For instance (returning to Proteus!), in their capacity of _thinking in terms of change_. This seems an _intrinsic part of thinking in terms of otherness_; yet, as, a fact, it dates only from the days of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Gibbon and Condorcet. This last name brings home that until the eighteenth century the only Future which people thought about was the Future in Heaven or Hell. The importance of the latter alternative explains quite sufficiently why no interest was left over for any other after-life, to wit, that of unborn generations. Indeed, the sway of religious conceptions accounts also for our ancestors having been no less cut off from the Past and replacing it (as their painters dressed Abraham or Cæsar in Renaissance costume) by the Present. For all religion tends to think _sub specie æternitatis_, as of the god who is sacrificed afresh at every celebration, and who consecrates the routine of the seasons and the seasonal monotony of agriculture and pastoral life; whence, no doubt, the persistence of the amazing fallacy _that there is nothing new under the sun_, with its corollary that there ought to be nothing not _old_. Whence also the double superstition (till Science broke in with something different!) of chewing and rechewing the cud of Scripture and the Classics. With, in turn, the practical results that Milton’s Puritans modelled themselves on Joshua and Gideon; and frilled and waistcoated French Revolutionaries postured as heroes of Plutarch. Why, at this very moment do we not see the rods and axes of antique hangmen figuring (not merely in figurative manner!) as emblems of post-war Italy, itself identified (to the neglect of schools and irrigation works) with a particularly high and palmy Rome? Rome! to rule which squalid mediæval village Dante called on a _Cæsar_ who was a _Kaiser_ elected by German feudatories; Rome, which we may take as a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the refusal to realize that Past is Past and Present is Present. Which is perhaps the only “Lesson of History”; and whose application would dissolve many mythical alloys of conflicting nations welded together by the passionate white-heat of a name: England, France, America, Christianity, and nowadays, I fear, also Socialism, nations, and creeds concerning which, when asked for our allegiance, we have need to inquire: In which of its phases, which of its characteristics and embodiments? For Intelligence warns us that we are dealing with Proteus, with him of ceaseless change. Not with the eternal, immutable divinities to whom our forebears brought their sometimes quaint and lovely, but, quite as often, obscene and grisly oblations.