"WE ARE LIKE DWARFS SEATED ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS; we see more things than the ancients and things more distant, but this is due neither to the sharpness of our own sight, nor to the greatness of our own stature, but because we are raised and borne aloft on that giant mass." So, in the twelfth century of our era, wrote Bernard of Chartres. This "giant mass" of "famous men and our fathers that begot us" is important to us not genetically and emotionally only. We get from our remote ancestors not just our faces and our frowns, the curve of an eyebrow and the trick of a likeness, but also all our history and our literature, our declarations of independence and our famous slogans. We get, too, our ideas and the very ways in which we think, together with the words we use to think with. Indeed "we have nothing that we are not given," nothing that has not been handed down and used again and again. And the "giant mass" is made up of specific individuals. "Man" generically -- if we admit that "man" exists apart from men, and one of the reasons for reading this book is to discover if we will admit "man" so to exist -- has been defined by the "ancients" as "a rational animal capable of laughter." "Man,"
we know, invented the wheel, the pulley, the arch, the internal combustion engine, the airplane. He discovered electricity and split the atom. Yet who or what was this "man"? Very, very few men have invented or discovered anything; most men, through all the ages, and still today, are dwarfs who couldn't even figure how to set an egg up straight or how to light a fire
by rubbing sticks together, unless borne aloft on the shoulders of the giants. Now, between the "ancients" and ourselves, between the "glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome" -- the remote origin of all Western man -- ... - from Amzon