Man’s liberty, man’s dignity, were asserted all through the Scholastic period and the prayer of Thomas Aquinas thanking God for the dignity He had bestowed upon man is a good proof of the fact. It could, therefore, only be through the greatest misrepresentation of historical facts that Pagan times were identified with the cause of liberty and equality of men, two ideas that are essentially Christian and were in their present form unknown to Paganism. Such perversion of facts cannot be, however, ascribed to a wilful adulteration of history. The men who upheld it are too many and some are too obviously sincere. Yet on the other hand it is impossible to ascribe it to an instinctive foreboding of immanence as nowadays understood. The only possible explanation is the force of repulsion for the immediate past that is inherent in the historical assertion of any new social force. A new age always asserts itself by fighting its antecedents and often the very cause of its coming to light. Hobbes, rejecting sovereignty by the grace of God to enforce his own conception of the sovereignty of his _Leviathan_ grounded on the _Bellum omnium contra omnes_, is merely conforming to the philosophy of Nature, which, as materialism, was to him a religion, a new religion that must take the place of the old one, at least amongst educated men. In its objectivity Nature stood to him as God; an awful divinity that had a good deal in common with the God of Calvin in the inalterability of its will. But few of the new thinkers had the courage to be as coherent as he was. For he was quite aware that the substitution of Nature for the God of Christianity, as the ultimate reality to which political forms had to be traced back, made for a greater implacability of political laws. The others sometimes pretended to believe and mostly did believe that the unknown _quidditas_ which they call human nature had a luminous social instinct that had been marred through what they called the Dark Ages; and they did not realise that the belief in such nature of man was elaborated in the schools of the Middle Ages, and that if it was taken for granted as much as the geometrical postulate that makes the three inner angles of a triangle equivalent to two right angles, it was just as abstract and could no more be proved on experimental ground. The nature of man taken as implying the necessity of or longing for social arrangements is illustrated in history; but it is the essence of history to relate to men the deeds of men, thereby is enforced the necessity of having society in order to have history. So that isolated man cannot enter history. Of men anterior to society we can, therefore, know nothing. But prehistoric times are not of necessity presocial; indeed, the art that flourished in such periods shows the existence of social intercourse in times of which we have, up to now, no historical knowledge. In any case the philosophy of politics