The great error of the wisest known nations of antiquity, the Greeks and Romans, was the preference invariable given to the imagined interests of an imaginary existence called the state or country, and the real interests of the real existences, or human beings, upon whom, individually and collectively, their laws could alone operate. Another error was the opposition in which they invariably placed the interests of their own nation to the interests of all other nations; and a third and greater error, was the elevating into a virtue this selfish preference of their own national interests, under the name of patriotism. The moderns are growing a little wise on these matters, but they are still very ignorant.

One makes a great error if one believes there are 'ancients.' Only now is antiquity starting to arise. It arises in the eyes and soul of the artist.

"To study India," he says, "is to trace humanity to its sources." "In the same way as modern society jostles antiquity at each step," he adds, "as our poets have copied Homer and Virgil, Sophocles and Euripides, Plautus and Terence; as our philosophers have drawn inspiration from Socrates, Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle; as our historians take Titus Livius, Sallust, or Tacitus, as models; our orators, Demosthenes or Cicero; our physicians study Hippocrates, and our codes transcribe Justinian--so had antiquity's self also an antiquity to study, to imitate, and to copy. What more simple and more logical? Do not peoples precede and succeed each other? Does the knowledge, painfully acquired by one nation, confine itself to its own territory, and die with the generation that produced it? Can there be any absurdity in the suggestion that the India of 6,000 years ago, brilliant, civilized, overflowing with population, impressed upon Egypt, Persia, Judea, Greece, and Rome, a stamp as ineffaceable, impressions as profound, as these last have impressed upon us? "It is time to disabuse ourselves of those prejudices which represent the ancients as having almost spontaneously-elaborated ideas, philosophic, religious, and moral, the most lofty--those prejudices that in their naive admiration explain all in the domain of science, arts, and letters, by the intuition of some few great men, and in the realm of religion by revelation." *

. . . I have excluded the idea of the Fall of Man. . . man has made a long climb from the status of the animal until the time when he could recognize right from wrong. That recognition, at first, was based on behavior that paid, that avoided the retribution of the tribe and the gods, and that enabled the primitive society to function. Yet, however lowly in origin—and I am referring to a period centuries before right seemed to be worth following simply because it was right, or because man’s dignity and status were sustained by doing right; centuries before right was conceived as pleasing to God because he was holy and righteous—that earliest recognition of a difference between right and wrong was an immense advance, even though wrong was chosen.

If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

When we set out to compare Antiquity with our own times, two extremes are noticeable: on the one hand we have the abstract and marmoreal hardness of the ancients, founded on the law of natural selection and on the aristocratic virtues of gods and heroes, and on the other hand we have the democratic excesses of our day, such as the reign of inferiors, the cult of mediocrity and vulgarity, the sentimentalist protection, not of the weak, but of weakness and defects, the psychological softness towards all forms of laxity and vice, immorality upheld in the name of "liberty" and "sincerity", stupidity and idle chatter masquerading as "culture", the scorn of wisdom and the neutralization of religion, and then the misdeeds of an atheistic science that leads to overpopulation, degeneration, and catastrophe.

His error lay in supposing that this age, more than any past or future one, is destined to see the tattered garments of Antiquity exchanged for a new suit, instead of gradually renewing themselves by patchwork; in applying his own little life span as the measure of an interminable acheivement; and, more than all, in fancying that it mattered anything to the great end in view whether he himself should contend for it or against it.

If men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backwards toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people...We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them.

Considering thus how much honor is awarded to antiquity, and how many times — letting pass infinite other examples — a fragment of an ancient statue has been bought at high price because someone wants to have it near oneself, to honor his house with it, and to be able to have it imitated by those who delight in that art, and how the latter then strive with all industry to represent it in all their works; and seeing, on the other hand, that the most virtuous works the histories show us, which have been done by ancient kingdoms and republics, by kings, captains, citizens, legislators, and others who have labored for their fatherland, are rather admired than imitated — indeed they are so much shunned by everyone in every least thing that no sign of that ancient virtue remains with us — I can do no other than marvel and grieve… From this it arises that the infinite number who read [the histories] take pleasure in hearing of the variety of accidents contained within them without thinking of imitating them, judging that imitation is not only difficult but impossible — as if heaven, sun, elements, men had varied in motion, order, and power from what they were in antiquity. Wishing, therefore, to turn men from this error, I have judged it necessary to write on all those books of Titus Livy...

But this same process of the old teaching the young can also cause errors and false conclusions to accumulate with the passage of time. One should therefore study ancient writings, not so much in the hope of finding lost wisdom as in the hope of locating the origin of errors that have been, and still are, accepted truths.

After logic we must proceed to philosophy proper. Here too we have to learn from our predecessors, just as in mathematics and law. Thus it is wrong to forbid the study of ancient philosophy. Harm from it is accidental, like harm from taking medicine, drinking water, or studying law.

Precedents deliberately established by wise men are entitled to great weight. They are evidence of truth, but only evidence...But a solitary precedent...which has never been reexamined, cannot be conclusive.

Let us not, in the pride of our superior knowledge, turn with contempt from the follies of our predecessors. The study of the errors into which great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive. As the man looks back to the days of his childhood and his youth, and recalls to his mind the strange notions and false opinions that swayed his actions at the time, that he may wonder at them; so should society, for its edification, look back to the opinions which governed ages that fled.

There are two opposite errors into which those who study the annals of our country are in constant danger of falling, the error of judging the present by the past, and the error of judging the past by the present. The former is the error of minds prone to reverence whatever is old, the latter of minds readily attracted by whatever is new. The former error may perpetually be observed in the reasonings of conservative politicians on the questions of their own day. The latter error perpetually infects the speculations of writers of the liberal school when they discuss the transactions of an earlier age. The former error is the more pernicious in a statesman, and the latter in a historian.