If there be one thing which, more than another, distinguishes Modern Philosophers from the Ancient Philosophy of Athens, it is the desire to discover a First Principle of certainty, a handle by which they may get hold of and set in due order the perplexed mass of reality. They find themselves born to an inheritance of tradition, a mass of belief and lore which overwhelms where it does not support. The long watches of the Middle Ages had been a time of preparation--even if the 'cerebration' had been somewhat unconscious. The mind had been by discipline trained to freedom. As it worked amid the material and tried to order it and defend it, the intellect grew to recognise its lordship over the load of authority. Overt revolts indeed against coercion by decrees and by canons of dogma had never been wanting even in the quietest of the so-called 'ages of faith.' But it is not in the loudest outcry or the most rampant dissent that progress shows its most effective course. The 'catholic' and 'orthodox' tradition equally bears witness to a movement to emancipation, to self-centred intelligence. Such an emancipation however cannot be complete and self-realised without a sharp and painful wrench at the moment of mental birth. The great word of disruption, of self-assertion, of defiance to the past and to the dominant, must be said: and, as human beings are constituted, it will be said in a tone of acerbity for which neither the revolutionist nor the reactionary are severally alone responsible.