I would not for a moment take advantage of the present opportunity to discourage the study of human nature and of the humanities, but for what is called the best opening for a constructive career give me nature. The ground for my preference is that human nature is an exhaustible fountain of research; Homer understood it well; Solomon fathomed it; Shakespeare divined it, both normal and abnormal; the modernists have been squeezing out the last drops of abnormality. Nature, studied since Aristotle’s time, is still full to the brim; no perceptible falling of its tides is evident from any point at which it is attacked, from nebulæ to protoplasm; it is always wholesome, refreshing and invigorating. Of the two most creative literary artists of our time, Maeterlinck, jaded with human abnormality, comes back to the bee and the flowers and the “blue bird,” with a delicious renewal of youth, while Rostand turns to the barnyard. The romanticists acted from the start, following here in the wake of the pseudo-classicists, on Professor Osborn’s assumption that normal human nature is something that may be bottled up once for all and put by on a shelf, though they would have been pained to learn from him that even abnormal human nature may also be bottled up and put by in the same fashion. Sophistries of this kind should perhaps be pardoned in the man of science when so many men who are supposed to stand for letters have shown him the way. Great literature is an imaginative and symbolical interpretation of an infinite that is accessible only to those who possess in some degree the same type of imagination. A writer like Maeterlinck, whom Professor Osborn takes to be representative of literature in general, is merely a late exponent of a movement that from the start turned away from this human infinite towards pantheistic revery.