ces have their votaries. Recently one of the latter has at last
discovered--such is the irony of destiny--the practical means of
steering balloons. These discoveries are useless, I admit, yet are ever
beautiful and fertile, fertile in new, if superfluous, beauties. They
are welcomed with transports of feverish enthusiasm and win for their
originators something better than glory,--the happiness that we know so
well.

But among the sciences there are two which are still experimental and
inductive and in addition pre-eminently useful. It is to this
exceptional standing that they perhaps owe, we must admit, the
unparalled rapidity with which they have grown. These two sciences which
were formerly the antipodes of one another, are to-day on the high road
to becoming identical by dint of pushing their joint researches ever
deeper and crushing to atoms the last problems left. Their names are
chemistry and psychology.

Our chemists, inspired perhaps by love and better instructed in the
nature of affinities, force their way into the inner life of the
molecules and reveal to us their desires, their ideas, and under a
fallacious air of conformity, their individual physiognomy. While they
thus construct for us the psychology of the atom, our psychologists
explain to us the atomic theory of self, I was going to say the
sociology of self. They enable us to perceive, even in its most minute
detail, the most admirable of all societies, this hierarchy of
consciousness, this feudal system of vassal souls, of which our
personality is the summit. We are indebted to them both for priceless
benefits. Thanks to the former we are no longer alone in a frozen world.
We are conscious that these rocks are alive and animated, we are
conscious that these hard metals which protect and warm us are likewise
a prolific brotherhood. Through their mediation these living stones have
some message for our heart, something at once alien and intimate, which
neither the stars nor the flowers of the field ever told to our
forefathers. And by their mediation also, and the service is not to be
despised--we have learnt certain processes which allow us (in a scanty
measure, it is true, for the moment) to supplement the insufficiency of
our ordinary food supplies, or to vary their monotony by several
substances agreeable to the taste and entirely compounded by artificial
means. But if our chemists have thus reassured us against the danger of
dying of hunger, our ps