all eternity. In another region of Oceania, the fate of the soul is decided by the family of the deceased, who throw dice for it. Odd means annihilation, even eternal happiness. In Tahiti, the blind souls, on leaving the body, wander away to a plain where there are two stones. One, touched first, confers immortal life, the other eternal death. This is almost sublimely absurd. It is as grandiose and terrible as predestination. Saint Augustine placed the one in the night, before birth. The Tahitians situated the other in the shades, after death. Protestantism, to which those poor people have since surrendered, has not much changed their beliefs. Generally speaking, the greatest effort of a religious or philosophical innovator is to put at the end what was originally at the beginning, or vice versa. By connecting itself with the idea of immortality, the idea of justice has, then, singularly disturbed its original character. It has even contaminated the idea of earthly immortality--the idea of glory. II How glory, first reserved for the kings and warriors sung by the poets, has come finally to be attributed to the poets themselves, even more than to the heroes of their poems, is an historic fact whose exact origin would be of little interest. It would be more curious to discover as a result of what change in the manners and customs, or through what enhancement of egoism and of vanity, the complicated idea of justice came to attach itself to the idea of the perennity of the name and of the work. At what epoch of Greek civilization, did an Athenian dramatist, whose play had been flouted by the public, have the boldness to appeal to posterity? Are any ancient texts known wherein such recriminations may be read? Sensibility has increased to such an extent that there exists to-day no scorned poetaster who does not dream of the justice of future generations. The _exigi monumentum_ of Horace and Malherbe has become democratized; but how can we believe that the vanity of authors has ever had a beginning? The fact must be admitted, however, in order to keep within the logic of the successive developments of human character.