To turn our back upon emotions and to take our place at the table of science means to ignore all that is beautiful, lovable, ennobling, and hopeful, to shut our eyes to the charms of form, colour, motion, and our ears to music, and to concentrate our attention upon the repast spread on the table of science: the pleasure of discovering bacteria in human tissue, the curiosity of counting the throbs of a frog’s heart after being torn from the living body, the sensation of ascertaining the effect of the gastric juices on the foot of a living rabbit inserted into a living dog’s stomach. We take no side in the question of vivisection, or any other scientific methods, but without in the least minimizing the great services rendered, and to be rendered, by science to humanity, we must express our astonishment that any sound mind, knowing what scientific methods are, and must be, can seriously suggest that scientific investigation should supersede art and poetry. If we believed in degeneration, such opinions would be the first examples of it we should quote. Poets and philosophers who deal with emotions, so to say with immaterial phenomena, impalpable to every one of our senses, but demonstrated as eternally real by their effects, must needs make use of symbols, or, to be more exact, of more symbols, vaguer symbols, and bolder symbols than those which naturally enter into language. To deny them this right is equal to denying the mathematician the use of the letter _X_, which stands for unknown quantities, and which is handled by him as dexterously as if it were the most familiar object in the world. If human beings were not allowed to speak about what their imagination conjures up, what their feelings prompt, and what irresistible instincts point to, they would be brought alarmingly near to the level of the beast. The French symbolists being poets, might not have formulated into distinct thoughts what we have said above, but they have certainly felt it all, and much more. They have felt themselves surrounded by undefined and undefinable _X’s_ of far greater moment to their lives, to their happiness, and to their best instincts, than all the known and half-known quantities of science. In attempting to give expression to their feelings and to their thoughts regarding the all-important unknown, and to evoke among their fellow-beings an interest in them, they have found themselves justified in using any means, including symbolism, for their purpose.