think you have advanced that far?"

The sayings of Nada and her like worked upon me, and the mania of the scientific method overtook me. I saw myself borne along by the current, taken by the magic of the atmosphere — the atmosphere of science, which alone held sway, monopolizing the attention of the girl students as it monopolized the attention of their fellow students at the university close by.

Formerly I made no distinction between science and literature; now I began to see the wide gulf that divides them. And my passion

for science grew when I became certain that I should never be able to specialize in one of its branches, because my earlier preparation had been literary, weak of foundation, above all on the side of mathemat-ics and the sciences. So I resolved to study what sciences I could within the narrow scope that lay open before me.

And I promised myself that if scientific specialization escaped me, the acquiring of the scientific spirit and contact with the secrets of the scientific method should not... I merged with a number of the

science students, and it pleased us to form for ourselves what we called a scientific stamp.

Our speech must be measured, with precision and verification in it. Every statement we hear must be measured by the laboratory's measure and tested with its instru-ments. Every book we read must be scientific, or else it deserves to be thrown into the wastebasket.

We took to disdaining literature when we set it beside science. And we disdained above all the litera-ture of sentiment and loftiness, and the gaudy oratorical literature with