A man's character is his fate
is a sentence that one would assign to Taine or to Stendahl in the nineteenth century if one did not know it to have been written by Heraclitus 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 directions A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, 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 presence 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 fourteenth 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
