Nature, Science, Humanity, are the three terms of initiation. First comes nature, which rules everything; then the revelations of nature, revelations which mean science--that is to say, phenomena made clear in themselves and observed by man; and lastly, the appropriation of phenomena for useful social purposes.... There is no error in nature, no perversity in man; evil comes only from society.... He [Mme. Adam's father] delighted in proving to me that it was useless for man to seek beyond nature for unattainable chimeras, for the infinite which our finite conception was unable to understand, and for the immaterial, which our materiality can never satisfactorily explain.... They [these humanitarian socialists] resembled my father. Their doubts--and they had many!--were of too recent a date to have dried up their souls; _they no longer believed in a divine Christ; they still believed in a human one_. They worshipped that mysterious Science, which replaced for them the supernatural, and which had not then brought all its brutality to light in crushing man under machinery. Could anything be more illuminating than that? Does it not set forth the close cousinship of humanitarianism with socialism and the fungous growth of the two out of the mouldering ruins of faith and the foul reek of a sensuous philosophy? And do you not see why any surrender to this modern cult of human comfort means the indefinite postponement of that fresh-dawning ideal which shall bring life to literature and art and evoke once more the golden destiny of man?