To perceive the true direction and to estimate the relative force of a large human movement requires a long interval of time. Caught in an eddy of the moment, we may seem to be drifting backward, when in reality to the spectator on the shore we are being swept onward with great rapidity. The same world of experience seemed to Parmenides to exclude by its very nature all motion, and to Heraclitus to derive its only reality from its perpetual change. It is the standard and the point of view that control such judgments, and we are entitled to ask of any standard or point of view, _Quid juris?_ Nordau, however, has not asked himself that question. Seizing upon some partially completed anthropological investigations, with their half-speculative inferences, he has fashioned for himself a yard-stick with which to measure civilization. Aristotle long ago pointed out that the true difference between the poet and the historian is to be found in the fact that the former relates what may happen, the latter what has happened. One might similarly distinguish the man of science, who applies what has been proved, from the charlatan, who seeks to apply what has not been proved. As a result of dissenting from Nordau’s premises, method, and conclusions, it is by no means necessary to be forced to defend all the phases of modern civilization that he attacks. Some of them, no doubt, are unwholesome, but for reasons other than those which this critic adduces. Many of them are mere fleeting phenomena, confined within the narrowest limits, and the world at large first heard of them from Nordau’s pages. It is only a lack of humour that can elevate such traits and tendencies into the position of powerful forces in human culture, such as Platonism, Humanism, or Christianity. The old Sophist was right when he commended humour as the test of gravity.