to use a language suitable to all nations; or rather, forgetting the
circumstances of time and place in order to think of nothing but the
men I speak to, I shall suppose myself in the Lyceum of Athens,
repeating the lessons of my masters before the Platos and the
Xenocrates of that famous seat of philosophy as my judges, and in
presence of the whole human species as my audience.

O man, whatever country you may belong to, whatever your opinions may
be, attend to my words; you shall hear your history such as I think I
have read it, not in books composed by those like you, for they are
liars, but in the book of nature which never lies. All that I shall
repeat after her, must be true, without any intermixture of falsehood,
but where I may happen, without intending it, to introduce my own
conceits. The times I am going to speak of are very remote. How much
you are changed from what you once were! 'Tis in a manner the life of
your species that I am going to write, from the qualities which you
have received, and which your education and your habits could deprave,
but could not destroy. There is, I am sensible, an age at which every
individual of you would choose to stop; and you will look out for the
age at which, had you your wish, your species had stopped. Uneasy at
your present condition for reasons which threaten your unhappy
posterity with still greater uneasiness, you will perhaps wish it were
in your power to go back; and this sentiment ought to be considered,
as the panegyric of your first parents, the condemnation of your
contemporaries, and a source of terror to all those who may have the
misfortune of succeeding you.