But although natural processes do not change from age to age, they differ in their effects in different climates. "It is certain that as a result of the reciprocal dependence which exists between all parts of the material world, differences of climate, which so clearly affect the life of plants, must also produce some effect on human brains." May it not be said then that, in consequence of climatic conditions, ancient Greece and Rome produced men of mental qualities different from those which could be produced in France? Oranges grow easily in Italy; it is more difficult to cultivate them in France. Fontenelle replies that art and cultivation exert a much greater influence on human brains than on the soil; ideas can be transported more easily from one country to another than plants; and as a consequence of commerce and mutual influence, peoples do not retain the original mental peculiarities due to climate. This may not be true of the extreme climates in the torrid and glacial zones, but in the temperate zone we may discount entirely climatic influence. The climates of Greece and Italy and that of France are too similar to cause any sensible difference between the Greeks or Latins and the French.

Saint Sorlin and Perrault had argued directly from the permanence of vigour in lions or trees to the permanence of vigour in man. If trees are the same as ever, brains must also be the same. But what about the minor premiss? Who knows that trees are precisely the same? It is an indemonstrable assumption that oaks and beeches in the days of Socrates and Cicero were not slightly better trees than the oaks and beeches of to-day. Fontenelle saw the weakness of this reasoning. He saw that it was necessary to prove that the trees, no less than human brains, have not degenerated. But his a priori proof is simply a statement of the Cartesian principle of the stability of natural processes, which he put in a thoroughly unscientific form. The stability of the laws of nature is a necessary hypothesis, without which science would be impossible. But here it was put to an illegitimate use. For it means that, given precisely the same conditions, the same physical phenomena will occur. Fontenelle therefore was bound to show that conditions had not altered in such a way as to cause changes in the quality of nature's organic productions. He did not do this. He did not take into consideration, for instance, that climatic conditions may vary from age to age as well as from country to country.

4.

Having established the natural equality of the Ancients and Moderns, Fontenelle inferred that whatever differences exist are due to external conditions—(1) time; (2) political institutions and the estate of affairs in general.

The ancients were prior in time to us, therefore they were the authors of the first inventions. For that, they cannot be regarded as our superiors. If we had been in their place we should have been the inventors, like them; if they were in ours, they would add to those inventions, like us. There is no great mystery in that. We must impute equal merit to the early thinkers who showed the way and to the later thinkers who pursued it. If the ancient attempts to explain the universe have been recently replaced by the discovery of a simple system (the Cartesian), we must consider that the truth could only be reached by the elimination of false routes, and in this way the numbers of the Pythagoreans, the ideas of Plato, the qualities of Aristotle, all served indirectly to advance knowledge. "We are under an obligation to the ancients for having exhausted almost all the false theories that could be formed." Enlightened both by their true views and by their errors, it is not surprising that we should surpass them.

But all this applies only to scientific studies, like mathematics, physics, and medicine, which depend partly on correct reasoning and partly on experience. Methods of reasoning improve slowly, and the most important advance which has been made in the present age is the method inaugurated by Descartes. Before him reasoning was loose; he introduced a more rigid and precise standard, and its influence is not only manifest in our best works on physics and philosophy, but is even discernible in books on ethics and religion.

We must expect posterity to excel us as we excel the Ancients, through improvement of method, which is a science in itself—the most difficult and least studied of all—and through increase of experience. Evidently the process is endless (il est evident que tout cela n'a point de fin), and the latest men of science must be the most competent.

But this does not apply to poetry or eloquence, round which the controversy has most violently raged. For poetry and eloquence do not depend on correct reasoning. They depend principally on vivacity of imagination, and "vivacity of imagination does not require a long course of experiments, or a great multitude of rules, to attain all the perfection of which it is capable." Such perfection might be attained in a few centuries. If the ancients did achieve perfection in imaginative literature, it follows that they cannot be surpassed; but we have no right to say, as their admirers are fond of pretending, that they cannot be equalled.

5.

Besides the mere nature of time, we have to take into account external circumstances in considering this question.

