The gloom and unrest called forth by Nordau’s work in nervous minds no doubt gain in strength from the apparently powerful personality behind it. But it suffices, as we have shown, to divest this imposing giant of his assumed power in order to escape from his influence. Nordau, had he not done so before, reveals himself unmistakably in the very last sentence of his book as one largely beset by human frailties when, in self-glorification, he quotes the words of him whose work he so strenuously attempts to undermine and oppose. In order to assure his readers that his object, as a scientist, is to benefit humanity, to lead it farther on the road on which religion, so much contemned by him, has already taken it some distance, he quotes Christ’s words: “Think not that I have come to destroy the law or the prophets; I have not come to destroy, but to fulfil.” We here refrain from the temptation to write half a dozen pages in order to show, in Nordau’s own manner, how, by quoting from the Scriptures, by appealing to faith and emotion, by comparing himself to Christ, he is symbolic with Paul Verlaine, he is mystical with the neo-Catholics, he is emotional with Rossetti, he is an egomaniac with the Diabolists, and a megalomaniac with Wagner. But we refrain, and only say that he is human. CHAPTER XII _REGENERATION_ If the manifold discussions which have raged around the question of human progress have failed to establish a consensus of opinion, it is largely due to the absence of any exact definition of the term progress. There can be no doubt about our advance in science. The trite references to the use we make of steam, of which the ancient sages knew so little as to call it smoke, establishes this beyond the possibility of denial. But, on the other hand, our advance in literature and art has been crab-like; for it has been accomplished with our face turned towards antiquity. To set up ideals out of the actualities of the past involves the recognition that we, as a race, stand lower than we have done before, or at least at one time we have slided backwards and not yet retrieved the lost ground. The progress of humanity, with all its deviations and backslidings, may appear as one decided march onwards, if we look upon our ideals, plucked from the past, as so many pegs thrown out into the distant future demarcating the ground to be occupied by the road of civilization. The Greeks showed us, as in a flash, and within a limited space, ideals of poetry and art, and since the time of the Renaissance we have been striving to attain them. Christ has been the moral ideal held up to us for well-nigh nineteen hundred years; but this we are so far from having realized, as to be filled with doubt whether, in our awkward groping, with our faces turned towards Calvary, we move in the right direction.