and completed epoch? Even if we supposed, with Mr. Matthew Arnold, that every brilliant age, such as the Renaissance, every age of art and science, harbours in its own bosom the germs of death, does that fact constitute a reason for lowering one’s estimate of such epochs of intense life, and is it not better for a people to have lived, even though but for a few years, than to have slept through centuries? [Sidenote: Analogy between life of nation and that of individual.] Nothing is eternal. When a nation has enjoyed a brilliant life during a certain number of years or centuries, when it has produced great artists or great scholars, there necessarily comes a period of comparative exhaustion. Religions also are subject to the law of birth, maturity, and decay. Where does the responsibility lie? On the very laws of life, which do not permit plants to blossom eternally, and which in general provide, in all the kingdoms of the natural world, that there shall be nothing so fragile as a flower. But if all human things are transitory, to labour for the efflorescence of intelligence, to regard art and science as the supreme aim of life, is precisely to pursue that which is least perishable. Art, science, the last achievements of the human mind do not decay; man alone, the individual disappears, and the ancient adage is eternally true: “Art is long, and life is short.” As to true justice, it also is surely eternal; but if by true justice be understood the hard law of Jehovah, the worship of this law has always fallen upon the insignificant epochs of history, and precisely upon the epochs of injustice and barbarism. Therein lies the explanation of the fact that that cult has flourished at periods when nations were the most robust and difficult to subdue. The manners of such nations are ferocious, their life at bottom is quite contrary to the ideal of justice, and their religious faith resembles their manners, and is violent and savage, and inclines them to intolerance, to fanaticism, to massacre; but all these elements of injustice none the less constitute, in the people that unites them all, so many additional chances of victory over other people. Later, when manners become more civilized, when faith diminishes and art and science are born, a nation often becomes weaker, directly as it becomes nobler; the finer an organism is, the more delicate it becomes, the easier it is to break. Renouncement of self, submission of the weak to the strong, and of the strongest to an all-powerful priest, the species of hierarchy that obtained in Judea, in India, and Europe during the Middle Ages, formerly gave a people a superiority in the struggle for existence, like that of a rock over a vegetable, of an oak over a sensitive plant, of a bull or an elephant over man; but is precisely that kind of effectiveness the ideal of humanity, and the aim to be proposed to human effort? To raise art and science to their highest possible