It is evident that he has not seen Millais’ latest pictures. Had he done so, he would not have jeopardized his whole system of reasoning by holding Millais up as an example of degeneration. Here, as in many other cases, Nordau, while exhibiting an enormous erudition, reveals a remarkable want of logic. To call Millais degenerate is a desperate way out of a dilemma in which he has landed himself by asserting, on the one hand, that those who paint pictures such as Millais painted years ago are people with degenerate brains, and, on the other, that people who produce pictures such as Millais paints now are people of sound mind. If degeneration is the first step towards a high, normal, and sound development, Nordau has been guilty of much ado about nothing. Had he ever beheld Holman Hunt’s “Shadow of the Cross” even in an engraving, he could not in his description of it have committed the mistakes he has unless his mind is impervious to pictorial impressions. He says that “the shadow of his (Christ’s) body falling on the ground shows the form of a cross.” This is not true. The shadow of Christ’s body falls on the wall, where a tool shelf and suspended tools simulate a cross. Nordau’s erroneous description will certainly prejudice those who have not seen the picture against Holman Hunt. It is natural that the materialist, the pseudo-scientifically superstitious, and the Philistine tendencies of our age, so eminently embodied in the mind of Nordau, and against which the pre-Raphaelite school is a protest, should militate against a fair appreciation of the tentative departure of these innovators. The essence of their mysticism and their symbolism is their belief in what, for lack of a better term, has been called their spiritual life—the belief that the mind is not a condition of matter, but that our thinking _Ego_ might have existed before it was incarnated, and that it will live after our body has decayed. Could our earthly existence be proved finite with certainty, could any future existence be proved a vain dream, incompatible with reason, then indeed would pre-Raphaelitism be the beginning of folly, as, in fact, would most of the things which now tend to lighten and beautify our lives. We shall not here endeavour to determine the five-thousand-year-old discussion regarding eternal life. We shall simply point out that the proofs on which the so-called materialists base their conclusions are not so absolutely convincing as to stigmatize their opponents as lunatics.