Elsewhere modern discoveries, like the circulation of the blood and
the motions of the earth, are criticised as useless; adding nothing
to the happiness and pleasures of mankind. Men acquired, at an early
period, a certain amount of useful knowledge, to which they have
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.
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