Descartes and the Roi-Soleil are so adequate an expression of their epoch that they may be considered as the characters of the prologue to the tragedy that was to bring the next century to its close. M. Jacques Maritain has rightly bestowed on Descartes the epithet of revolutionary, but it could be extended to Louis XIV if one did not run the risk of seeming paradoxical. For both their self-assertions, politically and theoretically absolute, are equally anti-religious and anti-historical. The position assumed by Mind whenever man is really religious implies self-negation. If God is, He must be infinite and Man, by comparison, nothing; at least such is the logical sequence of the doctrines upheld by most religious people. And when Mind is speculatively too poor to realise the necessity of the religious moment in which man bows down to everything that is not his beloved self and accepts the law that such recognition begets, man can turn to history and trace there intuitively (as the first great thinker of Italy has done), the part played by each one of mind’s activities. Religion then appears independently of personal conviction, a constant element in the life of man, more or less preponderant, always there, as the recognition of all that is to man not-self. It is where modern thought has failed to realise this, either theoretically or historically, that it knows only the first term of the relation which is the basis of every social organisation. Liberty and law are correlative terms just as are light and shadow. Liberty is the claim of the subject and law springs from the recognition of the object. Louis XIV and Descartes, thanks to their unbounded selfishness, assert emphatically their empirical individuality. For them the self swallows up the other term the not-self, that the modern world after them seems to ignore. Descartes was endowed with the most precious gifts that make the scientist and the thinker. Yet it can be said that his greatest fortune lay in the fact that he embodies most perfectly all that is characteristic of the French mind. Foreigners, even when their knowledge of his language is far from perfect, can take his _Discours sur la Méthode_ and read it with perfect ease and a feeling of intellectual and æsthetic well-being. To read this and to walk through the park of Versailles are equally indispensable to understand that great century in France. And both walk and reading make very much the same impression.