terrestrial milieu is unstable. Its heat has constantly diminished. Formerly, in the most remote epochs, the vicinity of the poles, now an ice-covered and inaccessible extent, had a climate hotter than that of the tropics. Life was born amid this tropical environment, at the bottom of an ocean that had a far higher temperature than the Caribbean sea or the sea of Java. Nevertheless the poles grew colder and all the other parts of the world as well. Then animal life found itself faced with this alternative: either to accept the new conditions of the milieu, or to rebel against these conditions,—struggle and maintain internally despite the external temperature, the high temperature of its origin.

That is a solemn moment in the drama of the world. What is to happen? If the new conditions are accepted, it spells fatal decline. If they are repulsed, it means a magnificent future development. Almost all animal life submitted: it is today represented by the lowest class of living creatures: the invertebrates. A single representative of the animal world revolted, made a prodigious effort, entered into strife with the hostile milieu and dominated it: the vertebrate. Thus life, in its superior aspects, affirmed itself from the very earliest times as an insurrection.

M. Quinton, says: "The vertebrate stands forth as marked by a particular character, which distinguishes him from the rest of the animal kingdom, giving him a position apart, above. While the balance of the animal kingdom accepts, or rather undergoes, in the face of the progressive shrinking of the seas and the cooling of the globe, the new conditions that have come about, and to which it can yield only at the cost of intense suffering, the vertebrates give evidence of a special power; they refuse to accept the conditions and confronted by hostile circumstances maintain the sole conditions favorable to their existence.... They are not, then, like the invertebrates, the passive toys of circumstances that dominate them, but, in part, the masters of the fundamental conditions necessary to their welfare. In the midst of the physical world that surrounds him, ignores him and oppresses him, man is not the sole insurgent, the only animal in revolt against the natural conditions, the only one tending to found, in an instable, hostile medium, the fixed elements of a superior life. The simple fish, the simple mammal ... hold the essential physical laws in check. When man attacks the natural forces that surround him, in order to dominate the hostile elements in them, he first participates of the genius of the vertebrate."

I have purposely underscored the words sole insurgent. These words, in fact, indicate the orientation of our efforts the moment we attempt to apply the biological principles enunciated by M. Quinton to the social domain. Far from teaching stagnation, resignation, acceptation, he counsels on the contrary, if one understands him, revolt against all that bars the progress of life and the maintenance of its highest conditions of power and intensity. These ideas are related to the basic ideas of Nietzsche's philosophy: we must grow or succumb. It is the same with individuals and persons as with the animal species: those who accept the conditions provided by their traditional environment, those who do not react, are condemned to decadence: they are invertebrates. The traits of a superior organism, on the contrary, are reaction through deep, continued evolution, or by a brusk revolution against the mediocrity of the milieu which tends to dominate and reduce it.

In certain places it is freely asserted that the peoples of the future are the wise peoples slumbering in the tradition of a political order, of a religious order, or a moral order: those peoples, on the contrary, are in their decline. But there is something worse: there are political—or social groups that dream, not of attaining to the genius of the vertebrate, which spells perpetual combat against the hostility of the environment, but of becoming once again invertebrates, and of falling asleep gently in the lap of ancient traditions.

There is, according to the theories of M. Quinton, in the social realm as in the biological, a fixed point, and one that must remain fixed unless decline is to set in, and that is life; but we must not confuse life with the environment in which it evolves. Life is constant and the milieu is variable. The most diverse political and social institutions have been successively imagined by man to assure, according to the needs of the moment, the development of his life. And as, in the course of time, they have appeared to him insufficient, he has rejected them to imagine others more in confirmity with his requirements: and thus social progress appears as a necessity, in the same way that anatomical progress has transformed an ocean worm into a fish and the fish into a mammal or a bird. In the two cases there is a certain end sought. It is for man to create for himself the social conditions that will permit his life to maintain its loftiest aims.

When the social conditions that the old regime brought about in France appeared to men unsuited any longer to the maintenance of their life, they acted like good vertebrates,—they revolted. Civilization is nothing but a succession of insurrections, now against the hostility of physical forces,—especially against the cold,—now against social forces, which, after a period of usefulness, tend almost always to evolve in the direction of parasitism.

THE PESSIMISM OF LEOPARDI

Leopardi has never been widely read in France. While Schopenhauer has achieved a certain literary popularity, Leopardi has remained, even for scholars, in the shade. This is due in large measure to the mediocrity of his translators and his commentators....

Leopardi's poetry is difficult to enjoy. M. Turiello says that it is obscure even to Italians of the present generation. It is true that Leopardi is somewhat addicted to archaism and that, moreover, the Italian language has since his day undergone rapid development under the influence of French. His prose, despite its severe form, now too concise and now a trifle oratorical, is more approachable.... But if translation, is always a difficult task, it is particularly difficult to translate Leopardi.

In prose as in verse he is a pessimist more by nature than as a result of reasoning. It is his sensibility rather than his intellect that speaks. He constructed no system; he gathers his impressions, his observations, and attempts, not without arbitrariness, to generalize them. His philosophy is entirely physiological: the world is bad because his personal life is bad. He conceives the world in most terrifying fashion, and supposes that if all men do not judge it as he does, it is because they are mad. Optimism, in fact, is fairly widespread. While there is life there is hope. The fable of Death and the Wood-cutter is a fair symbol of humanity's out-look. On the other hand it is certain that literatures and philosophies, even those which aim to produce laughter as well as those which exalt life, are generally pessimistic. There is a tragic background to Molière's plays and a gloomy background to Nietzsche's aphorisms. Absolute, beatific optimism is compatible only with a sort of animal insensibility and stupidity: only idiots are constantly laughing and are constantly happy to be alive. Absolute pessimism, however, can develop only in certain depressed organisms: its extreme manifestations are plainly pathological and connected with maladies of the brain.

Schopenhauer affirms that life is evil, yet he loves it and enjoys it. Let fame come, and he expands with cheer. His character is by no means gloomy. He is at the same time a philosopher and a humorous writer. Leopardi never knew these expansions. He affects to despise even glory, for which he nevertheless labors. But he, too, is a keen, witty spirit, although ever bitter; and he, too, is a humorist. He