Certainly old things are passing away; not the old ideals only, but even the regret they leave behind is dead, and we are shaping instinctively our new ideals. Yet we are at peace with the past. The streams of hot lava flow forth and cover the world; the lava is but the minute fragments of former life. We marvel at the prodigality of nature, but how marvellous, too, the economy! The old cycles are for ever renewed, and it is no paradox that he who would advance can never cling too close to the past. The thing that has been is the thing that will be again; if we realize that, we may avoid many of the disillusions, miseries, insanities, that for ever accompany the throes of new birth. Set your shoulder joyously to the world’s wheel: you may spare yourself some unhappiness if, beforehand, you slip the book of _Ecclesiastes_ beneath your arm. DIDEROT. Of the three intellectual heroes of the Revolution, Diderot exercised the least apparent influence; he was, for the most part, too far ahead of his time, and his tremendous energies were frequently either concealed or dissipated along innumerable channels. The humane Voltaire, short-sighted, but so keen within his range, whose sarcasm was always on the side of benevolence; the morbid, wrong-headed, suffering Rousseau, who spent his life in bringing to birth an exquisite emotional thrill which is now a common possession--these two men stood out in the eyes of all, then and long after, as the standard-bearers of revolution. On the other hand, Diderot’s great German contemporary, Goethe, the only man with whom he may fairly be compared, has during most part of this century seemed to us the inaugurator of the spiritual activities of the modern world. Goethe is still full of meaning; it will be long before we have exhausted “Wilhelm Meister” or “Faust.” Perhaps, now that we are so anxious to reform the world before reforming ourselves, we need more than ever the example of Goethe’s self-culture and self-restraint, of his wise reverence for temperance and harmony. But even Goethe, with that peaceful Weimar atmosphere about him, seems to us a little antique and remote from our modern ways. Diderot, on the other hand, who grew up and lived among the various and turbulent activities of the city that was in his time the focus of European life, appears before us now as a spirit of the latter nineteenth century, at one with our aspirations to-day. It was fitting that his works should wait until our own time for the most adequate and complete publication yet possible, and that he should now first receive full and ungrudging appreciation.[2] “At the distance of some centuries Diderot will appear prodigious; men will look from afar at that universal head with admiration mingled with astonishment, as we to-day look at the heads of Plato and Aristotle.” So Rousseau wrote, at the end of his life, of the friend whose unwearying kindness he--almost alone among human beings--had at last