And as with flying, so with all similar advances in mechanical discovery. Man creates and man consumes; no happier for a provision which merely feeds a restless, hungry impulse towards change. So many houses, so many clothes, so many elaborate meals, so many holidays to-day. The number is doubled to-morrow. The many acquiesce: the few, on the one extreme, accept and rejoice; the few, on the other, push aside the banquet untasted, or spurn the feast with bitter gibe at the futility of it all. “The barrenness and ignobleness of the labourer’s life,” says a modern philosopher, “consists in the fact that it is moved by no ideal inner springs.” But the labourer has no monopoly in such a loss and deficiency. The whole of modern life has the accusation resting upon it, that it is moved by no ideal inner springs. Some find satisfaction in political energies, others in religious ardours; others, again,--in the mere play and triviality of wealth accumulation,--card games, or ingenious children’s diversions carried into the larger universe of human affairs. Pursuit of knowledge claims a tiny “remnant,” with a high intellectual hunger; or enthusiasm for the future of the race, as they see always, luminous and clear on the horizon, the shining of the star of a new dawn. But to the general these “ideal inner springs” are wanting. They feel confused in a world of confusion. Social unrest affects large masses of them whose restlessness finds no clear fruit in action. Literature proclaims a disenchantment. Man wanders unsatisfied in the spacious palaces of his new material splendour. Many, after a rebellion at the time of adolescence, settle down into acceptance; into making the “best of it” in a world hard to understand, but, on the whole, easy to endure. Others still refuse to relinquish the past for the intangible, elusive promises of the future. “Enlightened persons,” wrote Châteaubriand, “cannot understand how a Catholic like myself can persist in sitting in the shadow of what they call ruins. Tell me, for pity’s sake, in the individual and philosophical society which you offer me, where shall I find a family and a God?” * * * * *