It is true that the reader will easily pick up in the Cartesian theories ideas known to St. Augustin and to the Scholastic Doctors against whom Descartes reacted so violently. The visitor might just as well notice in the park or on the noble façade of the palace lines and decorative patterns reminding him of the Renaissance Villas seen in Italy, but this does not deprive the palace and its setting of their purely French character. The fact is that the seventeenth century with the last half of the sixteenth and the first of the eighteenth, appears in the life of Mind, i.e. in history, as an Anglo-French period, whereas the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth had been in their artistic and intellectual production mainly Italian. The ideas elaborated in France and in England had come from everywhere and from all centuries, Italy being chiefly the historical and natural agent of communication, a sort of historical point of convergence between antiquity and modern times as she is geographically between east and west. The idea of originality, without playing upon words, can be called the “original sin” of our modern world; born from the contempt of Bacon and Descartes for the past, it is ending now in Futurism and Bolshevism. To attempt to create something new without roots in the past in art, politics, science or philosophy is not merely absurd, it is impossible. The living dialectic we term history displays each of its moments as the logical sequence of the preceding one and the elaborating stage of the next. The work of Descartes will live as long as our intellectual life lasts. Yet this very work, in which he inaugurates the anti-historical method, is the best illustration of the law of history, displaying as it does the riches of a mind in which were interwoven the legacies of the past and the germs of all that was to be subjective and positive in the philosophy of several centuries. Louis XIV brought a political form to the precision of a mathematical formula, that is to say he made it absolute and by so doing rendered the evolution, characteristic of all social organisation, impossible for the monarchy he represented. That which is absolute is unalterable. To be absolute this French monarchy had to be static; whereas every political system must be dynamic. Perfection is the negation of development. The person of Louis XIV was the perfect realisation of France’s ideal of an absolute Sovereign and as such it was, therefore, the conclusion of the process which had brought him to the throne.