"What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that glitter in his face; a thing to set children screaming;-- ... Poor soul here for so little, cast among so many hardships filled with desires, so incommensurate and so inconsistent; savagely surrounded, savagely descended, irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow lives, ... infinitely childish, often admirably valiant, often touchingly kind; sitting down to debate of right or wrong and the attributes of the Deity; rising up to battle for an egg or die for an idea.... To touch the heart of his mystery we find in him one thought, strange to the point of lunacy, the thought of duty, the thought of something owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God; an ideal of decency to which he would rise if possible, a limit of shame, below which if it be possible he will not stoop.... Not in man alone, but we trace it in dogs and cats which we know fairly well, and doubtless some similar point of honour sways the elephant, the oyster and the louse, of whom we know so little"-- Alas, Poor Yorick! How a century of liberty has humbled him. It is thus the successors of Rousseau, of Chateaubriand, of the believers in the perfectibility of man, speak--saying, calmly, "The Empire of this world belongs to force"--and that "Hitherto in our judgments of men we have taken for our masters the oracles and poets, and like them we have received for certain truths the noble dreams of our imaginations and the imperious suggestions of our hearts. We have bound ourselves by the partiality of religious divinations, and we have shaped our doctrines by our instincts and our vexations.... Science at last approaches with exact and penetrating implements ... and in this employment of science, in this conception of things, there is a new art, a new morality, a new polity, a new religion, and it is in the present time our task to discover them." We must not forget to consider a little the amusing change our century has seen in the alteration of its heroic ideals. For the sentimental rubbish, the dripping egotism of a Werther, of a Manfred, in whom the young of their day found the most adequate expression of their self-consciousness, we have substituted the Stevenson and Kipling hero--hard-headed, silent, practical, scornful of abstractions, contemptuous of emotions, who has but two dominant ideals, patriotism and duty; who keeps his pores open and his mouth shut.