We shall thus in the end
lose one more advantage possessed by all our ancestors. For Latin is
not only a key to the knowledge of Roman antiquity; its also directly
opens up to us the Middle Age in every country in Europe, and modern
times as well, down to about the year 1750. Erigena, for example, in
the ninth century, John of Salisbury in the twelfth, Raimond Lully in
the thirteenth, with a hundred others, speak straight to us in the
very language that they naturally adopted in thinking of learned
matters.
They thus come quite close to us even at this distance of time: we are
in direct contact with them, and really come to know them. How would
it have been if every one of them spoke in the language that was
peculiar to his time and country? We should not understand even the
half of what they said. A real intellectual contact with them would be
impossible. We should see them like shadows on the farthest horizon,
or, may be, through the translator's telescope.
It was with an eye to the advantage of writing in Latin that Bacon, as
he himself expressly states, proceeded to translate his _Essays_ into
that language, under the title _Sermones fideles_; at which work
Hobbes assisted him.[1]
[Footnote 1: Cf. Thomae Hobbes vita: _Carolopoli apud Eleutherium
Anglicum_, 1681, p.
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