of the ancients
revived, as at one stroke, the aesthetic ideals which they had created
and the learning which they had accumulated, yet even if their works
had not been preserved we should, though it would have cost us many long
years of labour, have discovered for ourselves "ideas of the true and
the beautiful." Where should we have found them? Where the ancients
themselves found them, after much groping.

6.

The comparison of the life of collective humanity to the life of a
single man, which had been drawn by Bacon and Pascal, Saint Sorlin and
Perrault, contains or illustrates an important truth which bears on
the whole question. Fontenelle puts it thus. An educated mind is, as it
were, composed of all the minds of preceding ages; we might say that a
single mind was being educated throughout all history. Thus this secular
man, who has lived since the beginning of the world, has had his infancy
in which he was absorbed by the most urgent needs of life; his youth in
which he succeeded pretty well in things of imagination like poetry
and eloquence, and even began to reason, but with more courage than
solidity. He is now in the age of manhood, is more enlightened, and
reasons better; but he would have advanced further if the passion for
war had not distracted him and given him a distaste for the sciences to
which he has at last returned.

Figures, if they are pressed, are dangerous; they suggest unwarrantable
conclusions. It may be illuminative to liken the development of humanity
to the growth of an individual; but to infer that the human race is now
in its old age, merely on the strength of the comparison, is obviously
unjustifiable. That is what Bacon and the others had done. The fallacy
was pointed out by Fontenelle.

From his point of view, an "old age" of humanity, which if it meant
anything meant decay as well as the wisdom of experience, was contrary
to the principle of the permanence of natural forces. Man, he asserts,
will have no old age. He will be always equally capable, of achieving
the successes of his youth; and he will become more and more expert in
the things which become the age of virility. Or "to drop metaphor,
men will never degenerate." In ages to come we may be regarded--say in
America--with the same excess of admiration with which we regard the
ancients. We might push the prediction further. In still later ages the
interval of time which divides us from the Greeks and Romans will appear
so r