Thus all things are accepted equally.

The liberty and creativity of ancient minds produced many kinds of philosophy and knowledge, many schools of different opinions, each undertaking to decide, evaluate, and choose so as to align themselves with the proper forces.

But now people all go one pace: They are addicted and devoted to certain set and fixed opinions, so that they are forced to defend even those things which they do not approve. Now we receive the arts by civil authority and ordinance, so that the schools have only one pattern, similar teaching, circumscribed curriculum, and standardized evaluations. Nowadays, people no longer consider what the coins weigh and are worth. Each person accepts or rejects, in turn, any piece of intellectual currency only according to the value that common approbation gives to it.

People do not argue about the qualities that make up intellectual currency itself, but about the rate of exchange, so to speak. Thus all things are accepted equally. They accept the opinion of authorities with the kind of certainty that truly belongs only to a verifiable geometrical proof. When push comes to shove, they do likewise with all of those sleights-of-hand proper to marketing, technology, religion, political parties, etc. All of this amounts to nothing more advanced than that ridiculous pursuit of a philospher’s stone that so distracted men of learning in the ages that we imagine as being far behind us.