3 o THE KINGDOM OF MAN 



old ruts of traditional ignorance, and obstinately turn 

 their faces towards the past, still believing that the 

 teachings and sayings of antiquity and the contemplation, 

 not to say the detailed enumeration, of the blunders and 

 crimes of its ancestors, can furnish mankind with the 

 knowledge necessary for its future progress. The compara- 

 tive failure of what may be called the speculative triumph 

 of the New Philosophy to produce immediate practical 

 consequences has even led some among those prejudiced 

 by custom and education in favour of the exclusive 

 employment of man's thought and ingenuity in the 

 delineation and imaginative resurrection of the youthful 

 follies and excesses of his race, to declare that the 

 knowledge of Nature is a failure, the New Philosophy of 

 the Nature-searchers a fraud. Thus the well-known 

 French publicist M. Brunetiere has taken upon himself 

 to declare what he calls the Bankruptcy of Science. 



12. THE REGNUM HOMINIS. 



As a matter of fact the new knowledge of Nature 

 the newly-ascertained capacity of man for a control of 

 Nature so thorough as to be almost unlimited has not 

 as yet had an opportunity for showing what it can do. 

 A lull after victory, a lethargic contentment, has to some 

 extent followed on the crowning triumphs of the great 

 Nature-searchers whose days were numbered with the 

 closing years of that nineteenth century which through 

 them marks an epoch. No power has called on man to 

 arise and enter upon the possession of his kingdom 

 the ' Regnum Hominis ' foreseen by Francis Bacon and 

 pictured by him to an admiring but incredulous age with 

 all the fervour and picturesque detail of which he was 

 capable. And yet at this moment the mechanical dim- 



