known to the most
cultivated Europeans which was not likewise known to the ancients. In
reference to the conduct of our intellect, the moderns have not only
made the most important additions to every department of knowledge that
the ancients ever attempted to study, but besides this they have upset
and revolutionized the old methods of inquiry; they have consolidated
into one great scheme all those resources of induction which Aristotle
alone dimly perceived; and they have created sciences, the faintest idea
of which never entered the mind of the boldest thinker antiquity
produced.

These are, to every educated man, recognized and notorious facts; and
the inference to be drawn from them is immediately obvious. Since
civilization is the product of moral and intellectual agencies, and
since that product is constantly changing, it evidently cannot be
regulated by the stationary agent; because, when surrounding
circumstances are unchanged, a stationary agent can only produce a
stationary effect. The only other agent is the intellectual one; and
that this is the real mover may be proved in two distinct ways: first
because, being as we have already seen either moral or intellectual, and
being as we have also seen not moral, it must be intellectual; and
secondly, because the intellectual principle has an activity and a
capacity for adaptation which, as I undertake to show, is quite
sufficient to account for the extraordinary progress that during several
centuries Europe has continued to make.

Such are the main arguments by which my view is supported; but there are
also other and collateral circumstances which are well worthy of
consideration. The first is, that the intellectual principle is not only
far more progressive than the moral principle, but is also far more
permanent in its results. The acquisitions made by the intellect are, in
every civilized country, carefully preserved, registered in certain
well-understood formulas, and protected by the use of technical and
scientific language; they are easily handed down from one generation to
another, and thus assuming an accessible, or as it were a tangible form,
they often influence the most distant posterity, they become the
heirlooms of mankind, the immortal bequest of the genius to which they
owe their birth. But the good deeds effected by our moral faculties are
less capable of transmission; they are of a more private and retiring
character: while as the motives to whi