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.

From his point of view, an "old age" of humanity, which if it meant
anything meant decay as well as the wisdom of experience, was
contrary to the principle of the permanence of natural forces. Man,
he asserts, will have no old age. He will be always equally capable,
of achieving the successes of his youth; and he will become more and
more expert in the things which become the age of virility. Or "to
drop metaphor, men will never degenerate." In ages to come we may be
regarded--say in America--with the same excess of admiration with
which we regard the ancients. We might push the prediction further.
In still later ages the interval of time which divides us from the
Greeks and Romans will appear so relatively small to posterity that
they will classify us and the ancients as virtually contemporary;
just in the same way as we group together the Greeks and Romans,
though the Romans in their own day were moderns in relation to the
Greeks. In that remote period men will be able to judge without