"It may be said with some plausibility that there is an abecedarian ignorance that comes before knowledge, and another, doctoral ignorance that comes after knowledge: an ignorance that knowledge creates and engenders, just as it undoes and destroys the first."

—Montaigne, "Of Vain Subtleties"

Hazlitt on why the Arts are not progressive:

"The arts of painting and poetry are conversant with the world of thought within us, and with the world of sense without us—with what we know, and see, and feel immediately. They flow from the sacred shrine of our own breasts, and kindled at the living lamp of nature. The pulse of the passions assuredly beat as high, the depths and soundings of the human heart were as well understood three thousand years ago, as they are at present; the face of nature and the 'the human face divine', shone as bright then as they have ever done. It is this light, reflected by the true genius on art, that marks out its path before it, and sheds a glory round the Muses' feet, like that which 'circled Una's angle face,

'And made a sunshine in the shady place.'

Nature is the soul of art."