known by the senses. Human history was an unending struggle of virtue against fortune, of the skill and courage and cunning of the human will against the blind power of fate which would—in the end—always prevail. The classical world had lost its nerve. Truth was ultimately unknowable. In Gibbon’s tart words, all religions were to the people equally true, to the philosophers equally false, and to the government equally useful. And this inward and spiritual decay was matched by all too visible disasters