While sitting in judgment upon the upper classes of Europe, why should he not have noticed the more serious side of their lives as well as their enjoyments, as manifested in subscriptions to hospitals or orphanages, and institutes of every description; sick-nursing establishments, where ladies of high rank and wealth give their personal services, sacrifices of time and comfort in the endeavour to brighten the lives of the poor, to save fallen women, to assist released prisoners, to protect children and even animals from cruelty? We say, purposely, nothing of all the charitable work done in connection with churches, because Nordau and his admirers might not recognise any results of religious feeling as a proof of sanity. But all these emphatic and unmistakable indications of the state of society—at least as valuable as the manifestations of vice, hysteria, and eccentricity—are ignored. On the other hand, he makes much of the attempts which here and there have been made, especially in Paris, with representations appealing to many senses at once; for instance, pictures exhibited with music, musical recitals in darkened rooms, etc. Such cases are not only extremely rare, but simply are another combination of many arts hardly more complicated than that represented by operas, in which dance[,] music, poetry, and painting are mingled in order to please. In what recorded period, and in what nation, have there not been attempts to create new sources of enjoyment? Why should not attempts be made at advance in amusements as well as in any other feature of our civilization? That many of these experiments appear silly, and end in utter failure, ought to surprise nobody, and scientists the least. Any one who has tried to invent something new, to ascertain by experiments some scientific fact, or to solve a physical or mechanical problem, ought to know that a very large number of experiments are bound to fail before success is achieved. It is strange to find in our days a scientist condemning, as the beginning of folly, that dissatisfaction with existing things which is the primary motor of all progress and all knowledge. By doing so he ranges himself on the side of those Philistines who burnt the apostles of progress as heretics and imprisoned the pioneers of science as madmen.