If the forces of nature are permanent, how are we to explain the fact that in the barbarous centuries after the decline of Rome—­the term Middle Ages has not yet come into currency—­ignorance was so dense and deep?  This breach of continuity is one of the plausible arguments of the advocates of the Ancients.  Those ages, they say, were ignorant and barbarous because the Greek and Latin writers had ceased to be read; as soon as the study of the classical models revived there was a renaissance of reason and good taste.  That is true, but it proves nothing.  Nature never forgot how to mould the head of Cicero or Livy.  She produces in every age men who might be great men; but the age does not always allow them to exert their talents.  Inundations of barbarians, universal wars, governments which discourage or do not favour science and art, prejudices which assume all variety of shapes—­like the Chinese prejudice against dissecting corpses—­may impose long periods of ignorance or bad taste.

But observe that, though the return to the study of the ancients revived, as at one stroke, the aesthetic ideals which they had created and the learning which they had accumulated, yet even if their works had not been preserved we should, though it would have cost us many long years of labour, have discovered for ourselves “ideas of the true and the beautiful.”  Where should we have found them?  Where the ancients themselves found them, after much groping.

6.

The comparison of the life of collective humanity to the life of a single man, which had been drawn by Bacon and Pascal, Saint Sorlin and Perrault, contains or illustrates an important truth which bears on the whole question.  Fontenelle puts it thus.  An educated mind is, as it were, composed of all the minds of preceding ages; we might say that a single mind was being educated throughout all history.  Thus this secular man, who has lived since the beginning of the world, has had his infancy in which he was absorbed by the most urgent needs of life; his youth in which he succeeded pretty well in things of imagination like poetry and eloquence, and even began to reason, but with more courage than solidity.  He is now in the age of manhood, is more enlightened, and reasons better; but he would have advanced further if the passion for war had not distracted him and given him a distaste for the sciences to which he has at last returned.

Figures, if they are pressed, are dangerous; they suggest unwarrantable conclusions.  It may be illuminative to liken the development of humanity to the growth of an individual; but to infer that the human race is now in its old age, merely on the strength of the comparison, is obviously unjustifiable.  That is what Bacon and the others had done.  The fallacy was pointed out by Fontenelle.