This is especially natural with people whose walk in life has precluded them from giving that absorbing attention to psychology and biology which to a sound mind is indispensable before it can master, or believe, the scientists’ theories of “mechanical causality,” and the annihilation of the conscious _Ego_. Nordau, like many other scientific enthusiasts, seems to labour under the impression that all the loud-voiced people, who affect complete irreligiosity, and who pose as free-thinkers, are really convinced that the scientific discovery of yesterday, which might be upset by the discovery of to-morrow, sufficiently explains the world and themselves. This is far from being the case. How often when we scratch the atheist do we not find the superstitiously devout. How many men could be found in the world who are so capable of satisfying all their curiosity regarding the unknown by scientific theories that they might be quoted in support of the artificiality of religious instincts? They would certainly number very few. And yet scientists of Nordau’s stamp are apt to regard such men as the only really sane ones, and the rest of humanity as to some extent degenerate. But how does Nordau know anything about Ibsen’s religious opinions? He simply studies the characters in Ibsen’s pieces and takes for granted that Ibsen must necessarily hold the same opinions as his characters. This absurd assumption, indispensable to his purpose, leads him sometimes into ridiculous dilemmas from which he escapes in a not less ridiculous manner. When he finds that Ibsen has _dramatis personæ_ of diametrically opposed opinions and beliefs, he does not know which of them represents Ibsen’s opinions and Ibsen’s beliefs. Determined not to notice the simple fact that none of them represent Ibsen’s views, he falls back on the expediency of declaring that, because his characters differ, Ibsen does not know his own mind, a fact which in our alienist’s view points to degeneracy. He quotes copiously from Ibsen’s pieces in order to show that those characters who have committed evil deeds, without having resigned themselves to being utterly bad, yearn for confession. From this we must conclude that Nordau considers a longing for confession in those who have sinned as an obsession and as pertaining to stigmata of degeneration. To make capital out of this, Nordau sticks hard to his assumption that Ibsen’s object is to preach some kind of creed by proclaiming his own opinions through his characters. Few people in the world really know what Ibsen’s final object and real aims are; but his immediate object, it will be granted, is to show his contemporaries what they really are, and so sternly and so cogently does he pursue this object that, while other dramatists show their spectators the defects of others, Ibsen lays bare their own.