Page:The battle of the books - Guthkelch - 1908.djvu/21

Rh Digression deals with the whole dispute. At the outset Fontenelle declares that the whole question comes only to this: were the trees which grew formerly finer than those we have now? If they were, Nature has evidently become enfeebled, and in these later ages we cannot hope to equal the works of the ancients: if they were not, it is clear that Nature is still the same, and men, too, must be as great as ever they were, and capable of producing works as fine as those of Homer or Plato or Demosthenes. To say that the ancients have made all the greatest discoveries proves nothing: the ancients made these discoveries because they lived before us, not because of their greater genius. The life of the world is the life of one man: a cultivated man now, has all the culture of the ages that went before him: so that like a being which has lived from the beginning of the world until the present day, having been once a child, thinking only of the most pressing needs of life, and then a youth, succeeding in the things of the imagination and beginning to reason for himself, mankind has become what it is now, a race reasoning with greater power and insight than ever before. But unlike the being to whom Fontenelle has compared