religious commotion: the explanation of the world and the sense of Destiny seemed included in the pages, so lucid, so scientifically pure, of the Selection of Species and the Descent of Man.

Doctrine entered into the current scientific reasoning. Struggle for Life, Evolution of Species, Sexual Selection, Adaptation to Environment, Survival of the Fittest, all these formulæ became part of the language of every-day life. It was admitted, without further examination, that the universe was submitted to the law of this "mechanical sorting" as Cournot had it, of this automatic fatum, dictating the invisible progress of matter and of Life.

Science reigned. It was evidently the only interpreter of Destiny. Man, plunged in nature, is subject to cosmic laws. Determinism is absolute. The problems which are supposed to be insoluble will not resist human investigation. Knowledge, like Light, will fill the world.

It was in the midst of this universal exaltation that Pasteur's works burst forth, in full strife, if I may say so; but, by an unexpected consequence of the simple, broad, and frank method which was his, he stopped at the limit of the knowable and the unknowable. Pasteur, by his life and convictions alone, held in suspense the problem which hovers over this dramatic period of the history of humanity.

Others showed the progress of selection; he discovered numbers in action. On one side, the élite-here, crowds. Swarming, crawling, incalculable, indestructible, untiring and invisible masses preside over the hatching of things and accompany their progress; without them, nothing can be done, nothing can remain. The élite could not emerge

in its effort, if the swarming, anonymous crowd did not surround, press, and support it.

From that point of view, Pasteur's work is democratic. It is also hearty and human. He measured with a glance the high researches of abstract science, but they did not detain him. An admirable altruism always brought him back to places where men toiled and suffered, where good could be done immediately. The great scientist would have neglected Science itself for Charity's sake. What a model! He could have repeated the saying of Claude Bernard : Man's power is greater than his knowledge."

His life was absorbed by the study of the diseases of silk-worms, the fermentation of yeasts and the diseases of beer, chicken cholera, infection in general, and vaccines. He became the creator of modern surgery, the creator of new hygiene and medicine, the organiser of the improvement of life, when he might have taught the laws of life.

It was through him, and after him, that Lister1 created antisepsis; it was through him, and after him, that Guérin inaugurated air-excluding dressings; by him, and through him, that, in view of the terrible mortality caused by hospital gangrene in army ambulances, surgery at last consented to make cleanliness and antisepsis the collaborators of operation. Air and Light poured in.

The microscope completed the work. Microbiology, with with Charles Robin, P. P. Bert, and

1 Sir Joseph Lister, now Baron Lister, b. London 1827. See his splendid letter to Pasteur, dated February 18th, 1874: Life of Pasteur, vol. ii., p. 20.

2 Charles Robin, b. Jasseron (Ain) 1821, a member of the Académie des Sciences, d. 1885.

Roux,' does not merely study the inner organism; not only does it pursue the search for protoplasm and the original cell, but it also studies the processes of death, as of life. In typhus, small-pox, tuberculosis, and all the great scourges which afflict humanity, it shows the microbe and the virus, multiplying the ever-constant menace of destruction against the work of repair and reproduction. As far as is possible, it indicates the remedy.

The remedy is chiefly preventive. Real medicine, prophylactic medicine, becomes constituted. It returns to its real name-Hygiene. Individual hygiene, public hygiene, the hygiene of cities, of houses, of clothes, of contacts. A wise and prudent organisation of private and social life will one day bring cleanliness, joy, and security into this short earthly passage.

Before the laws of international hygiene, a prelude to international peace, epidemics disappear. Already, leprosy has receded, cholera and the plague are arrested in the Red Sea and the Suez Canal and on the return of pilgrims from Mecca. We may foresee the day when other evils will be conjured.

Thus do Pasteurian principles penetrate medicine. If overwork and excessive vital tension do not overwhelm the coming generations with the nervous diseases studied at the same time by Charcot; aty if man is not alarmed at the direct and truthful vidis-ew which he now has of himself and the world,—a nthe w humanity will arise by degrees.

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1 Emile Roux, b. Confolens (Charente) 1853, a member of the Académie des Sciences.

2 Jean Charcot, b. Paris 1825, a member of the Académie des Sciences, d. 1893.

Social existence will be bettered when the laws of existence and society are better known. By trimming wounds, eliminating poisons, cleansing away pus, and everywhere uncovering living surfaces, Science shows us all lives bound and chained together by a close need of each other and a mutual control over each other.

Orderly effort, such is the law of Nature, and consequently of Humanity.

But has Science, the sudden revealer of this magnificent Unity, obtained a final and complete victory? Does Science hold under its yoke the whole of Man, his senses, his intelligence, his heart, his destiny?

Pasteur, the echo of a generation rendered prudent by its sorrows, does not break with traditional sentiment :

"There are two men," said he, "in each one of us: the scientist, he who starts with a clear field and desires to rise to the knowledge of Nature through observation, experimentation, and reasoning, and the man of sentiment, the man of belief, the man who mourns his dead children and who cannot, alas! prove that he will see them again, but who believes that he will, and lives in that hope; the man who will not die like a vibrio, but who feels that the force within him cannot die. The two domains are distinct, and woe to him who tries to let them trespass on each other in the so imperfect state of human knowledge."

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CHAPTER XIII

THE MORAL CRISIS.

I.-Moral Law and society-Three risks: religious, economic and patriotic-Authority and liberty-Religion-Inner and outer crisis of Catholicism-Catholic France-Symptoms of disaffection.

II.-Free-thought.-Philosophical systems-Philosophical opportunism-Ethical systems.

III.-Economics-Saint-Simonism-The " orthodox" schoolEconomic Ethics-Disadvantages and benefits of Economicism.

IV. Morality without sanction-The " generous

man-Nonconstraint-Religion of the Fatherland-Theory of Oppor

tunism.

I

HA

AVING recounted the material resources and intellectual production of France at the time of her recovery, it is now time to touch upon a deeper and more obscure problem; that is, to appreciate the intimate convictions of the social body when the crisis which threw off the last remaining consequences of the war and which determined a new vital process was at its climax.

No circumstance could have been more favourable to the historian, in order to seize the fugitive features of a nation, than the hour when they were contracted in an agonised spasm. The physiology, psychology, and, alas! the pathology of nations can