Such authors as Théophile Gautier, Baudelaire, Rollinat, and others attract especially Nordau’s attention; but he deals with them in order to show that they individually had degenerated into egomaniacs, and he does not once try to realize the relation between their so-called degeneracy and the general tendencies of our time. Had he done so, he might have felt inclined to be less hard on these exponents of _fin de siècle_ corruption. Speaking of the hints which this school of poets and writers sometimes throws out that they are not quite serious, Nordau comes very near to discovering their significance when he says about Baudelaire that perhaps “he sought to make himself believe that, with his Satanism, he was laughing at the Philistines.” But Nordau does not follow up the cue he has thus accidentally dropped upon, but adds a sentence revealing the one-sidedness of his inquiry, when he says: “but such a tardy palliation does not deceive the psychologist, and it is of no importance for his judgment.” That may be so. But it is of the utmost importance to humanity. That the yielding to the promptings of “unconsciousness,” to the dictates of instincts bad or good, was on the part of the so-called Parnassians an experimental plunge in the dark—a challenge to those who pretended to know better to show them that they were wrong—cannot be denied by any one who has read their writings with some knowledge of the French character. These men took up literature at a time when the world began to perceive that science could not satisfy its emotional aspirations, that it could not explain the mysteries of the Universe, or bring about that balance between our emotional and intellectual natures on which a healthy life depends. But this was not the only disillusion which humanity experienced at that time. All the hopes which the altruistic feeling had prompted us to base on democratic governments and scientific political economy had vanished. When the Utopias of the economists turned out to be a _fata morgana_, instead of the solid ladder leading up to the material heaven promised by the religion of humanity of the scientists, a Babylonian confusion arose among the people who had first been told to worship at the shrine of religion, then at the shrine of science, and now stood without any shrine whatsoever. In France, more than in any other country, we meet with people whose minds are too subtle and whose emotions are too genuine to permit them to dwell contented in that Philistinism which leans on the one side towards the scientific creed or absence of creed, in order to appear modern, and, on the other side, on religion, in order to be safe, but whose real shrine is the money-safe. These French people, mostly authors and artists, had studied both the religious and the scientific theories, and had found the causes of their miscarriage.