From the French Revolution onwards, throughout Europe and throughout America, the political parties, the social classes, and institutions, and the philosophical doctrines which supported the principle of authority, little by little, but everywhere and unintermittently, have given way before the onslaught of the parties, the classes, and the doctrines which support the principle of liberty. The former have been forced sooner or later to allow the right of free criticism and discussion to oust the ancient duty of tacit obedience in the state, in religion, in the school, and ultimately in the family. Poets and philosophers have extolled the liberation of man from ancient servitudes as the most glorious victory man can vaunt. A victory, certainly; but over whom? Over himself, as it seems; since the limits, within which man was content to rest confined until the French Revolution, he himself had erected and invested with sacred terrors. It is clear that the slave, the tyrant, and the liberator were one and the same person. Moreover, one may well think that, in gaining his liberty, man has not been born again to a new destiny nor has he regenerated his own nature; rather has he learned to employ his own energies in a different way. Man had lived for centuries within strict limits, which confined in a narrow compass his curiosity, ambition, energy, and pride. But within those limits he had lived with greater comfort and less anxiety than we are living, without racking his brains to invent or to understand something new every day, not spurred on every hour to produce at greater speed and in greater abundance, not exasperated by the multitude of his needs nor agitated from morning to night by the pursuit of the means to satisfy them. But after the discovery of America and the first great astronomical discoveries which shed glory on the beginning of the sixteenth century, there arose in man the first sparks of ambition to seek new ways in the world outside the ancient limits. The philosophies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and still more the first discoveries of science, lent boldness to these ambitions. One day men realised that Prometheus, that clumsy thief, had stolen from the gods only a tiny spark of the fire. They planned a second robbery, discovered coal and electricity, and invented the steam-engine. And behold! the French Revolution, which confounded and upset, from one end of Europe to the other, boundaries, laws, institutions, and traditions—ideal and material limits. Then at last man realised that he could conquer and exploit the whole earth with iron and fire. At the same time as liberty, a new, untiring, formidable eagerness invaded the two worlds. All the limits which, for so many centuries, had confined in a narrow circle the energy and aspirations of even the most highly venerated of men fell one after the other to the ground. They fell, because the human mind could not have launched