schools of humbug, unscientific philosophies. A mere vocal question mark will suffice to cancel them. But let us just once more, before we finally abandon it and pass on to the discussion of relative realities, repeat this litany of nonsense, by which the minds of millions of men, for thousands of years, had been lulled into stupor '-with outstretched finger he beat time, as in mocking voice he repeated the incantation,-'Faith, hope, and charity; the true, the beautiful, and the good'; then dismissed it with a contemptuous rap of the thumb.

'One day Mensch received the commission to translate a number of English, German, Dutch and French scientific works for a Russian university. These were chiefly standard books concerned with the biological sciences. And suddenly he found the eyes of his imagination looking into the laboratories where experiment and observation were unremittingly pursued. Experiment and observation -here at last were two definite concepts to be introduced into a mind emptied of all the lumber of cant. He saw them as Renan before him had seen them-as two illimitable lines, railroads, on which a vast train, loaded with eager adventurers and intrepid explorers, moved forward. Sometimes with dazzling speed-sometimes at a snail's crawl; but it moved always. Its progress might be delayed, but it was never stopped. On the lines of experiment and observation a few men were always

going forward, well in advance of the bulk of humanity, towards the realms of knowledge. Many came back empty-handed; some brought no more than news of a light which belonged to the future ; others found a clue, slight in itself, but pointing to many tracks; and to a rare individual it fell from time to time to make a supreme discovery.

'But at whatever pace the majority of these men advanced, and however far they went, their progress was only in one direction. Despite all they had learnt, and their prodigious facilities for assimilating knowledge, they remained in general ordinary men, brilliant specialists within a small compass, but in character no more developed than the majority. Their judgment, save when it was applied to a concrete scientific problem, was as warped as that of their contemporaries; they fell as easily as any others into the traps laid by the politicians and the theologians; often they helped to make those traps. They too were victims of prejudice, mean-minded and narrow-gutted. Selfdeception ruled their minds; self-dissection they could not or would not apply.

The financiers behind the leading political juntas had therefore plenty of scientific material at their behest. The leaders of the nations found no chemist or physicist unresponsive to their orders, and the result of this docility became for the first time strikingly obvious in the war of 19141918, the first chemical war on a fairly large scale.

'That war gave a few people an inkling of what might follow. The lay mind made no attempt to understand the scientific mind, but it became suspicious and frightened of the possible passing of power into the hands of the scientists. For the first time the uneducated thousands were warned, chiefly in the Press, that an entirely new menace might be threatening them.

'In its appointed hour the vision of Mensch broke into flower. For a number of years he had thought the scientific man to be the perfection of human evolution. This type of man had gone ahead and found, not vague theories to dwindle into emptiness at the first attempt at practical application, but the two great principles of experiment and observation. A prophetic artist was needed to realize that these two great principles could be applied to the solution of all human problems; that religion with its faith and fear was an appanage of mental savagery; that philosophy with its ethical wranglings was an even more futile attempt to escape from man's selfimposed burdens; but that all their shams could be broken up, their stranglehold on the mind destroyed, by the vigilant application of these two guiding rules.

'Mensch was that prophetic artist. Once that vision had taken form in his mind, he set out to examine it in detail. It seemed to him logically certain that no deviation from the ancient routine

of battle and recuperation, of senseless slaughter and useless recovery, was to be expected, so long as the old laws of thought prevailed; it seemed equally clear that the control of humanity had passed from the theologians to the politicians, and must in due course pass from them to the scientists. Yet it was plain that the scientific point of view did not exist apart from specialization. In the groups and sub-groups of the specialists there were but a handful of first-rate minds; there were thousands of mediocrities and hundreds who were definitely dangerous, either gullible or corruptible to the end of their time.

'He concentrated now exclusively on the translation of scientific works, in order that he might move constantly among their users. Here and there he found a man such as we now term fully developed up to the present pitch; one who was guided in his self-conscious dealing by the principles of experiment and observation. It was a memorable day for him when he met the physiologist M'Grath, who used his own body for the purposes of experiment.

The passionate capacities his thoughts did not absorb were concentrated into love of little children. Here he followed and was content to follow a charming precedent. The little children suffered him to come unto them, and he sought their company. Wherever he might happen to be his temporary home consisted of one room in a mean

city street, wherein all day long and far into the evening the urchins frolicked and fought. Often he would lay down his pen and go to them, teaching them new games, telling them of alien children in far lands, playing a tune on his fiddle that they might dance, or impersonating grotesque and comical beasts to draw their laughter. His dramatic instincts found their complete gratification in the mothering and fathering of the unwanted. He never begot a child himself. Not only promiscuous breeding, but unintelligent motherhood, outraged his sense and disgusted his senses. The necessity of establishing motherhood on a vocational basis was one of his earliest decisions.

'He began to collect infants when he realized that he would one day require disciples. He chose them with discrimination, noting the necessity that the material for his educational experiment should be physically hardy and mentally endowed. He never took a child of less than three years of age or more than five, with rare exceptions. His ambition was to select one boy from each European nation, to transport them to an estate far from all human settlements, and there to prepare them for their mission.

'He first chose St. John Richmond and thereafter Conrad Pushkin. In order to provide for these two he whittled down his, and their, needs to the finest point; he worked from eight o'clock