If the forces of nature are permanent, how are we to explain the fact that in the barbarous centuries after the decline of Rome—the term Middle Ages has not yet come into currency—ignorance was so dense and deep? This breach of continuity is one of the plausible arguments of the advocates of the Ancients. Those ages, they say, were ignorant and barbarous because the Greek and Latin writers had ceased to be read; as soon as the study of the classical models revived there was a renaissance of reason and good taste. That is true, but it proves nothing. Nature never forgot how to mould the head of Cicero or Livy. She produces in every age men who might be great men; but the age does not always allow them to exert their talents. Inundations of barbarians, universal wars, governments which discourage or do not favour science and art, prejudices which assume all variety of shapes—like the Chinese prejudice against dissecting corpses—may impose long periods of ignorance or bad taste.

But observe that, though the return to the study of the ancients revived, as at one stroke, the aesthetic ideals which they had created and the learning which they had accumulated, yet even if their works had not been preserved we should, though it would have cost us many long years of labour, have discovered for ourselves "ideas of the true and the beautiful." Where should we have found them? Where the ancients themselves found them, after much groping.

6.

The comparison of the life of collective humanity to the life of a single man, which had been drawn by Bacon and Pascal, Saint Sorlin and Perrault, contains or illustrates an important truth which bears on the whole question. Fontenelle puts it thus. An educated mind is, as it were, composed of all the minds of preceding ages; we might say that a single mind was being educated throughout all history. Thus this secular man, who has lived since the beginning of the world, has had his infancy in which he was absorbed by the most urgent needs of life; his youth in which he succeeded pretty well in things of imagination like poetry and eloquence, and even began to reason, but with more courage than solidity. He is now in the age of manhood, is more enlightened, and reasons better; but he would have advanced further if the passion for war had not distracted him and given him a distaste for the sciences to which he has at last returned.

Figures, if they are pressed, are dangerous; they suggest unwarrantable conclusions. It may be illuminative to liken the development of humanity to the growth of an individual; but to infer that the human race is now in its old age, merely on the strength of the comparison, is obviously unjustifiable. That is what Bacon and the others had done. The fallacy was pointed out by Fontenelle.

From his point of view, an "old age" of humanity, which if it meant anything meant decay as well as the wisdom of experience, was contrary to the principle of the permanence of natural forces. Man, he asserts, will have no old age. He will be always equally capable, of achieving the successes of his youth; and he will become more and more expert in the things which become the age of virility. Or "to drop metaphor, men will never degenerate." In ages to come we may be regarded—say in America—with the same excess of admiration with which we regard the ancients. We might push the prediction further. In still later ages the interval of time which divides us from the Greeks and Romans will appear so relatively small to posterity that they will classify us and the ancients as virtually contemporary; just in the same way as we group together the Greeks and Romans, though the Romans in their own day were moderns in relation to the Greeks. In that remote period men will be able to judge without prejudice the comparative merits of Sophocles and Corneille.

Unreasonable admiration for the ancients is one of the chief obstacles to progress (le progres des choses). Philosophy not only did not advance, but even fell into an abyss of unintelligible ideas, because, through devotion to the authority of Aristotle, men sought truth in his enigmatic writings instead of seeking it in nature. If the authority of Descartes were ever to have the same fortune, the results would be no less disastrous.

7.

This memorable brochure exhibits, without pedantry, perspicuous arrangement and the "geometrical" precision on which Fontenelle remarked as one of the notes of the new epoch introduced by Descartes. It displays too the author's open-mindedness, and his readiness to follow where the argument leads. He is able already to look beyond Cartesianism; he knows that it cannot be final. No man of his time was more open-minded and free from prejudice than Fontenelle. This quality of mind helped him to turn his eyes to the future. Perrault and his predecessors were absorbed in the interest of the present and the past. Descartes was too much engaged in his own original discoveries to do more than throw a passing glance at posterity.

Now the prospect of the future was one of the two elements which were still needed to fashion the theory of the progress of knowledge. All the conditions for such a theory were present. Bodin and Bacon, Descartes and the champions of the Moderns—the reaction against the Renaissance, and the startling discoveries of science—had prepared the way; progress was established for the past and present. But the theory of the progress of knowledge includes and acquires its value by including the indefinite future. This step was taken by Fontenelle. The idea had been almost excluded by Bacon's misleading metaphor of old age, which Fontenelle expressly rejects. Man will have no old age; his intellect will never degenerate; and "the sound views of intellectual men in successive generations will continually add up."

But progress must not only be conceived as extending indefinitely into the future; it must also be conceived as necessary and certain. This is the second essential feature of the theory. The theory would have little value or significance, if the prospect of progress in the future depended on chance or the unpredictable discretion of an external will. Fontenelle asserts implicitly the certainty of progress when he declares that the discoveries and improvements of the modern age would have been made by the ancients if they exchanged places with the moderns; for this amounts to saying that science will progress and knowledge increase independently of particular individuals. If Descartes had not been born, some one else would have done his work; and there could have been no Descartes before the seventeenth century. For, as he says in a later work, [Footnote: Preface des elemens de la geometrie de l'infini (OEuvres, x. p. 40, ed. 1790).] "there is an order which regulates our progress. Every science develops after a certain number of preceding sciences have developed, and only then; it has to await its turn to burst its shell."

Fontenelle, then, was the first to formulate the idea of the progress, of knowledge, as a complete doctrine. At the moment the import and far-reaching effects of the idea were not realised, either by himself or by others, and his pamphlet, which appeared in the company of a perverse theory of pastoral poetry, was acclaimed merely as an able defence of the Moderns.

8.

If the theory of the indefinite progress of knowledge is true, it is one of those truths which were originally established by false reasoning. It was established on a principle which excluded degeneration, but equally excluded evolution; and the whole conception of nature which Fontenelle had learned from Descartes is long since dead and buried.

But it is more important to observe that this principle, which seemed to secure the indefinite progress of knowledge, disabled Fontenelle from suggesting a theory of the progress of society. The invariability of nature, as he conceived it, was true of the emotions and the will, as well as of the intellect. It implied that man himself would be psychically always the same—unalterable, incurable. L'ordre general de la Nature a Fair bien constant. His opinion of the human race was expressed in the Dialogues of the Dead, [Footnote: It may be seen too in the Plurality of Worlds.] and it never seems to have varied. The world consists of a multitude of fools, and a mere handful of reasonable men. Men's passions will always be the same and will produce wars in the future as in the past. Civilisation makes no difference; it is little more than a veneer.

Even if theory had not stood in his way, Fontenelle was the last man who was likely to dream dreams of social improvement. He was temperamentally an Epicurean, of the same refined stamp as Epicurus himself, and he enjoyed throughout his long life—he lived to the age of a hundred—the tranquillity which was the true Epicurean ideal. He was never troubled by domestic cares, and his own modest ambition was satisfied when, at the age of forty, he was appointed permanent Secretary of the Academy of Sciences. He was not the man to let his mind dwell on the woes and evils of the world; and the follies and perversities which cause them interested him only so far as they provided material for his wit.

It remains, however, noteworthy that the author of the theory of the progress of knowledge, which was afterwards to expand into a general theory of human Progress, would not have allowed that this extension was legitimate; though it was through this extension that Fontenelle's idea acquired human value and interest and became a force in the world.

9.

Fontenelle did a good deal more than formulate the idea. He reinforced it by showing that the prospect of a steady and rapid increase of knowledge in the future was certified.

The postulate of the immutability of the laws of nature, which has been the indispensable basis for the advance of modern science, is fundamental with Descartes. But Descartes did not explicitly insist on it, and it was Fontenelle, perhaps more than any one else, who made it current coin. That was a service performed by the disciple; but he seems to have been original in introducing the fruitful idea of the sciences as confederate and intimately interconnected [Footnote: Roger Bacon, as we saw, had a glimpse of this principle.]; not forming a number of isolated domains, as hitherto, but constituting a system in which the advance of one will contribute to the advance of the others. He exposed with masterly ability the reciprocal relations of physics and mathematics. No man of his day had a more comprehensive view of all the sciences, though he made no original contributions to any. His curiosity was universal, and as Secretary of the Academy he was obliged, according to his own high standard of his duty, to keep abreast of all that was being done in every branch of knowledge. That was possible then; it would be impossible now.

In the famous series of obituary discourses which he delivered on savants who were members of the Academy, Fontenelle probably thought that he was contributing to the realisation of this ideal of "solidarity," for they amounted to a chronicle of scientific progress in every department. They are free from technicalities and extraordinarily lucid, and they appealed not only to men of science, but to those of the educated public who possessed some scientific curiosity. This brings us to another important role of Fontenelle—the role of interpreter of the world of science to the world outside. It is closely related to our subject.

