And in the second half of the nineteenth century, an age essentially unphilosophical and technical, dominated by a myopic specialism and by historical materialism, this ideal took a practical form, not so much in the popularization as in the vulgarization of science--or, rather, of pseudo-science--venting itself in a flood of cheap, popular, and propagandist literature. Science sought to popularize itself as if it were its function to come down to the people and subserve their passions, and not the duty of the people to rise to science and through science to rise to higher heights, to new and profounder aspirations. All this led Brunetière to proclaim the bankruptcy of science, and this science--if you like to call it science--did in effect become bankrupt. And as it failed to satisfy, men continued their quest for happiness, but without finding it, either in wealth, or in knowledge, or in power, or in pleasure, or in resignation, or in a good conscience, or in culture. And the result was pessimism. Neither did the gospel of progress satisfy. What end did progress serve? Man would not accommodate himself to rationalism; the _Kulturkampf_ did not suffice him; he sought to give a final finality to life, and what I call the final finality is the real _hontôs hon_. And the famous _maladie du siècle_, which announced itself in Rousseau and was exhibited more plainly in Sénancour's _Obermann_ than in any other character, neither was nor is anything else but the loss of faith in the immortality of the soul, in the human finality of the Universe. The truest symbol of it is to be found in a creation of fiction, Dr. Faustus. This immortal Dr. Faustus, the product of the Renaissance and the Reformation, first comes into our ken at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when in 1604 he is introduced to us by Christopher Marlowe. This is the same character that Goethe was to rediscover two centuries later, although in certain respects the earlier Faust was the fresher and more spontaneous. And side by side with him Mephistopheles appears, of whom Faust asks: "What good will my soul do thy lord?" "Enlarge his kingdom," Mephistopheles replies. "Is that the reason why he tempts us thus?" the Doctor asks again, and the evil spirit answers: "_Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris_," which, mistranslated into Romance, is the equivalent of our proverb--"The misfortune of many is the consolation of fools." "Where we are is hell, and where hell is there must we ever be," Mephistopheles continues, to which Faust answers that he thinks hell's a fable and asks him who made the world. And finally this tragic Doctor, tortured with our torture, meets Helen, who, although no doubt Marlowe never suspected it, is none other than renascent Culture. And in Marlowe's _Faust_ there is a scene that is worth the whole of the second part of the _Faust_ of Goethe. Faust says to Helen: "Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss"--and he kisses her--