Unfortunately, in the eighteenth century, reason was classic; not only the aptitude but the documents which enable it to comprehend tradition were absent.  In the first place, there was no knowledge of history; learning was, due to its dullness and tediousness, refused; learned compilations, vast collections of extracts and the slow work of criticism were held in disdain.  Voltaire made fun of the Benedictines.  Montesquieu, to ensure the acceptance of his “Esprit des lois,” indulged in wit about laws.  Reynal, to give an impetus to his history of commerce in the Indies, welded to it the declamation of Diderot.  The Abbé Barthélemy covered over the realities of Greek manners and customs with his literary varnish.  Science was expected to be either epigrammatic or oratorical; crude or technical details would have been objectionable to a public composed of people of the good society; correctness of style therefore drove out or falsified those small significant facts which give a peculiar sense and their original relief to ancient personalities. —­ Even if writers had dared to note them, their sense and bearing would not have been understood.  The sympathetic imagination did not exist[9]; people were incapable of going out of themselves, of betaking themselves to distant points of view, of conjecturing the peculiar and violent states of the human brain, the decisive and fruitful moment during which it gives birth to a vigorous creation, a religion destined to rule, a state that is sure to endure.  The imagination of Man is limited to personal experiences, and where in their experience, could individuals in this society have found the material which would have allowed them to imagine the convulsions of a delivery?  How could minds, as polished and as amiable as these, fully adopt the sentiments of an apostle, of a monk, of a barbarian or feudal founder; see these in the milieu which explains and justifies them; picture to themselves the surrounding crowd, at first souls in despair and haunted by mystic dreams, and next the rude and violent intellects given up to instinct and imagery, thinking with half-visions, their resolve consisting of irresistible impulses?  A speculative reasoning of this stamp could not imagine figures like these.  To bring them within its rectilinear limits they require to be reduced and made over; the Macbeth of Shakespeare becomes that of Ducis, and the Mahomet of the Koran that of Voltaire.  Consequently, as they failed to see souls, they misconceived institutions.  The suspicion that truth could have been conveyed only through the medium of legends, that justice could have been established only by force, that religion was obliged to assume the sacerdotal form, that the State necessarily took a military form, and that the Gothic edifice possessed, as well as other structures, its own architecture, proportions, balance of parts, solidity, and even beauty, never entered their heads. —­ Furthermore, unable to comprehend the past, they could not comprehend