study the working of their organs and muscles and nerves--has brought a
new spirit into the world, a spirit of fidelity to fact, and with it a
new and higher ideal of life and of art, which must of necessity change
and transform all the conditions of existence, and in time modify the
almost immutable nature of man. For this new spirit, this love of the
fact and of truth, this passion for reality will do away with the
foolish fears and futile hopes which have fretted the childhood of our
race, and will slowly but surely establish on broad foundations the
Kingdom of Man upon Earth. For that is the meaning and purpose of the
change which is now coming over the world. The faiths and convictions of
twenty centuries are passing away and the forms and institutions of a
hundred generations of men are dissolving before us like the baseless
fabric of a dream. A new morality is already shaping itself in the
spirit; a morality based not on guess-work and on fancies; but on
ascertained laws of moral health; a scientific morality belonging not to
statics, like the morality of the Jews, but to dynamics, and so fitting
the nature of each individual person. Even now conscience with its
prohibitions is fading out of life, evolving into a more profound
consciousness of ourselves and others, with multiplied incitements to
wise giving. The old religious asceticism with its hatred of the body is
dead; the servile acceptance of conditions of life and even of natural
laws is seen to be vicious; it is of the nobility of man to be insatiate
in desire and to rebel against limiting conditions; it is the property
of his intelligence to constrain even the laws of nature to the
attainment of his ideal.

Already we are proud of being students, investigators, servants of
truth, and we leave the great names of demi-gods and heroes a little
contemptuously to the men of bygone times. As student-artists we are no
longer content with the outward presentment and form of men: we want to