Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
From the description of him on Wikipedia, I am certain it is the former, although the bone wedrifid picks with "composed" is symptomatic of where he falls short of his contemporary, Voltaire. He was a most refined, civilised, intelligent, and educated writer, very popular among the intellectual class, and achieved memberships of distinguished academic societies, but his strength, a great one indeed, was in writing well on what was already known, and he created little that was new. Voltaire's name lives to this day, but Fontenelle's, while important in his time, does not.
Scholarship is indeed a virtue, but Fontenelle's was not in service of a higher goal.