The essence of truth distilled in that last sentence will more and more impose itself. If soldiers will not fight on an empty stomach, still less will they fight on an empty soul. A shrug, a sensualism, an epigram, and the “lie of religion” is shattered beyond repair: so far, so good. But with religion there has gone the whole category of the ideal. In a world from which all values have been expelled, except the values of appetite, there remains no principle of sacrifice. The only maxim which it is capable of evolving from its own resources is that of egotism, enlightened by prudence; for that _credo_ men will do many things, but they will not die. Such a gospel may for a time be expounded, and even practised, by the noisy minorities who make laws and write books: the anonymous shoulders of the common people are strong enough to carry that and heavier burdens. But the peculiar weakness of any such philosophy is that it has only to be generally accepted in order to become impossible. Egotism and the pleasure-calculus will procure a brief, if not very respectable, ecstasy for the masters, as they loll in their carved and curtained litters, turning over with a languid hand the latest bibelot of selfishness. But let that point of view infect the bearers of the litter, and they will set it down with disturbing roughness. Morality begins where hedonism ends. In France the evolution, whether conducted in the personal consciousness of a master like Bourget, or in the general mind and being, has followed the same curve to the same issue. After Renan there was but one refinement possible: M. Anatole France appeared. But the signs of dissolution have, of late, been accumulating about this specialist in _patchouli_ and paganism. For instance, he has been translated into English. Anatomists like M. Michaut, whose book is one of the literary events of recent years, have made the tour of his philosophy from Dan to Beersheba, and found all barren. Through the _sociologisme_ of writers like Guyau, and the _solidarité_ of writers like Bourgeois, the new France has come back to the old sanities. The experiment of the passing generation consisted essentially in an attempt to live without a brain or a conscience. That experiment, it is curious to note, was pushed to its extreme by an English-writing, French-trained Irishman, Mr. George Moore. It has reached its Vale. A rhapsodist in the last issue of the _Sociological Review_ bewails, but at any rate confesses, the change. It is bad enough that “reactionary” illusions like patriotism should be returning to honour. But when you find University students going to Mass----Going on week-days. And Bergson and mysticism, construed as a tonic of action, setting the fashion.