the universal (added to a certain contempt for the experimental) is pre-eminently a legacy of Greece to the human mind. So here again, and moreover in its profoundest part, the teaching of the modern ‘clerks’ shows the triumph of Germanic values and the bankruptcy of Hellenism. I should like to point out another form, not the least remarkable, which this preaching of particularism assumes among the ‘clerks’. I mean their exhortations to consider everything only as it exists _in time_, that is as it constitutes a succession of particular states, a ‘becoming’, a ‘history’, and never as it presents a state of permanence beyond time under this succession of distinct cases. I mean especially their assertion that this view of things in their historical aspect is the only serious and philosophical view, and that the need to look at them in their eternal aspect is a form of the child’s taste for ghosts, and should be merely smiled at. Need I point out that this conception inspires the whole of modern thought? It exists among a whole group of literary critics, who, on their own showing, inquire far less whether a work is beautiful than whether it expresses ‘the present’ aspirations of ‘the contemporary soul’.[80] It may be seen in a whole school of moralist-historians who admire a doctrine, not because it is just or good, but because it embodies the morality _of its time_, the scientific spirit _of its time_. (This is the principal reason why Sorel admires Bergsonism and why Nietzsche admires the philosophy of Nicolas de Cuse.) It may be seen especially in all our metaphysicians. Whether they put forward _Entwickelung_ or _Duration_ or _Creative Evolution_ or _Pluralism_ or _Integral Experience_ or the _Concrete Universal_, they all teach that the absolute is developed _in time_, in the circumstantial, and proclaim the decadence of that form of mind which, from Plato to Kant, hallows existence as conceived beyond change.[81] If, with Pythagoras, we assume that the Cosmos is the place of regulated and uniform existence, and the Ouranos the place of the becoming and the moving, we may say that all modern metaphysics place the Ouranos at the top of their scale of values and hold the Cosmos in very slight esteem. Is it not remarkable to see the ‘clerks’, even in the lofty function of metaphysicians, teaching the laymen that the real alone is worthy of consideration, and that the supersensible is only worthy of derisive laughter?[82] (_B_) _The ‘clerks’ praise attachment to the practical, and denounce love of the spiritual_ But the ‘clerks’ with their doctrines have inflamed the realism of the laymen in other ways besides praising the particular and denouncing the universal. At the very top of the scale of moral values they place the possession of concrete advantages, of material power and the means by which they are procured; and they hold up to scorn the pursuit of truly spiritual advantages, of non-practical or disinterested values.