We are fond of calling this an age of transition, but if we trace history back we find that practically every age--at least for many centuries--has been an age of transition. If we must set a starting-point from which we have been moving, the social philosopher will be inclined to place it about the beginning of the sixteenth century. If we have been in transition for four hundred years, it seems almost time to settle down from this wild ferment of beliefs and discoveries that has kept the world’s mind in constant turmoil since the time of the Renaissance. There are signs that such a crystallization is taking place. We are weeding out our culture, and casting aside the classical literature that was the breeding-ground for the old ideas. We have achieved as yet little to take its place. Most of the modern literature is rather a restless groping about in the dark for new modes of thinking and new principles of life, and thus far it hardly seems to have grasped the robust and vital in the new to any appreciable extent. One can hardly believe that this morbid virus that is still working with undiminished vigor and deadly effect will succeed in making itself the dominant note in European literature for the next five hundred years. One hates to think that our posterity is to be doomed to torture itself into appreciating our feverish modern art and music, and learn to rank the wild complexities of Strauss with the sublimities of Beethoven. Shall we be sure that the conquest of the air is finally achieved and a third dimension added to man’s traveling, or is it all simply another daring and brilliant stab at the impossible, another of those blasphemies against nature which impious man is constantly striving to commit? There are few signs of the Socialistic State, but who knows what births of new institutions, of which we are now quite unaware, future ages will see to have been developing in our very midst? Is religion doomed, or is it merely being transformed, so that we shall be seen to have been creating amid all our indifference a new type and a new ideal? Will our age actually be distinctive as the era of the Dawn of Peace, or will the baby institution of arbitration disappear before a crude and terrible reality? Are we progressing, or shall we seem to have sown the seeds of world decay in this age of ours, and at a great crisis in history let slip another opportunity to carry mankind to a higher social level? It is maddening to the philosopher to think how long he will have to live to find an answer to these questions. He wants to know, but in the present all he can do is to guess at random. Not immortality, but an opportunity to wake up every hundred years or so to see how the world is progressing, may well be his desire and his dream. Such an immortality may be incredible, but it is the only form which has ever proved satisfactory, or ever will, to the rational man. X THE EXPERIMENTAL LIFE