Ten lines of notes, a few memoranda of conversations--faint reflections, to us around him, of the great inward light--are all that enable one to attempt an indication of the few leading conceptions were to complete "Les Origines de la France Contemporaine." "Le Milieu Moderne", was to have been the title of the last book.

The question here is how to discover the great characteristics of the period into which European societies entered and about were to live.

Rising to a higher point of view than that to which he had confined himself in studying France, M.Taine regarded its metamorphosis as a case of transformation as general as the passage of the Cite antique over to the Roman Empire over to the feudal State.

Now, as formerly, this transformation is the effect of a "change in the intellectual and physical condition of men"; that is to say, in other words, in the environment that surrounds them.

Such is the advent of a new geological period, of a glacial period, for example, or, more precisely, "the very slow and then accelerated upheaval of a continent, forcing the submarine species which breathe by gills to transform themselves into species which breathe by lungs." It is impossible to divine in what sense this adaptation takes place if we do not comprehend the event, that is to say if we do not perceive its starting-point and the innate force which produces it.