For if the original stock of souls, natural intelligence or thought at humanity's disposal is limited, it is also indestructible. This hypothesis excludes any triumphant evolutionism and also spares us all the apocalyptic views on the loss of the 'symbolic capital' of the species (these are the two standpoints of humanism: triumphant or depressed). There is no privilege of one period over another, nor any absolute progress - there, at least, no inequalities. In intelligence, we might be said to be infinitely superior, but in thought we are probably exactly the equal of preceding and future generations. Whereas the most probable hypothesis is that the human race merely has at its disposal, today, as it had yesterday, a general fund, a limited stock that redistributes itself across the generations, but is always of equal quantity. “Such is our intelligence, that intelligence that lives on the illusion of an exponential growth of our stock.
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