The imperial court is assembled. A stage has been erected. The court astrologer announces the play and Mephistopheles is installed in the prompter's box. All is in expectation and excitement. Then on the stage is seen rising from the ground the form of Faust attended by the tripod. He touches the tripod with the glowing key. A dense mist of incense arises, and as it clears away is seen--Paris. His appearance is greeted by the enthusiastic comments of the court ladies, young and old, and criticized by the men courtiers--with evident jealousy. Helen then appears, and the comments and criticisms are reversed, female jealousy now having its turn. Faust stands entranced at the loveliness of Helen. In spite of the angry protests of Mephistopheles from the prompter's box, who tells him to keep to his rôle and not to be taken in by a mere phantom of his own raising. Faust, unable any longer to control himself when Paris attempts to carry off Helen, rushes forward to rescue her. A great explosion takes place and all is darkness. Faust has fallen senseless to the ground. Mephistopheles picks him up and carries him away--with contemptuous remarks. At the beginning of the next act we find Faust lying, still insensible, on his bed in his old room, where we first met him--his professor's study. His daring attempt to grasp ideal beauty has ended, as it often does end, and as it ended in Goethe's own case, in failure of a sudden and explosive nature. He is now to have an experience of a different nature. During the years while he has been making his first trial of the outer world, his old Famulus, Wagner, now professor in Faust's place, has been devoting _his_ whole time and energies to realising that dream of science--the chemical production of life. It is, says Professor Romanes, 'the dream of modern science that a machine _may_ finally be constructed so elaborate in its multiple play of forces that it would begin to show evidences of consciousness and mind'--mind and motion being, according to certain modern scientists, identical. Curiously enough a scientist of the same name--Wagner--who lived in the last century, did, like Faust's Famulus Wagner, in the same way devote his life to the production of a living organism--a 'homunculus'--in the conviction, as he asserted, that 'in course of time chemistry is bound to succeed in producing organic bodies and in creating a human being by means of crystallization'--an assertion not very different from that of a still more trustworthy scientist, for Professor Huxley himself has told us that he lived in 'the hope and the faith that in course of time we shall see our way from the constituents of the protoplasm to its properties,' _i.e._ from carbonic acid, water, and ammonia to that mysterious thing which we call vitality or life--from the molecular motion of the brain to Socratic wisdom, Shakespearean genius, and Christian faith, hope and charity.