inquiry into the facts. His conclusions were favourable to Bernadette. In a pastoral he submitted that the faithful were justified in believing that Mary, mother of God, had appeared on a number of occasions to the girl, and that the apparition possessed the character of truth. That judgment the Holy Father confirmed.

I went to Lourdes an idle sightseer; I came away impressed and thoughtful, victim of the mysterious exaltation which haunts the company of pilgrims. The experience is common enough. Of those who go merely to look, the majority succumb unresistingly to the atmosphere of sanctity pervading the place, an atmosphere unspoilt by the booths which flank the entrance to the sacred enclosure or by advertisements proclaiming the blood relationship of the traders with Bernadette. And, apart from sanctity, few can escape the influence which the beauty of Lourdes exercises upon the mind. Art here has perfected the work of Nature. As the visitor passes through the entrance gate he sees at his feet a spacious parallelogram lined on three sides by a concourse of pilgrims, and terminated on the fourth by a noble flight of steps leading to the Church of the Rosary. Above towers the great Basilica, a richly ornamented structure crowned by a lofty spire nestling against a background of mountain and forest. Under the lee of the Basilica is the miraculous grotto, adorned on one side of the cleft by a statue of the Virgin and on the other by a number of crutches and trusses left by pilgrims cured of their infirmities. Hard by are the taps from which the faithful draw the blessed water to drink and wash.

Briefly this is what the three-quarters of a million pilgrims who visit Lourdes each year see; what they feel is less easy to define. All men are not made for pilgrimage. Of the many who dream of joining one only the courageous few undertake the toilsome experience. As at Mecca and at Benares, so at Lourdes, the pilgrims follow a formal programme of worship. In their movements the hand of the practised stage manager is noticeable, and the patient crowd is shepherded from one stage to another. Nothing is left to chance, nothing to the initiative of the individual. Pilgrimages of 10,000 souls are no uncommon spectacle; yet there is no confusion, no jostling, and no irreverence. A single thought inspires all hearts-the glory of the Virgin Mary. The Holy Church leaves no stone unturned to stamp lasting memories of Lourdes upon the imagination of the faithful. Skilled preachers, hour after hour, address fresh congregations assembled in front of the grotto, while at fixed times the pilgrims gather together and in procession march round the entire enclosure. How many prayers of penitence within the short space of a day are not raised to God at Lourdes !

Through the throng of worshippers are borne on stretchers pitiful wrecks of humanity, men, women and children of all ages

and of all classes, stricken with obscure maladies, and abandoned by medical science as incurable. Sustained by the conviction that the Lady of the Grotto will intervene with God on their behalf, they endure the tedium and pain of a long railway journey. They bear their suffering with fortitude, inspired by the news that one of their number has been miraculously restored to health. Such cures do actually take place. Hardly a day passes that report is not made of one pilgrim casting away his crutches, or of another arising from his couch. If anyone questions the truth of these reports, the neat tablets in the churches of the Rosary and the Basilica which solemnly tell of recoveries of health should remove his doubt. The sincerity of the brief records is convincing.

Lourdes has no monopoly of pilgrimage in the Pyrenees. Within a few miles to the west is Montaut Betharram, once a favoured resort of the devout. Overshadowed now by its neighbour, Betharram has lost its former reputation, and strangers visit the picturesque village usually only to make acquaintance with a curious grotto. But an excursion into its depths hardly repays the fatigue of the undertaking. There is little mystery or interest about this grotto, or about the river which traverses it, and the walker welcomes a ray of light which betokens the end of an exhausting journey through the bowels of a mountain.

West of Toulouse Imperial Rome has left little trace of her rule, and Pau, compared with Arles or Nîmes, is a town of mushroom growth whose proper history begins only with the Middle Ages. Here the Princes of Navarre had their capital; here Margaret of Valois, sister of Francis I. and wife of Henri d'Albert, held her celebrated court and sheltered Calvin from his persecutors. Little is left of the original château wherein Henri IV. was born. When fortune looked coldly upon the house of Navarre their home became a melancholy ruin, and for many generations the château remained untenanted. Then Louis Philippe undertook the work of restoration, and Napoleon III. completed the task. Many exquisite Flemish and Gobelin tapestries now clothe the naked walls; but, save from its association with Margaret and her grandson, the château has little interest for the visitor.

P. G. ELGOOD.

SUCCESS AND FAILURE

THE science of psychology, it may be maintained, gives us 'but a halfpennyworth of bread to an intolerable deal of sack.' How little do its disquisitions explain human nature by unveiling any such laws, or constant successions, as raise scientific knowledge above the level of simple experience. What pretensions can it make to scientific definition when it is unable to describe the nature of an 'idea,' or of such fundamental processes as those of intelligence and imagination? For its failure several reasons suggest themselves. It has ignored the indisputable inference that individuals which are formed by the union of two distinct living organisms (the male and female germs) must be dual in their nature. It has been insufficiently impressed with the continuity of evolution, which, like the thread of Ariadne, can give us a guiding lead through the obscurest of problems. That is to say, it has not realised that human capacities must be traceable to some source, however elementary, in the humblest of living creatures. And it has taken up too 'objective' an attitude: it has given too large a share of its attention to our relations with the outside. world through our sensations and our behaviour, whereas the causes, or motives, of our various activities are nervous conditions that are within us, and can only be detected by selfobservation. Our sensations, it may be urged, are causes. But only in so far as they 'set off' internal forces, as a match explodes gunpowder. The sight of food does not move one who has no appetite; and it follows that one who is stimulated by it acts under the causal effect not merely of the food, but of his appetite. So, again, one is not discomposed by the sensation of an obstacle if there is no wish to surmount it. Moreover, sensations influence but a small part of our behaviour. We are actuated in greatest measure by ideas, and these are within us-are, in fact, a part of ourselves.

