Growth after death. – Those audacious little words about moral matters that Fontenelle threw out in his immortal Dialogues of the Dead37 were considered in his time to be paradoxes and games of a not wholly innocent wit; even the highest judges of taste and of the mind saw nothing more in it – indeed, maybe not even Fontenelle himself. Now something incredible transpires: these thoughts become truths! Science proves them! The game gets serious! And we read these dialogues with a different feeling than Voltaire38 and Helvétius39 read them, and involuntarily we promote their creators to a different and much higher rank of mind than they did. Rightly? Wrongly?