"The succession of man... offers from age to age a spectacle ever varied. Reason, the passions, liberty,
incessantly produce new events. All the ages are
linked together by a sequence of causes and
effects which connect the existing state of the
world with all that has preceded it. The multiform
signs of language and of writing... have made of all
the individual funds of knowledge a common
treasure, which one generation transmits to the
next, along with an inheritance always increased
by the discoveries of each age; thus the human
race seen from its origin appears to the eye of the
philosopher as one vast whole, which itself, like
each individual composing it, has had its infancy
and its development."
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