added nothing; since then they have been slowly discovering things
that are unnecessary. Nature has not been so unjust as to allow one
age to enjoy more pleasures than another. And what is the value of
civilisation? It moulds our words, and embarrasses our actions; it
does not affect our feelings. [Footnote: See the dialogues of Harvey
with Erasistratus (a Greek physician of the third century B.C.);
Galileo with Apicius; Montezuma with Fernando Cortez.]

One might hardly have expected the author of these Dialogues to come
forward a few years later as a champion of the Moderns, even though,
in the dedicatory epistle to Lucian, he compared France to Greece.
But he was seriously interested in the debated question, as an
intellectual problem, and in January 1688 he published his
Digression on the Ancients and Moderns, a short pamphlet, but
weightier and more suggestive than the large work of his friend
Perrault, which began to appear nine months later.

3.

The question of pre-eminence between the Ancients and Moderns is
reducible to another. Were trees in ancient times greater than to-
day? If they were, then Homer, Plato, and Demosthenes cannot be
equalled in modern times; if they were not, they can.

Fontenelle states the problem in this succinct way at the beginning
of the Digression. The permanence of the forces of Nature had been
asserted by Saint Sorlin and Perrault; they had offered no proof,
and had used the principle rather incidentally and by way of
illustration. But the whole inquiry hinged on it. If it can be shown
that man has not degenerated, the cause of the Moderns is