However, even an intellect so positive and so sceptical as that of Zola has been unable to resist the lures of faith. There is a very interesting note on this subject in the _Journal_ of de Goncourt, dated February 20, 1883. “To-night, after dinner, at the foot of the bedstead of carved wood, where coffee was served, Zola began to talk of death, on which his thoughts have been fixed more than ever since the death of his mother. After a short silence, he said that death had made an in-road on the nihilism of his religious convictions, as he could not face the possibility of an eternal separation.” In strata of society less impregnated with rational and scientific thought, it is plain that the return to religion must be more common. I recall the case of a woman of the people, a workwoman, who declared that she formerly had had no belief, but that, since the birth of her son, she had begun to believe in the good God, as she was convinced that it was only by such a belief that she could guard the life of her child from the evils of the world. As things are, it is not wonderful that many people decline to educate their children in an exclusively scientific spirit, which is destructive to faith, as they cannot substitute for faith something equally consoling. Perhaps ideas of this kind lie behind the story of the apple of the Garden of Eden and the invention of the words of Jahveh: “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Genesis ii. 17). The legend of Prometheus, who stole fire from heaven, and was chained to a rock, is in the same category. Solomon gave voice to the same idea, in the clearest way, in his words: “I communed with mine own heart, saying, Lo, I am come to great estate, and have gotten more wisdom than all they that have been before me in Jerusalem; yea, my heart had great experience of wisdom and knowledge. “And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. “For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge, increaseth sorrow” (Ecclesiastes, i. 16). Much later, Shakespeare offered to us in _Hamlet_, the type of a man very highly cultivated, in whom reason and reflection had arrested action. As he could not solve by reason the problems that haunted him, he asked if it were worth while to remain alive. Then followed the famous lines: “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”