The “ache of modernism” and the turmoil of Whitman’s “growing arrogance of realism” confront the demands of the human spirit for adventure and of the human heart for triumph over time and change. Science in its buoyant beginnings had provided great inspiration, of wonderful gifts for man’s enjoyment, of wonderful knowledge of the universal secret. Sixty years ago it seemed to be offering humanity not only control of material forces and cunning invention, but also the interpretation of the secret of life and destiny. But science to-day--in the critic’s examination--protests in literature the affirmation of a bankrupt creed. The revelation of the secret has become the assertion of Haeckel, that “consciousness, thought, and speculation are functions of the ganglionic cells of the cortex of the brain.” And the inspiration of the discovery sinks back into the declaration that “Democracy is an expression of the constant desire for change, due to a hope that change will bring some remedy for the really incurable ills of human nature.” In such a critic as Mr. Hardy, reaction against this failure, the bankruptcy of the creed of science, passes into an almost savage revolt against the blind purposes of life; its clumsy cruelties, its lack of guidance or intelligible meaning. “Hardy goes so far as to suggest that God is either a defeated God or that He is indifferent, if not actually hostile, to men.” “Human beings are for him worthy of praise and pity because they have been laden with sorrows which they did not deserve, and are kinder to one another than God is kind to them.”[20] This great writer sees in vision the tragedy of “the modern vice of unrest,” of “the view of life as a thing to be put up with, replacing that zest for existence which was so intense in early civilisation.” “It is the beginning of the coming universal wish not to live.”