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.
3.
The question of pre-eminence between the Ancients and Moderns is reducible to another.