4.

Having established the natural equality of the Ancients and Moderns, Fontenelle inferred that whatever differences exist are due to external conditions—­(1) time; (2) political institutions and the estate of affairs in general.

The ancients were prior in time to us, therefore they were the authors of the first inventions.  For that, they cannot be regarded as our superiors.  If we had been in their place we should have been the inventors, like them; if they were in ours, they would add to those inventions, like us.  There is no great mystery in that.  We must impute equal merit to the early thinkers who showed the way and to the later thinkers who pursued it.  If the ancient attempts to explain the universe have been recently replaced by the discovery of a simple system (the Cartesian), we must consider that the truth could only be reached by the elimination of false routes, and in this way the numbers of the Pythagoreans, the ideas of Plato, the qualities of Aristotle, all served indirectly to advance knowledge.  “We are under an obligation to the ancients for having exhausted almost all the false theories that could be formed.”  Enlightened both by their true views and by their errors, it is not surprising that we should surpass them.

But all this applies only to scientific studies, like mathematics, physics, and medicine, which depend partly on correct reasoning and partly on experience.  Methods of reasoning improve slowly, and the most important advance which has been made in the present age is the method inaugurated by Descartes.  Before him reasoning was loose; he introduced a more rigid and precise standard, and its influence is not only manifest in our best works on physics and philosophy, but is even discernible in books on ethics and religion.

We must expect posterity to excel us as we excel the Ancients, through improvement of method, which is a science in itself—­the most difficult and least studied of all—­and through increase of experience.  Evidently the process is endless (il est evident que tout cela n’a point de fin), and the latest men of science must be the most competent.

But this does not apply to poetry or eloquence, round which the controversy has most violently raged.  For poetry and eloquence do not depend on correct reasoning.  They depend principally on vivacity of imagination, and “vivacity of imagination does not require a long course of experiments, or a great multitude of rules, to attain all the perfection of which it is capable.”  Such perfection might be attained in a few centuries.  If the ancients did achieve perfection in imaginative literature, it follows that they cannot be surpassed; but we have no right to say, as their admirers are fond of pretending, that they cannot be equalled.

5.

Besides the mere nature of time, we have to take into account external circumstances in considering this question.