For the popularisation of science, which was to be one of the features of the nineteenth century, was in fact a condition of the success of the idea of Progress. That idea could not insinuate itself into the public mind and become a living force in civilised societies until the meaning and value of science had been generally grasped, and the results of scientific discovery had been more or less diffused. The achievements of physical science did more than anything else to convert the imaginations of men to the general doctrine of Progress.

Before the later part of the seventeenth century, the remarkable physical discoveries of recent date had hardly escaped beyond academic circles. But an interest in these subjects began to become the fashion in the later years of Louis XIV. Science was talked in the salons; ladies studied mechanics and anatomy. Moliere's play, Les Femmes savantes, which appeared in 1672, is one of the first indications. In 1686 Fontenelle published his Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, in which a savant explains the new astronomy to a lady in the park of a country house. [Footnote: The Marquise of the Plurality of Worlds is supposed to be Madame de la Mesangere, who lived near Rouen, Fontenelle's birthplace. He was a friend and a frequent visitor at her chateau. See Maigron, Fontenelle, p. 42. The English translation of 1688 was by Glanvill. A new translation was published at Dublin as late as 1761.] It is the first book—at least the first that has any claim to be remembered—in the literature of popular science, and it is one of the most striking. It met with the success which it deserved. It was reprinted again and again, and it was almost immediately translated into English.

The significance of the Plurality of Worlds is indeed much greater than that of a pioneer work in popularisation and a model in the art of making technical subjects interesting. We must remember that at this time the belief that the sun revolves round the earth still prevailed. Only the few knew better. The cosmic revolution which is associated with the names of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo was slow in producing its effects. It was rejected by Bacon; and the condemnation of Galileo by the Church made Descartes, who dreaded nothing so much as a collision with the ecclesiastical authorities unwilling to insist on it. [Footnote: Cp. Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartesienne, i. p. 42-3.] Milton's Raphael, in the Eighth Book of Paradise Lost (published 1667), does not venture to affirm the Copernican system; he explains it sympathetically, but leaves the question open. [Footnote: Masson (Milton's Poetical Works, vol. 2) observes that Milton's life (1608-74) "coincides with the period of the struggle between the two systems" (p. 90). Milton's friends, the Smectymnians, in answer to Bishop Hall's Humble Remonstrance (1641), "had cited the Copernican doctrine as an unquestionable instance of a supreme absurdity." Masson has some apposite remarks on the influence of the Ptolemaic system "upon the thinkings and imaginations of mankind everywhere on all subjects whatsoever till about two hundred years ago."] Fontenelle's book was an event. It disclosed to the general public a new picture of the universe, to which men would have to accustom their imaginations.

We may perhaps best conceive all that this change meant by supposing what a difference it would make to us if it were suddenly discovered that the old system which Copernicus upset was true after all, and that we had to think ourselves back into a strictly limited universe of which the earth is the centre. The loss of its privileged position by our own planet; its degradation, from a cosmic point of view, to insignificance; the necessity of admitting the probability that there may be many other inhabited worlds—all this had consequences ranging beyond the field of astronomy. It was as if a man who dreamed that he was living in Paris or London should awake to discover that he was really in an obscure island in the Pacific Ocean, and that the Pacific Ocean was immeasurably vaster than he had imagined. The Marquise, in the Plurality of Worlds, reacts to the startling illumination: "Voila l'univers si grand que je m'y perds, je ne sais plus ou je suis; je ne suis plus rien.—La terre est si effroyablement petite!"

Such a revolution in cosmic values could not fail to exert a penetrating influence on human thought. The privileged position of the earth had been a capital feature of the whole doctrine, as to the universe and man's destinies, which had been taught by the Church, and it had made that doctrine more specious than it might otherwise have seemed. Though the Churches could reform their teaching to meet the new situation, the fact remained that the Christian scheme sounded less plausible when the central importance of the human race was shown to be an illusion. Would man, stripped of his cosmic pretensions, and finding himself lost in the immensities of space, invent a more modest theory of his destinies confined to his own little earth—si effroyablement petite? The eighteenth century answered this question by the theory of Progress.

