Though the scope of my discussion is limited to literature and art, it would be paltry to confine our inquiries within limited horizons.  Painting and architecture, alas, are not the whole of life; the fine arts are only the flowers of existence; they are useful as humanising elements; but they are not indispensable.  That vague community among whom we arbitrarily place those with whom we disagree—­the Philistines—­get on very well without them.  But even Philistines have to reckon with Religion and Science, and in a lesser degree with Philosophy.  That powerful trinity affects our every-day life.  Philosophy is so cloistered, so difficult to understand, that we seldom hear of its decay; though we are constantly told that some branch of science is being neglected, or owing to a religious revival that its prestige is becoming undermined; its truths are becoming falsehoods.  I am not a man of science, not even a student, only a desultory reader.  Yet I suggest that, as was pointed out in the case of the fine arts, certain branches of the divine scholarship, if I may call it so, may be arrested temporarily in any development they may have reached.  Let us take medicine.  Medicine is primarily based upon the study of anatomy or structure—­physiology—­or the scheme of structure carried out in life; and upon botany and chemistry as representing the vegetable and mineral worlds where the remedies are sought.  Anatomy soon reaches a finite position, when a sufficient number of careful dissections has been made; the other divisions used to look like promising endless development; but there is reason to suppose that they too, as far as medicine is concerned, have reached a sterile perfection.

The microscope is perfected up to a point which mechanicians think cannot be improved upon; so that those ultimate elements of physiology which depend upon the observation of minute structure are known to us.  To put it crudely, we cannot discover any more germs, whose presence is hidden from us by mere minuteness, unless we can improve our machinery, and that, we are told, is an improbable event.  I will not labour the point by applying it to botany, which is very obvious, or to chemistry, where it is not so clear.  But it is clear that owing to a feeling that not much more is to be got from minute observation with the tools at our disposal, the brightest intellects and most inventive clairvoyant work are shunted into more imaginative channels.  There are no men who guess so brilliantly as men of science, so that science, in that respect, has attained the dignity of Theology.  I suppose that the startling theories propounded by Sir Oliver Lodge and others will be taken as evidence of the decay of science.  But the human intellect, especially if it is scientific, cannot, I imagine, like actors, go on repeating or feigning the same emotion.  It must leave for the moment as apparently completed one branch of knowledge to which it may