Yes, man has discovered the treasure that long lay hidden in his breast, the seed and bud that longed to burst forth into life and blossom. Now the motto is: Independent self-development; no more restraint, but living out one’s personality. The eagle is not given wings to be bound down upon the earth; nor does the bud come forth never to unfold. Full freedom, therefore, too, for everything human! And modern man leaps to the fatal conclusion: therefore all interference of external authority is unjust, is force, constraint upon my being; the same error that boys fall into when life begins to tingle with its fulness of strength. Being ignorant of their nature, they feel any kind of dependence a chain; only themselves, their judgments and desires, are law. Just so modern man, in his deplorable want of self-knowledge, fails to see how he is cutting himself off from the source and support of life; how he is pulling himself out by the roots from the soil whence he derives his strength; how, left to his own littleness, he withers away; how, abandoned to his own diseased nature, he condemns himself to intellectual decay. Autonomism, individualism, independent personality—these have become the ideals that permeate the man of this age, and influence the thought of thousands without their knowing it. The well-known, Protestant, theologian, _A. Sabatier_, writes: “It is not difficult to find the common principle to which all the expressions and tendencies of the spirit of modern times can be reduced in any field whatever. One word expresses it—the word, ‘autonomy.’ By autonomy I understand the firm confidence, which the mind of man has attained in his present stage of development, that he contains in himself his own rule of life and norm of thought, and that he harbours the ardent desire of realizing himself by obeying his own law” (La Religion de la Culture moderne, 10). “Modern times,” writes _R. Eucken_, “have changed the position of the human subject ... it has become to them the centre of his life and the ultimate end of his endeavours” (Zeitschrift fuer Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, 112 (1898), 165 s.). Still clearer are the following words of _G. Spicker_: “Man depended formerly either on nature or on revelation, or on both at once; now it is just the opposite: man is in every way, theoretically as well as practically, an autonomist. If anything can denote clearly the characteristic difference between the modern and the old scholastic view, it is this absolute, subjective, standpoint.” “As we in principle do not intend to depend on any objectivity or authority, there is nothing left but the autonomy of the subject” (Der Kampf zweier Weltanschauungen (1898), 143, 145). A noted apostle of modern freedom exclaims enthusiastically: