most deceptive uniformity reigns over our manners, and all minds seem as
if they had been cast in a single mould. Hence we never know with what
sort of person we are dealing, hence the hateful troop of suspicions,
fears, reserves, and treacheries, and the concealment of impiety,
arrogance, calumny, and scepticism, under a dangerous varnish of
refinement. So terrible a set of effects must have a cause. History
shows that the cause here is to be found in the progress of sciences and
arts. Egypt, once so mighty, becomes the mother of philosophy and the
fine arts; straightway behold its conquest by Cambyses, by Greeks, by
Romans, by Arabs, finally by Turks. Greece twice conquered Asia, once
before Troy, once in its own homes; then came in fatal sequence the
progress of the arts, the dissolution of manners, and the yoke of the
Macedonian. Rome, founded by a shepherd and raised to glory by
husbandmen, began to degenerate with Ennius, and the eve of her ruin was
the day when she gave a citizen the deadly title of arbiter of good
taste. China, where letters carry men to the highest dignities of the
state, could not be preserved by all her literature from the conquering
power of the ruder Tartar. On the other hand, the Persians, Scythians,
Germans, remain in history as types of simplicity, innocence, and
virtue. Was not he admittedly the wisest of the Greeks, who made of his
own apology a plea for ignorance, and a denunciation of poets, orators,
and artists? The chosen people of God never cultivated the sciences, and
when the new law was established, it was not the learned, but the simple
and lowly, fishers and workmen, to whom Christ entrusted his teaching
and its ministry.[160]

This, then, is the way in which chastisement has always overtaken our
presumptuous efforts to emerge from that happy ignorance in which
eternal wisdom placed us; though the thick veil with which that wisdom
has covered all its operations seemed to warn us that we were not
destined to fatuous research. All the secrets that Nature hides from us
are so many evils against which she would fain shelter us.

Is probity the child of ignorance, and can science and virtue be really
inconsistent with one another? These sounding contrasts are mere
deceits, because if you look nearly into the results of this science of
which we talk so proudly, you will perceive that they confirm the
results of induction from history. Astronomy, for instance, is born of
superstiti