of _The Architectural Record_, Mr. Leon V. Solon, writing from an
entirely different point of view, divines this tendency, and expresses
the opinion that color is again renascent. This tendency is so marked,
and this opinion is so shared that we may look with confidence toward
a color-evolution in architectural art.

The question of the character of what may be called the ornamental
mode of the architecture of the New Age is of all questions the most
obscure. Evolution along the lines of the already existent does not
help us here, for we are utterly without any ornamental mode from
which a new and better might conceivably evolve. Nothing so betrays
the spiritual bankruptcy of the end of the Iron Age as this.

The only light on this problem which we shall find, dwells in the
realm of metaphysics rather than in the world of material reality.
Ornament, more than any other element of architecture, is deeply
psychological, it is an externalization of an inner life. This is
so true that any time-worn fragment out of the past when art was
a language can usually be assigned to its place and its period, so
eloquent is it of a particular people and a particular time. Could we
therefore detect and understand the obscure movement of consciousness
in the modern world, we might gain some clue to the language it would
later find.

It is clear that consciousness is moving away from its absorption in
materiality because it is losing faith in materialism. Clairvoyance,
psychism, the recrudescence of mysticism, of occultism--these signs
of the times are straws which show which way the wind now sets, and
indicate that the modern mind is beginning to find itself at home in
what is called _the fourth dimension_. The phrase is used here in