But nobody arrives at any destination. As reason fails to guide the researcher to his desired haven, so also instinctive wholesomeness fails of its goal. The one deeply lovable person in the entire story would have demonstrated, if anyone could do it under the presuppositions of the author, that life can achieve a worth-while destiny otherwise than through knowledge. Leora is natural, spontaneous, affectionate; she makes adjustments by simple directness of feeling without artifice or ambition; though she has no discernible philosophy of life, she is dependable; on the whole, she seems to be contented. But her simplicity is that of narrowness, not of comprehension; she achieves adaptation but not mastery of her situations, and in the end her lack of any real understanding of the scientific habits and standards of her husband overwhelms them both in a needless tragedy. Everywhere is frustration by inherent, unchangeable defects; yet no tears, no pathos (for there is no “might have been”); the irrational is both foreground and background. A surd in every experience would not necessarily mean defeat if there were any self-sustaining meanings also. But if our supposed meanings turn out to be surds! There shines in the earlier parts of the story the steady brilliance of one ideal, that of unswerving devotion to pure science--wanting to know the exact truth at all costs. This ideal is incarnated in a sturdy-willed, growly old priest of the laboratory from whom young men of science catch the holy flame. They, one and all, allow it to flicker and smolder; some of them let it go out; but for a long time the old priest’s light burns steadily on. The reader half believes that here, for just once, rationality is to vindicate itself. At last there comes to the veteran researcher an opportunity to guard research, and to extend it, by administering a research institution that possesses abundant funds. Unknowing that his motives are mixed and contradictory, he accepts the fatal advancement, becomes compromised, and is lost. As a symbol of his descent the novelist makes him sink into senile dementia. “Vanity of vanities!... All is vanity.” How much has this literary exploitation of the irrational in man had to do with the disillusionment that has been spreading among us? Have we here chiefly a cause, or chiefly an effect? If a cause, is it a major or a minor one? In any case we have a symptom or diagnostic fact. Disillusionment has gone far enough to be represented in a considerable body of literature that cannot be ignored. Whatever much-read novels and much-witnessed plays reveal concerning a people or an age is here revealed; whatever they do to people is being done here and now.