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La cité de dieu
CHAPITRE X.
DE LA FAUSSETÉ DE L’HISTOIRE QUI COMPTE DANS LE PASSÉ PLUSIEURS MILLIERS D’ANNÉES.
Laissons là les conjectures de ceux qui déraisonnent sur l’origine du genre humain. Les uns croient que les hommes ont toujours existé aussi bien que le monde, ce qui a fait dire à Apulée : « Chaque homme est mortel, « pris en particulier, mais les hommes, pris ensemble, sont immortels1 ». Lorsqu’on leur demande comment cette opinion peut s’accorder avec le récit de leurs historiens sur les premiers inventeurs des arts ou sur ceux qui ont habité les premiers certains pays, ils répondent que d’âge en âge il arrive des déluges et des embrasements qui dépeuplent une partie de la terre et amènent la ruine des arts, de sorte que le petit nombre des hommes survivants paraît les inventer, quand il ne fait que les renouveler2, mais qu’au reste un homme ne saurait venir que d’un autre homme. Parler ainsi, c’est dire, non ce qu’on sait, mais ce qu’on croit.
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The City of God
Chapter 10.--Of the Falseness of the History Which Allots Many Thousand Years to the World's Past.
Let us, then, omit the conjectures of men who know not what they say, when they speak of the nature and origin of the human race. For some hold the same opinion regarding men that they hold regarding the world itself, that they have always been. Thus Apuleius says when he is describing our race, "Individually they are mortal, but collectively, and as a race, they are immortal." 1 And when they are asked, how, if the human race has always been, they vindicate the truth of their history, which narrates who were the inventors, and what they invented, and who first instituted the liberal studies and the other arts, and who first inhabited this or that region, and this or that island? they reply, 2 that most, if not all lands, were so desolated at intervals by fire and flood, that men were greatly reduced in numbers, and from these, again, the population was restored to its former numbers, and that thus there was at intervals a new beginning made, and though those things which had been interrupted and checked by the severe devastations were only renewed, yet they seemed to be originated then; but that man could not exist at all save as produced by man. But they say what they think, not what they know.