The fact, however, that “Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing,” is not an irony of fate so much as a folly of society. Later in the story the philosophizing of one of the characters leads the author to the reflection: “Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world may have its consolations.” Nay, the metaphysician himself does not altogether escape. Piero de Cosimo is accused of being one and repudiates the idea:[456] “Not I, Messer Greco; a philosopher is the last sort of animal I should choose to resemble. I find it enough to live, without spinning lies to account for life. Fowls cackle, asses bray, women chatter, and philosophers spin false reasons--that’s the effect the sight of the world brings out of them.” This perception of the Idol of the Cave, and the whole trend of Eliot’s argument is evidence that the pragmatic attitude existed some time before it was so vividly and enduringly defined by Professor James. Since these various changes bring about no complete break with the satiric tradition, we may expect to find the connecting links with both the remote and the immediate past as much in evidence as are the features of novelty. Peacock’s indebtedness was to the Athenian comedy, and Lytton’s to the near-contemporary Byron. Mrs. Gaskell had Jane Austen and Crabbe and the whole gallery of eighteenth-century village vignettes for her humors of rural life; while her _Mary Barton_ probably reached back to _Sybil_, as it did forward to the line of economic novels. Thackeray had a large store to draw on for his burlesques, as did Lytton and Butler for their pseudo-Utopias. Nor is there any abrupt termination to satiric affairs as the Victorians left them at the end of the century. The years stand as sign posts along the way, and not as barriers across it. The changes they call our attention to were less patent to those in and by whom they were working than to us with our perspective. From our moderate distance we are able to discern not only the evolutionary process but some of its results.