Academic stubborn opposition to new and revolutionary theories of all kinds is one phase of the mental malady of Respectability. All hierarchies and autocracies have the sacrosanct seal of Respectability; they have a conventional reputation to maintain, and it is to their vital interest to fight innovating opinion. For instance, the French Academy refuses persistently to elect M. Zola, on the very plea of his literary unconventionality and virility. He writes for the thoughtful and wide-visioned, and not for the horde of shallow Respectables. Yet Zola is beyond doubt the greatest novelist of our age; and perhaps the only French novelist of his day who can count upon immortality. It is his greatness, his genius, that exclude him from the narrow coterie. "My position is simple," he writes. "Since there is an Academy in France, I ought to belong to it. I have stood for election, and I cannot recognise anything wrong on my part in having done so. So long as I continue to stand, I am not beaten, therefore I will always stand." But Zola may rest well content; he has won greater fame and honour than the Academy could confer upon him. * * * * * Instance, again, the Respectable hostility to the evolutionary theory. Was the opposition entirely motived by a spirit of scientific scepticism and caution? Certainly not. The main attack was made by the army of Respectables, who became exceedingly angry with Charles Darwin because he calmly demolished a number of groundless suppositions as to the origin of life, the descent of man, and the development of the sense of morality. Your true conventionalist, confronted with a new and startling idea, is like the savage who lashes himself into a passion at the sight of a steamboat or some other mechanical invention. The savage wants to smash the machine and the man who made it. * * * * * Mr. Lawson Tait, the well-known physician, has stated that he suffered in social and professional life for his acceptance of the Darwinian hypothesis. Mr. Tait writes: "'The Origin of Species' was published in 1859. I came across it in 1861--as a boy of 17--it captivated me, and took such a hold of me that I tried the application of its principle in every direction open to my youthful mind. In 1863, as president of the Hunterian Medical Society (the Society of University Students), I applied Darwin's doctrines in directions which brought upon me the expressed anger of the authorities, and my career as a University student was in danger of a premature ending. Not only was there not a single professor of the University of Edinburgh at that time who was other than actively hostile to Darwin's views, but the acceptance of them actually drove me from my native city, in 1866." Such is a typical illustration of the mental corrosion induced by the insanity of Academic Respectability.