] during the subsequent period of decline.
We find the two views thus combined, for instance, in Plato's Laws,
and in the earliest reasoned history of civilisation written by
Dicaearchus, a pupil of Aristotle. [Footnote: Aristotle's own view
is not very clear. He thinks that all arts, sciences, and
institutions have been repeatedly, or rather an infinite number of
times (word in Greek) discovered in the past and again lost.
Metaphysics, xi. 8 ad fin.; Politics, iv. 10, cp. ii. 2. An infinite
number of times seems to imply the doctrine of cycles.] But the
simple life of the first age, in which men were not worn with toil,
and war and disease were unknown, was regarded as the ideal State to
which man would lie only too fortunate if he could return. He had
indeed at a remote time ill the past succeeded in ameliorating some
of the conditions of his lot, but such ancient discoveries as fire
or ploughing or navigation or law-giving did not suggest the guess
that new inventions might lead ultimately to conditions in which
life would be more complex but as happy as the simple life of the
primitive world.
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