We cannot, then, hope to understand life if we regard it objectively from the outside. Our only clue to its mysteries is through the perception that may be called 'subjective '-the careful observing of our own feelings, motives and thoughts, and the regarding of the external behaviour of other persons (and of

living creatures generally) simply as the sign of certain internal activities which, in kind, we experience ourselves. So far, however, is psychology from this attitude that one of its leading schools clings to the paradox that our emotions are caused by the movements and gestures which manifest them, that we are afraid because we run away, and angry with another because we threaten him. There is, no doubt, something in experience that supports this inversion of the real order of things. It is a fact that by deliberately smiling we can keep up our spirits, that anger may grow if we express it violently, and that, in a measure, 'manners makyth man.' But these are simply illustrations of ' autosuggestive,' or memorial, stimulation, and this commonly runs backwards. Apart from it, conduct and speech are the outcome of internal nervous conditions, which urge external activity and are relieved by it. Is there anyone who, under the influence of strong emotion, has not felt the relief that is given by doing or saying something?

If we turn our eyes inwards, so to speak, we shall discover that certain feelings always follow certain other feelings, or certain thoughts, in a sequence that is so regular as to be a 'law.' One of the most familiar of these sequences is that success is followed by a feeling of exhilaration, failure by depression. The forcefulness of these feelings is illustrated by their effect upon the muscles. Exhilaration braces, depression relaxes them. And the strut of pride is by no means peculiar to man. A cock that feels masterful, a dog that feels heroic, are models of tightly braced stiffness. It is eminently useful that success should be rewarded and failure punished, for success, in small things even more than in great, is absolutely essential for the preservation of life. And we can trace the law under which this reward and punishment are administered. An effort involves a strain. If successful, there is an exhilarating nervous rebound, inasmuch as a shock to the temper' that fails to reverse its phase from pleasurable to painful invariably intensifies its pleasurableness-a law that explains such mysteries of human nature as the curiously mixed effects of tickling and our appreciation of the humorous and facetious. In all these cases there is something which shocks,' but fails to distress us. If, however, effort fails, our temper is not merely 'shocked,' but reversed into acute depression.

The exhilaration of success is felt as pride, the depression of failure as shame. That is to say, they become activated by a like or dislike of self, for pride is obviously self-admiration, and shame self-contempt. The conditions of attractedness and repelledness of which we are conscious as likes and dislikes are amongst the most fundamental elements of our physical nature. It is only when they contribute to the action of a stimulus that

it is effective. Repose, for instance, which attracts us when fatigued, is not tempting in other circumstances; music may be annoying instead of pleasing if we are not in a temper to appreciate it. And a liking for a thing is not merely essential in order that we may respond to its stimulation: it is a force that impels us to search for the thing; that is to say, it becomes a motive if its object is in the future. A few-very few-of our likes are innate. For the most part they are acquired through the influence of pleasure evolution's instrument for the creation of new likes that incline us towards the things that cause the pleasure, and may be extended through analogies to other similar things. So we are constantly acquiring new tastes.' It is in accordance with this law that, as we ourselves are the cause of the exhilaration that follows successful effort, we are drawn to ourselves, through the duality of our nature, in the self-admiration of pride.

Success is so pleasurable, failure so painful an experience that our thoughts are constantly dwelling upon them, and we deduce from them ideas of various conditions that appear necessarily to proceed from them, and to be their qualities. If we are successful, we are superior or excellent, and since we may attain these distinctions by good birth, or good luck, as well as by effort, these advantages seem also to be successful.' We are also powerful, since our success may be repeated. We are, moreover, peculiar or notable, since superiority, or excellence, stands out from the common or normal. 'Nobility' is notability. Failure similarly gives rise to ideas that are the contraries of these that is to say, to ideas of inferiority, weakness, and 'commonness.' All these ideas, being mental developments of success or failure, are as stimulating as success and failure themselves. If we feel ourselves to be excellent, powerful or peculiar, we are as exhilarated as we are by an actual success.

It is one of the mysteries of life that emotions which are stimulated by actual experiences should also be stimulated by recollections or ideas of these experiences. Here, again, we can discover a law which explains the mystery, if it does not unveil its ultimate causes. When two nervous conditions have co-operated with one another, whether simultaneously or in succession, the subsequent activity of one will restimulate, or resuscitate, the other. The most obvious illustration of this law is the process of memory in which one idea restimulates another because the two have been associated in perceptive or reflective experience, and have thus become familiarised' with one another. It is illustrated in our physical nature by the 'auto-suggestive' restimulation of emotions by the manner or behaviour that has been associated with them. Our dexterities, again, depend upon the automatic restimulation of one muscle nerve by another VOL. XCVII-No. 575

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