156 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



A man's character is his fate 

 is a sentence that one would assign to Taine or to Stendahl in the nine- 

 teenth century if one did not know it to have been written by Hera- 

 clitus in the fifth century before Christ. In like manner, some of 

 the scientific processes of Hipparchus, Archimedes and Boger Bacon are 

 so ' modern ' as to bring a glow of delighted wonder when they are 

 met with. Their failure to draw certain conclusions that seem almost 

 obvious to us is equally astonishing. A formal explanation of the 

 differences and of the resemblances of ancient ages with our own might 

 be somewhat as follows. We may suppose that a completely developed 

 man of our day has educated his sympathies and intelligence to have 

 outlets in a certain large number of directions — let us say, in the direc- 

 tions A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, 0, P, Q, E, S, T, IT, V, 

 W, X, Y, Z. It is possible, however, that some few of these outlets 

 are absent, or nearly closed, E and 0, for instance. The men of the 

 eighteenth century may be supposed to have had fewer outlets, and 

 those of the thirteenth still fewer; but the intensity and refinement of 

 their sympathies in certain directions may not have been less, but far 

 greater, than ours. The feeling of the thirteenth century for religion, 

 and of the sixteenth for art, for example, were not only different in 

 intensity, but very different in quality, from our own. 



When we make a formal comparison of our age with that of St. 

 Thomas Aquinas and of Newton, the table might stand thus : 



A, B, C, D, - F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, - P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, 



XX century. 



a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, -,-,-, m, n, XIII century. 



a, b, - -, -, - g, h, i, j, k, 1, m, n, o, p, q, r, XVIII century. 



If in a comparison of the thirteenth century with the twentieth 

 our discourse is upon the matters A, B, C and D we may find their 

 insights, a, b, c, d, singularly like our own. The case may be the 

 same for the matters G, H, I compared with g, h, i. But if, by chance, 

 we are comparing their insight e with our absence of insight, or our 

 X, Y, Z, with the blanks in their experience, we are astonished at the 

 difference of outlook. 



This formal and unimaginative illustration may not be quite useless 

 in clarifying one's thought upon a matter easy to express in words 

 and exceedingly difficult to realize. It is essential to admit the pres- 

 ence of blanks in the experience of past centuries ; and also the presence 

 of insights upon fundamental matters which are astonishingly different 

 in intensity and in quality from our own. The experience of the 

 thirteenth century was handed onwards to succeeding ages ; it could be 

 understood by the ages near to it ; words continued to mean in the four- 

 teenth very nearly what they meant in the preceding century. But as 

 ideas changed, the signs for ideas changed with them; and we must be 

 constantly on our guard lest we unthinkingly admit an old form as if it 



