Keeping house resembles a clock. You wind it up on Saturday night and it puts in the rest of the week in running down. Life is about as satisfactory in its attempts as the thrusts of swordsmen fencing with blindfolded eyes. One of my greatest regrets has been that life has no back door. Necessity is quite as often the mother of goodness as invention. In the old wars recorded eloquently in tapestries, marbles, canvasses, men died and kept their faith. The coming wars will be wars of science. They will be fought largely by the brain, in lonely rooms. Men will die just the same, but they will not keep their faith. Sacrifices will be heaped to a new God—Super-Mechanics. Yet the Greeks used to write songs to Apollo in which they called him both _Destroyer_ and _Healer_. If circles of time are vast, still they are circles. Republics have been the world’s dream of justice. Now Science is shaking them sadly. What is there Science is not shaking? Is there a field of mind not attacked? The thinking of France, the philosophical dreaming of Germany, the peculiarly destructive quality in the brain of the Hebrew, have together been helpful in hastening change. There is no value not suffering transformation. Hear what De Tocqueville writes about democracy in America. He had one of the most dangerously penetrating minds the world has known: _I think that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever existed before ... men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy but it prevents existence._ The gentle, the humanity loving philosophizing of the painter, Redon, in his notes, is good to know. It tells us, too, how great his heart was. He insists continually upon something I have always believed, that, in supreme creating, the heart, nobility of nature, play a not yet credited part. As the Bhagavad Gita is a breviary for the soul, some of the notes of Redon are a breviary for art and its making. Few can read him without feeling an impulse to be better, loftier visioned. His brief notes, his diary jottings, are a kind of New Testament of Beauty. A Biblical soul, flinging forth proud, powerful phrases! A prophet painting super-terrestrial flowers, too ripe in color, too wise, graceful, lovely, but weighted with divine regret!