A long chapter might be written on the credulity of men of science. The hypotheses that they have chased out of the door complacently fly in at the window. Many scientists, fresh from apparently important discoveries in narrow fields, need to be reminded of the lesson contained in the legend of St. Augustine, who when walking on the shore one day, absorbed in meditation, suddenly perceived a child that with a shell was ladling the sea into a hole in the sand. “What are you doing, my child?” asked St. Augustine. “I am emptying the ocean,” was the reply, “into this hole.”—“That is impossible.” “Not more impossible than for you to empty the universe into your intellect,” said the child, and vanished. Nordau is particularly prone to regard the small achievements of a certain school of alienists as having supplied him with a conclusive test of all excellence. Indeed, no part of his diatribe is more open to criticism than the use he makes of Science. If modern science is demonstrating any one thing more clearly than another, it is that the insights of the seers of our race as to the highest human aspirations and the deepest needs of the human spirit, meet not with contradiction but with support as knowledge of the cosmos becomes more extensive and more accurate. Nordau has neglected to reckon with the profound truth that finds expression in the celebrated saying of Lotze: “The more I myself have laboured to prepare the way for acceptance of the mechanical view of Nature in the region of organic life—in which region this view seemed to advance more timidly than the nature of the thing required—the more do I now feel impelled to bring into prominence the other aspect which was equally near to my heart during all these endeavours.... It is in such mediation [between the two aspects] that the true source of the life of science is to be found; not indeed in affirming now a fragment of one view and now a fragment of the other, but in showing how _absolutely universal is the extent_, and at the same time how _completely subordinate is the significance, of the mission which mechanism has to fulfil in the structure of the world_.” There is also hidden from Nordau’s view that noble conception of the place and significance of Science to which Tyndall gave expression in the eloquent peroration of his Belfast address more than twenty years ago: