previous next
[105] strangers to the useful arts, as well as to the comforts and virtues of home. Abounding in what to us are luxuries of life, they had not what to us are its necessaries.

Without knowledge there can be no sure progress. Vice and barbarism are the inseparable companions of ignorance. Nor is it too much to say, that, except in rare instances, the highest virtue is attained only through intelligence. And this is natural; for, in order to do right, we must first understand what is right. But the people of Greece and Rome, even in the brilliant days of Pericles and Augustus, were unable to arrive at this knowledge. The sublime teachings of Plato and Socrates — calculated in many respects to promote the best interests of the race — were restrained in their influence to the small company of listeners, or to the few who could obtain a copy of the costly manuscript in which they were preserved. Thus the knowledge and virtue acquired by individuals failed to be diffused in their own age, or secured to posterity.

But now at last, through an agency all unknown to antiquity, knowledge of every kind has become general and permanent. it can no longer be confined to a select circle. It cannot be crushed by tyranny, or lost by neglect. It is immortal as the soul from which it proceeds. This alone renders all

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
Socrates (1)
Plato (1)
Pericles (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: