measure of the reach of men's minds, and a still more pungent
satire on our vanity. We should say, Fermat went to such a page,
Archimedes went a few pages further.

"What then is our end? The execution of a work that can never be
achieved, and which would be far beyond human intelligence if it
were achieved. Are we not more insensate than the first inhabitants
of the plain of Shinar? We know the immeasurable distance between
the earth and the heavens, and still we insist on rearing our
tower.

"But can we presume that there will not come a time when our pride
will abandon the work in discouragement? What appearance is there
that, narrowly lodged and ill at its ease here below, our pride
should obstinately persist in constructing an uninhabitable palace
beyond the earth's atmosphere? Even if it should so insist, would
it not be arrested by the confusion of tongues, which is already
only too perceptible and too inconvenient in natural history?
Besides, it is utility that circumscribes all. It will be utility
that in a few centuries will set bounds to experimental physics, as
it is on the eve of setting bounds to geometry. I grant centuries
to this study, because the sphere of its utility is infinitely more
extensive than that of any abstract science, and it is without
contradiction the base of our real knowledge."[212]

[212] _Oeuv._, ii. 12, 13, Sec. 6. See the same idea in the
Encyclopaedia, above, vol. i. pp. 225-227.

We cannot wonder that when Comte drew up his list of the hundred and
fifty volumes that should form the good Positivist's library in the
nineteenth century, he should have placed Diderot's _Interpretation of
Nature_ on one side of Descartes' _Discourse on Method_, with Bacon's
_Novum Organum_ on the other.

The same spirit finds even stronger and more distinct expression in a
later aphorism:--"Since the reason cannot understand everything,
imagination foresee everything, sense observe everything, nor memory
retain everything; since great men are born at such remote intervals,
and the progress of science is so interrupted by revolution, that whole
ages of study are passed in recovering the knowledge of the centuries
that are gone,--to observe everything in nature without distinction is
to fail in duty to the human race. Men who are beyond the common run in
their talents ought to res