out into the unknown to essay so many new marvels if those ancient limits which imprisoned it had remained standing. The multitude would not have bowed their necks to the hard discipline of their new work, if in compensation they had not been liberated from other, more ancient, disciplinary restrictions. In short, the great era of iron and fire began, in which the principle of liberty was destined to assault the principle of authority in its last entrenchments, and to drive it right away to the farthest frontiers of political, moral, and intellectual anarchy. But for this very reason the era of iron and fire has seen the gradual confusion and reduction to wavering uncertainty of all the criteria which served to distinguish the beautiful from the ugly, the true from the false, good from evil. These criteria have become confused because they are and can be nothing else but limits; limits which are precise and sure so long as they are restricted, but become feeble the more they are enlarged. But how can a century, which has made itself so powerful by dint of overturning the ancient limits on every hand, be expected to respect these limits in the spiritual world? As a result we find a civilisation which has built railways, studded the Atlantic with steamers, exploited America, and multiplied the world’s riches a hundredfold in fifty years,—we find it obsessed by grotesque doubts and eccentric uncertainties with regard to the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, in which generation after generation, accustomed to respect amongst other limits those imposed by literary traditions, had unhesitatingly agreed to recognise two masterpieces composed by a poet of genius. So we see the epoch which has overturned and destroyed so many thrones and altars and made Reason and Science march in triumph through the smoking ruins of a score of revolutions,—we see it obsessed on a sudden by a thousand scruples, halt, ask itself what is truth, whether it exists, and if it can be recognised. We see it rack its brains to decide whether what we know is a real and objective something or only a creation of our fancy. All these scruples and doubts are, as it were, the brow of a slope down which our epoch slides at headlong speed towards the abyss of nothingness. And in the century which has given man liberty, the certainty of food, comfort in abundance, and so many guarantees against the oppression of individuals and authorities as were known to no previous century; in the century which, by overthrowing so many limits, has banished from our midst so many reasons for hatred and war, do we not hear a thousand voices on every side cursing man for a miserable slave and accusing the times of being corrupt; crying that conditions must be purified with fire and sword, according to some, with war, according to others, with revolution? Having once transgressed the limits, man has become insatiable. The more he possesses, the more he wants.