If we are on the whole satisfied with the new on its intrinsic merits as a present complex fact, we have therein sufficient ground for saying that it marks a stage in progress. This, in fact, is what such a proposition means. And the old then appears more or less widely discontinuous with the new--not merely that it shows, in units of measure, less of the acceptable quality or qualities which the _new_ fact or situation is found to possess, but that it belongs for us to a qualitatively different level and order of existence. How, we wonder, could our ancestors have found life tolerable in their undrained and imperfectly heated dwellings, without the telephone, the morning's news of the world by cable, and the phonograph? How, again, could feudal homage and fealty have ever been the foundation of social order in countries where today every elector is wont to think and to act in his public relations no longer as a subject but as a citizen. And how, in still a different sphere, could the father or the mother of a happy family of children ever have found the freedom and irresponsibility of bachelorhood endurable? Shall we say that in changes like these we have to do simply with the quantitative increase of some quality, present in small measure in the earlier stages and in larger measure in the later? Or shall we evade the issue with the general admission that _of course_, as every schoolboy knows, there are in this world many differences of degree that somehow "amount to differences of kind"? As a matter of fact what has happened in every case like these is an actual change of standard, a new construction in the growing system of one's norms of value and behavior. Provisionally, though hopefully, a step has been taken--a real event in personal and in social history has been given place and date. From some source beyond the scope and nature of the earlier function a suggestion or an impulsion has come by which the agent has endeavored to move forward. The change wrought is a transcendence of the earlier level of experience and valuation, not a widening and clarification of vision on that level. And the standards which govern on the new level serve not so much to condemn the old as to seal its consignment to disuse and oblivion. Least of all can a judgment or appraisal of the old from the standpoint of the new be taken for a transcript of the motives which led to the transition.