ABSTRACT
Greece raised the art of celebrating the great feats of her children so high that Ernest Renan was inclined to attribute to her the invention of the idea of glory. Greece was well deserving of civilization in endowing it with a purpose in life that possessed "unequaled value". At times Aristotle wonders what would happen in the case of certain bodies going beyond the limits of the experiment to the point where some of their important characteristics could be called null or infinite. The constructions of the past are generally solid enough to resist the pamphleteers who relate to poor devils the absurdities, vices or wrongdoings of certain errant social authorities. There is much truth in William James's schematic tableau of the most widespread philosophical concepts, arranged around the two poles of rationalism and empiricism. At the end of the Old Regime innumerable lofty minds composed descriptions of the natural state of societies whose elements were borrowed from many sources.
