method, technical phraseology, or any of the parade of the Schools,
whether "Academics old and new, Cynic, Peripatetic, the sect
Epicurean, or Stoic severe," held up the mirror to human nature, and
took good counsel as to the ordering of character and of life.

Mill, in his little fragment on Aphorisms, has said that in the first
kind of wisdom every age in which science flourishes ought to surpass
the ages that have gone before. In knowledge and methods of science
each generation starts from the point at which its predecessor left
off; but in the wisdom of life, in the maxims of good sense applied to
public and to private conduct, there is, said Mill, a pretty nearly
equal amount in all ages.

If this seem doubtful to any one, let him think how many of the
shrewdest moralities of human nature are to be found in writings as
ancient as the apocryphal Book of the Wisdom of Solomon and of Jesus
the Son of Sirach; as _Aesop's Fables_; as the oracular sentences that
are to be found in Homer and the Greek dramatists and orators; as
all that immense host of wise and pithy saws which, to the number
of between four and five thousand, were collected from all ancient
literature by the industry of Erasmus in his great folio of Adages. As
we turn over these pages of old time, we almost feel that those are
right who tell us that everything has been said, that the thing that
has been is the thing that shall be, and there is no new thing under
the sun. Even so, we are happily not bound to Schopenhauer's gloomy
conclusion (_Werke_, v. 332), that "The wise men of all times have
always said the same, and the fools, that is the immense majority, of
all times have always done the same, that is to say, the opposite of
what the wise have said; and that is why Voltaire tells us that we
shall leave this world just as stupid and as bad as we found it when