This is easily accounted for by the fact that our facilities for gaining a personal knowledge of one another have greatly increased of late years, and also that our capacity for reading the text of human nature has developed itself both in breadth and depth. Our self-consciousness has become wide awake, our personal needs are more complicated, and our understanding of one another is finer and more flexible than it used to be, while our feelings in general have become more sensitive and we are more easily moved than formerly. What before Keller’s time were whole notes with a stop, became with Keller half notes dwelling long on an even tone, and are now an irritating rising and falling of semiquavers which require a finer ear and between which the pauses are fewer. Our notion of health itself has undergone continual changes, and is changing still. With Keller it signifies something symmetrical, something which changes unwillingly and then only to spring back again into what it was at first. It is health in the abstract, something universal and typical and authentic, but which would not suffice for the present creative characteristic, since we know to how many oscillations, to how much heaviness, discomfort and suffering, even the most vigorous health is subject; moreover, we know that health in other words is really nothing but a certain overplus of vital energy which helps us on to our legs again every time that we succumb. But as for meaning anything absolute, continuous and unbroken, as in the case of animal life--that, although it may have been Keller’s meaning, is not health in the sense that we understand it now. The literature which bases its creations on this interpretation of human nature is now only in its first groping beginnings; the authors whose nerves are as a sensitive, stringed instrument are scarce indeed--there are but one or two.