al conduct, as by his
judgments on events and men. The pure passion of abstract thought fires
each to do the best that is his to do. His life is to be the
word-for-word translation of his own spirit."

The death-bed repentance of a century, born skeptical, reared decadent,
and professing practical materialism; the conversion of a literature
from the pure passion of the senses to the pure passion of abstract
thought; the assumption of an apostolic mission by journalists,
novelists, playwrights, college professors, and scientific masters, will
doubtless furnish the century to come with one of its most curious and
interesting fields of study. It is an episode in evolution which may
indeed be termed dramatic, this fifth act of the nineteenth-century epic
of France,--or it might be called, of Paris; the story of its pilgrimage
from revolution to evolution. M. Melchior de Vogue, himself one of the
apostles of the new life, or of the new work in the old life, of
France, describes the preparation of the national soil for the growth of
Desjardinism. He says:--

"The French children who were born just before 1870 grew up in an
atmosphere of patriotic mourning and amidst the discouragement of
defeat. National life, such as it became reconstituted after that
terrible shock, revealed to them on all sides nothing but abortive
hopes, paltry struggles of interest, and a society without any
other hierarchy but that of money, and without other principle or
ideal than the pursuit of material enjoyment. Literature ...
reflected these same tendencies; it was dejected or vile, and
distressed the heart by its artistic dryness or disgusted it by its
trivial realism. Science itself ... began to appear to many what it
is in reality, namely, a means, not an end; its prestige declined
and its infallibility was questioned.... Above all, it was clear
from too evident social symptoms that if science can satisfy some
very distinguished minds, it can do nothing to moralize and
discipline societies....

"For a hundred years after the destruction of the religious and
political dogmas of the past, France had lived as best she could on
some few fragile dogmas, which had in their turn been consecrated
by a naive superstition; these dogmas were the principles of
1789--the almightiness of reason, the efficacy of absolute liberty,
the sovereignty of the