HKB
Herodotus, who lived two thousand two hundred years ago, and who had seen them, was not able to learn from the Egyptian priests at what time they had been erected.
It is difficult to give to the most ancient of the pyramids less than four thousand years of antiquity; but one must consider that these efforts of the ostentation of the kings could only have been commenced long after the establishment of the towns. But to build towns in a land inundated every year, let us always remark that it was first necessary to raise the land of the towns on piles in this land of mud, and to render them inaccessible to the flood; it was essential, before taking this necessary course, and before being in a state to attempt these great works, for the people to have practised retreating during the rising of the Nile, amid the rocks which form two chains right and left of this river. It was necessary for these mustered peoples to have the instruments for tilling, those of architecture, a knowledge of surveying, with laws and a police. All this necessarily requires a prodigious space of time. We see by the long details which face every day the most necessary and the smallest of our undertakings, how difficult it is to do great things, and it needs not only indefatigable stubbornness, but several generations animated with this stubbornness.
However, whether it be Menes, Thaut or Cheops, or Rameses who erected one or two of these prodigious masses, we shall not be the more instructed of the history of ancient Egypt: the language of this people is lost. We therefore know nothing but that before the most ancient historians there was matter for making an ancient history.
IGNORANCE
I am ignorant of how I was formed, and of how I was born. For a quarter of my life I was absolutely ignorant of the reasons for all that I saw, heard and felt, and I was nothing but a parrot at whom other parrots chattered.
When I looked round me and within me, I conceived that something exists for all eternity; since there are beings who exist to-day, I concluded that there is a being who is necessary and necessarily eternal. Thus, the first step I took to emerge from my ignorance crossed the boundaries of all the centuries.
But when I tried to walk in this infinite quarry open before me, I could neither find a single path, nor discern plainly a single object; and from the leap I made to contemplate eternity, I fell back again into the abyss of my ignorance.
I saw what was called "matter," from the star Sirius and the stars of the Milky Way, as distant from Sirius as Sirius is from us, right to the last atom that can be perceived with the microscope, and I am ignorant as to what matter is.
The light which let me see all these beings is unknown to me; I can, with the help of a prism, dissect this light, and divide it into seven pencils of rays; but I cannot divide these pencils; I am ignorant of what they are composed. Light is of the nature of matter, since it has movement and makes an impression on objects; but it does not tend toward a centre like all bodies: on the contrary, it escapes invincibly from the centre, whereas all matter bears towards its centre. Light seems penetrable, and matter is impenetrable. Is this light matter? is it not matter? with what innumerable properties can it be endowed? I am ignorant thereof.