are the first studious age in puncto of “costumes,” I mean as concerns morals, articles of belief, artistic tastes, and religions; we are prepared as no other age has ever been for a carnival in the grand style, for the most spiritual festival — laughter and arrogance, for the transcendental height of supreme folly and Aristophanic ridicule of the world.

Perhaps we are still discovering the domain of our invention just here, the domain where even we can still be original, probably as parodists of the world’s history and as God’s Merry-Andrews, — perhaps, though nothing else of the present have a future, our laughter itself may have a future!

224. The historical sense (or the capacity for divining quickly the order of rank of the valuations