What ails it, at bottom, is the delusion that all the mysteries, given doctors enough, theories enough, pills enough, may be solved--that it is all a matter of finding a panacea, unearthing a prophet, passing a bill. If it turns to Nietzsche, however gingerly and suspiciously, it will turn only to fresh disappointment and dismay, for Nietzsche is no quack with another sure cure, but simply an iconoclast who shows that all the sure cures of the past and present have failed, and _must_ fail--and particularly the sure cure of the mob, the scheme of determining the diagnosis by taking a vote, the notion that the medicine which most pleases the grossest palates is the medicine to get the patient upon his legs. Nietzsche is no reformer; he is an assassin of reformers; if he preaches anything at all, it is that reform is useless, illusory--above all, unnecessary. The patient is really not dying at all. Let him get up and dance! Let him pick up his bed and employ it upon the skulls of his physicians! Life is not a disease to be treated with boluses and philtres, not an affliction to be shirked and sentimentalized, but an adventure to be savoured and enjoyed--life, here and now, is the highest imaginable experience. What the world needs is not a cure for it, but room for it, freedom for it, innocent zest for it. So accepted and regarded, half of its terrors vanish at once, and even its unescapable catastrophes take on a certain high stateliness, a fine æsthetic dignity. This is the tragic view that Mr. Muir cries up--life as joy triumphing over fate. "For the character of tragedy is not negative and condemnatory, but deeply affirmative and joyous." The ideal man is not the time-serving slave of Christendom, in endless terror of God, forever flattering and bribing God, but the Nietzschean _Ja-sager,_ the yes-sayer, facing destiny courageously and a bit proudly, living to the full the life that lies within his grasp in the present, accepting its terms as he finds them, undaunted by the impenetrable shadows that loom ahead.