ll furnish as many facts as
the memory can retain, and will give him 'a pleasure not to be repented
of' (Timaeus). Only let him beware of being the slave of crotchets, or
of running after a Will o' the Wisp in his ignorance, or in his vanity
of attributing to himself the gifts of a poet or assuming the air of
a philosopher. He should know the limits of his own powers. Better to
build up the mind by slow additions, to creep on quietly from one
thing to another, to gain insensibly new powers and new interests in
knowledge, than to form vast schemes which are never destined to be
realized. But perhaps, as Plato would say, 'This is part of another
subject' (Tim.); though we may also defend our digression by his example
(Theaet.).

4. We remark with surprise that the progress of nations or the natural
growth of institutions which fill modern treatises on political
philosophy seem hardly ever to have attracted the attention of Plato
and Aristotle. The ancients were familiar with the mutability of human
affairs; they could moralize over the ruins of cities and the fall of
empires (Plato, Statesman, and Sulpicius' Letter to Cicero); by them
fate and chance were deemed to be real powers, almost persons, and
to have had a great share in political events. The wiser of them like
Thucydides believed that 'what had been would be again,' and that a
tolerable idea of the future could be gathered from the past. Also they
had dreams of a Golden Age which existed once upon a time and might
still exist in some unknown land, or might return again in the remote
future. But the regular growth of a state enlightened by experience,
progressing in knowledge, improving in the arts, of which the citizens
were educated by the fulfilment of political duties, appears never to
have come within the range of their hopes and aspirations. Such a state
had never been seen, and therefore could not be conceived by them. Their
experience (Aristot. Metaph.; Plato, Laws) led them to conclude that
there had been cycles of civilization in which the arts had been
discovered and lost many times over, and cities had been overthrown and
rebuilt again and again, and deluges and volcanoes and other natural
convulsions had altered the face of the earth. Tradition told them of
many destructions of mankind and of the preservation of a remnant.
The world began again after a deluge and was reconstructed out of the
fragments of itself. Also they were acquainted with empires