For, first, since research must be cooperative and organized, institutionalism seizes the opportunity to lay the long fingers of its dead hand upon every condition and plan. Next, vulgar utility, because it purveys the physical sustenance of science, craftily opens and closes the doors through which the researcher has to walk. Then, the mixed motives of the individuals with whom the researcher must be associated--the desire for recognition in the scientific world, the desire for quick results, or for official position--insinuate themselves like sand in the cogwheels of a fine mechanism. Humanitarianism, with its well-meaning desire promptly to relieve distress, throws its arms around the neck of plain truth-seeking and drags it under the waves of popular clamor or applause. Even within the mind of the researcher, there is no real peace nor unity. Anger and impatience, plain sex-instinct, and even domestic virtues entangle his interests and divert him from the straight line of loyalty to his scientific aspirations. At times uncertainty seizes him as to whether the near-by values of efficiency as the world measures it be not greater, in fact, than the far values of fundamental truth. Thus is pictured the life of reason at its intellectual climax. This is the focus of the story, but not the whole of it. Around the central character cluster varied types of life-history, but every type is either self-contradictory, or consistently shallow, or inadequate because of its unwise goodness. Not less than in the rabble of instincts in O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms,” but only in a different manner, and on a more refined level, man is the victim of himself. The idea is pursued with both continuity and subtlety. With continuity because it pervades the minor as well as the major characters and incidents of the plot; with subtlety because over-simplification of motives is skilfully avoided. The finer qualities are presented as fine and sincere even though the life within which they occur be smitten with ultimate futility. There is, indeed, biting cynicism for virtues that are cold and calculating, but not for warm, impulsive goodness.