do no longer make such a distinction.