If the men of old sometimes appear ingenuous, it is often because they are considered from a distorted point of view, which is the result of a more or less generalized corruption; to accuse them of being naïve amounts to applying a law to them retroactively, to express ourselves in legal terms. Likewise, if an ancient writer can give the impression of simplemindedness, this is largely because he did not have to take account of a thousand errors still unknown nor of a thousand possibilities of misinterpretation, and also because there was no need for his dialectic to be like the Scottish dance between eggs, seeing that such an author could in a large measure dispense with nuances; words still possessed a freshness and a fullness—or a magic—which is difficult for us to imagine, living as we do in a climate of verbal inflation. (Excerpted from page 86.)