The Summary Cause for the
Stability or Downfall of Human Societies
CHAPTER 5
How respect for antiquity and love of useful innovations must be regulated
39. The supreme respect we see given throughout history and by all nations to their first institutions has therefore a deep reason.(26) Some so-called philosophers ridiculed this respect, declaring it blind ignorance and servile obsequiousness to au-thority; in short, stupidity. They did not see the reason for this respect. They did not understand that it is an effect of a principle of nature, an effect of a rational law; that there is something deeper in the common sense of nations than in the empty theories of a few individuals, and that our vision, guided by a series of experiences from the distant past, is more likely to see what is true than an imagination unbridled by facts, which roams about in the world of the unusual and of the possible.
Let us therefore be convinced that the first institutions are necessarily those on which a society is founded. The founders had to attend to bringing into existence what did not exist; they had no time to think about accessories.
40. We should not be deceived. This natural, wise respect does not oblige us to oppose useful innovations, but to distinguish accurately between innovations which destroy what is old, and innovations which add to what is old. Relative to those which are aimed at destroying anything ancient, we must proceed with greater diffidence and caution. The innovators must be certain that they are destroying merely a prop or scaffolding, not a principal arch or a column. Relative to innovations which add but do not destroy, and therefore entail less danger of harming a society’s existence, we must act in such a way that what is new harmonises well with the old and corresponds to the toothing left by the first builders.
Notes
(26) The cause I have given for the honour paid by human beings to antiquity does not exclude other causes. Religion, the natural piety of children towards their fathers, the need we generally feel to cling to an authority rather than flounder in uncertainty, the instinct for universal sociality by which we desire to live united with those who have passed on and those yet to come, and similar causes also play a part.