the person with any values whatever? Before answering this question, let us pause to admire the magic property of speech, I mean the power which a word bestows on a newly created idea when it extends to that idea after having been applied to a pre-existent object of modifying that object and thus retro- actively influencing the past. In whatever light we view the transition from relative to absolute justice, whether it took place by stages or all at once, there has been creation. Some- thing has supervened which might never have existed, which would not have existed except for certain circumstances, certain men, perhaps one particular man. But instead of realizing that some new thing has come and taken possession of the old and absorbed it into a whole that was up to then unforeseeable, we prefer looking upon the process as if the new thing had always been there, not actually but virtually pre-existing, and as if the old had been a part of it even then, a part of something yet uncreated; and on this showing the conceptions of justice which followed one another in ancient societies were no more than partial, incomplete visions of an integral justice which is nothing more or less than justice as we know it to-day. There is no need to analyse in detail this particular example of a very general illusion, barely noticed by philosophers, which has vitiated a goodly number of metaphysical doctrines and which sets the theory of knowledge