“It was quite the same to me whether Jesus was God or not God; whether the Holy Ghost proceeded from the one or the other. It was likely neither necessary nor important for me to know how, when, and by whom the Gospels, or any one of the parables were composed, and whether they could be ascribed to Christ or not. What to me was important was that the light which for eighteen hundred years was the light of the world is that light still; but what name was to be given to the source of this light, or what were its component parts, and by whom it was lighted, was quite indifferent to me.” The difference in the two replies is one of words only. If therefore Nordau acknowledged that a sensible man could ask such a question, and if the reply of Nordau we have just quoted is recognised by him as his own opinion, he and Tolstoi would stand very much in the same category. But Nordau does not think that a perfectly sane mind would ask such a question; and if it was asked, he has another reply. This reply is however far from being so clear as the other. “If,” he says, “on the other hand, there is no belief in a God, it is also impossible to form a conception of the aim, for then the aim existing in consciousness only as an idea, in the absence of a universal consciousness, has no locus for existence; there is no place for it in nature.” From this it ought to follow that, if a man does not believe in God, there is no God, and consequently there can be no aim. He then proceeds to argue that, if there be no aim, it is useless to ask the question, “Wherefore am I alive?” but that we can ask the question, “Why do we live?” His reply to this is characteristic: “We live in obedience to the mechanical law of causality, which requires no plan and no universal consciousness.” It is curious to behold how Nordau cannot perceive that his question, “Why do we live?” implies the question, “Whence the mechanical law of causality?” and that his reply is simply, “We live because we live.” Once he has accepted this self-delusion as a solid foundation, his reasoning again becomes rational, and does not bear on the point before us. The most astounding part of it is that Nordau considers Tolstoi, and all others whose instinct, whose emotion, and whose immutable reasoning point to a cause behind Nordau’s home-made mechanical law of causality, as thereby showing signs of mental degeneration.