orical materialism, this ideal took a practical form, not so much in
the popularization as in the vulgarization of science--or, rather, of
pseudo-science--venting itself in a flood of cheap, popular, and
propagandist literature. Science sought to popularize itself as if it
were its function to come down to the people and subserve their
passions, and not the duty of the people to rise to science and through
science to rise to higher heights, to new and profounder aspirations.

All this led Brunetiere to proclaim the bankruptcy of science, and this
science--if you like to call it science--did in effect become bankrupt.
And as it failed to satisfy, men continued their quest for happiness,
but without finding it, either in wealth, or in knowledge, or in power,
or in pleasure, or in resignation, or in a good conscience, or in
culture. And the result was pessimism.

Neither did the gospel of progress satisfy. What end did progress serve?
Man would not accommodate himself to rationalism; the _Kulturkampf_ did
not suffice him; he sought to give a final finality to life, and what I
call the final finality is the real _hontos hon_. And the famous _maladie
du siecle_, which announced itself in Rousseau and was exhibited more
plainly in Senancour's _Obermann_ than in any other character, neither
was nor is anything else but the loss of faith in the immortality of the
soul, in the human finality of the Universe.

The truest symbol of it is to be found in a creation of fiction, Dr.
Faustus.

This immortal Dr. Faustus, the product of the Renaissance and the
Reformation, first comes into our ken at the beginning of the
seventeenth century, when in 1604 he is introduced to us by Christopher
Marlowe. This is the same character that Goethe was to rediscover two
centuries later, although in certain respects the earlier Faust was the
fresher and more spontaneous. And side by side with him Mephistopheles
appears, of whom Faust asks: "What good will my soul do thy lord?"
"Enlarge his kingdom," Mephistopheles replies. "Is that the reason why
he tempts us thus?" the Doctor asks again, and the evil spirit answers:
"_Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris_," which, mistranslated into
Romance, is the equivalent of our proverb--"The misfortune of many is
the consolation of fools." "Where we are is hell, and where hell is
there must we ever be," Mephistopheles continues, to which Faust answers
that he thinks hell's a fable and asks him who made