He has suggested in the same essays two solutions of the ethical problem. In our fight with Nature there is first the alternative of complete surrender, abandonment and acceptance. This is the choice of the saints and the sages. The other alternative is to fight the fight for its own sake, and to challenge the world on its own ground. If we refuse to serve Nature we may well try to surpass it, and disprove it. Dreiser seems very much in favor of those Promethean ethics. The universal forces may well overtake us and beat us at the game. What of that? If we cannot win, let us, at least, know that we tried. Here Dreiser once more points out a moral, not of conscience but of science. He revives Socrates’ dictum “Know thyself” and the world along with you. This may be the best road to victory when all is told. Surrounded on all sides by superhuman energies let us prove ourselves supermen to meet them, and if we are ominously assailed, let us at least find out the name of our assailant. If we suffer, let us gladly, proudly confess it. As for Theodore Dreiser himself, he declares that a nook beside the giant Prometheus on the rock would please him more than a seat in the orchestra of Fra Angelico’s winged seraphs. This ethics does not lack generosity and heroism. When all is said, Dreiser the philosopher and Dreiser the artist go hand in hand. He accepts the world as it is. Let it be good or evil, a means toward an end or an end in itself, a providential purpose or such stuff as dreams are made of, this huge mystery is in itself something worth meditating and writing upon. What do evolution, melioration and progress matter? When Dreiser returns after twenty years to his native Hoosier village he is concerned with only one question. Have his countrymen succeeded in enriching their sensuous experience and developing their perceptive capacity, or shall we admit that since the days of King Solomon, or Euripides or Shakespeare man’s faculty to enjoy the world has not made any progress? Euripides’ “Medea,” the “Canticle of Canticles,” “Macbeth,” are just as true and beautiful to-day as they were centuries ago. Have we moderns found anything superior to the sensuous delight which these works of the past allow us to enjoy? Can anything beyond be imagined? What have time and space to do with the enjoyment of life? No mechanical device can accelerate spiritual progress. Theodore Dreiser cannot be imposed upon by the conquest of the air or of the asphalt. The Big Bertha and the asphyxiating gas are not signs to him of human supremacy. At present man does not any more understand the tremendous forces which he commands than he did in his primitive days, although he can conceive of still more tremendous energies than those which he sees at play around him. Our response to the stimuli of Nature has improved very little. There seems to be a maximum limit of sensations beyond which we cannot pass. Who can quote a writer able to feel more keenly than Homer? When