It is accomplishments which are expected from us after a study of the ancients: formerly, for example, the ability to write and speak. But what is expected now! Thinking and deduction: but these things are not learnt _from_ the ancients, but at best _through_ the ancients, by means of science. Moreover, all historical deduction is very limited and unsafe; natural science should be preferred. 35 It is the same with the simplicity of antiquity as it is with the simplicity of style: it is the highest thing which we recognise and must imitate; but it is also the last Let it be remembered that the classic prose of the Greeks is also a late result 36 What a mockery of the study of the "humanities" lies in the fact that they were also called "belles lettres" (bellas litteras)! 37 Wolfs[5] reasons why the Egyptians, Hebrews Persians, and other Oriental nations were not to be set on the same plane with the Greeks and Romans: "The former have either not raised themselves, or have raised themselves only to a slight extent, above that type of culture which should be called a mere civilisation and bourgeois acquirement, as opposed to the higher and true culture of the mind." He then explains that this culture is spiritual and literary: "In a well-organised nation this may be begun earlier than order and peacefulness in the outward life of the people (enlightenment)." He then contrasts the inhabitants of easternmost Asia ("like such individuals, who are not wanting in clean, decent, and comfortable dwellings, clothing, and surroundings; but who never feel the necessity for a higher enlightenment") with the Greeks ("in the case of the Greeks, even among the most educated inhabitants of Attica, the contrary often happens to an astonishing degree; and the people neglect as insignificant factors that which we, thanks to our love of order, are in the habit of looking upon as the foundations of mental culture itself"). [Footnote 5: Friedrich August Wolf (1759-1824), the well-known classical scholar, now chiefly remembered by his "Prolegomena ad Homerum."--TR.] 38 Our terminology already shows how prone we are to judge the ancients wrongly: the exaggerated sense of literature, for example; or, as Wolf, when speaking of the "inner history of ancient erudition," calls it, "the history of learned enlightenment." 39 According to Goethe, the ancients are "the despair of the emulator." Voltaire said: "If the admirers of Homer were honest, they would acknowledge the boredom which their favourite often causes them." 40