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In his beliefs the normal man passes through a similar series of reactions from the acceptance of the marvellous in his childhood and youth to the sceptical rejection of the miraculous and the acceptance of only the literal and material in his buoyant manhood, thence to the profounder philosophy and mystical speculations of riper age.

The old, old conflict between materialism and idealism, between seeing-knowing and thinking-feeling, between the cruder actualities of the senses and the finer actualities of the imagination!

It is not that all men at a given time are idealists and at another realists, any more than all painters in one decade are Impressionists, in another Post-Impressionists. Life does not move that way.

Between 1874 and 1900 Impressionism forged to the front and monopolized the attention of the art world, yet during that period there were painted more pictures of the Pre-Impressionist schools than ever before. The Impressionists made all the noise, the Pre-Impressionists did most of the work.