10.

Fontenelle is one of the most representative thinkers of that period—we have no distinguishing name for it—which lies between the characteristic thinkers of the seventeenth century and the characteristic thinkers of the eighteenth. It is a period of over sixty years, beginning about 1680, for though Montesquieu and Voltaire were writing long before 1740, the great influential works of the "age of illumination" begin with the Esprit des lois in 1748. The intellectual task of this intervening period was to turn to account the ideas provided by the philosophy of Descartes, and use them as solvents of the ideas handed down from the Middle Ages. We might almost call it the Cartesian period for, though Descartes was dead, it was in these years that Cartesianism performed its task and transformed human thought.

When we speak of Cartesianism we do not mean the metaphysical system of the master, or any of his particular views such as that of innate ideas. We mean the general principles, which were to leave an abiding impression on the texture of thought: the supremacy of reason over authority, the stability of the laws of Nature, rigorous standards of proof. Fontenelle was far from accepting all the views of Descartes, whom he does not scruple to criticise; but he was a true Cartesian in the sense that he was deeply imbued with these principles, which generated, to use an expression of his own, "des especes de rebelles, qui conspiraient contre l'ignorance et les prejuges dominants." [Footnote: Eloge de M. Lemery.] And of all these rebels against ruling prejudices he probably did more than any single man to exhibit the consequences of the Cartesian ideas and drive them home.

The Plurality of Worlds was a contribution to the task of transforming thought and abolishing ancient error; but the History of Oracles which appeared in the following year was more characteristic. It was a free adaptation of an unreadable Latin treatise by a Dutchman, which in Fontenelle's skilful hands becomes a vehicle for applying Cartesian solvents to theological authority. The thesis is that the Greek oracles were a sacerdotal imposture, and not, as ecclesiastical tradition said, the work of evil spirits, who were stricken silent at the death of Jesus Christ. The effect was to discredit the authority of the early Fathers of the Church, though the writer has the discretion to repudiate such an intention. For the publication was risky; and twenty years later a Jesuit Father wrote a treatise to confute it, and exposed the secret poison, with consequences which might have been disastrous for Fontenelle if he had not had powerful friends among the Jesuits themselves. Fontenelle had none of the impetuosity of Voltaire, and after the publication of the History of Oracles he confined his criticism of tradition to the field of science. He was convinced that "les choses fort etablies ne peuvent etre attaquees que par degrez." [Footnote: Eloge de M. Lemery.]

The secret poison, of which Fontenelle prepared this remarkable dose with a touch which reminds us of Voltaire, was being administered in the same Cartesian period, and with similar precautions, by Bayle. Like Fontenelle, this great sceptic, "the father of modern incredulity" as he was called by Joseph de Maistre, stood between the two centuries and belonged to both. Like Fontenelle, he took a gloomy view of humanity; he had no faith in that goodness of human nature which was to be a characteristic dogma of the age of illumination. But he was untouched by the discoveries of science; he took no interest in Galileo or Newton; and while the most important work of Fontenelle was the interpretation of the positive advances of knowledge, Bayle's was entirely subversive.

The principle of unchangeable laws in nature is intimately connected with the growth of Deism which is a note of this period. The function of the Deity was virtually confined to originating the machine of nature, which, once regulated, was set beyond any further interference on His part, though His existence might be necessary for its conservation. A view so sharply opposed to the current belief could not have made way as it did without a penetrating criticism of the current theology. Such criticism was performed by Bayle. His works were a school for rationalism for about seventy years. He supplied to the thinkers of the eighteenth century, English as well as French, a magazine of subversive arguments, and he helped to emancipate morality both from theology and from metaphysics.

This intellectual revolutionary movement, which was propagated in salons as well as by books, shook the doctrine of Providence which Bossuet had so eloquently expounded. It meant the enthronement of reason—Cartesian reason—before whose severe tribunal history as well as opinions were tried. New rules of criticism were introduced, new standards of proof. When Fontenelle observed that the existence of Alexander the Great could not be strictly demonstrated and was no more than highly probable, [Footnote: Plurality des mondes, sixieme soir.] it was an undesigned warning that tradition would receive short shrift at the hands of men trained in analytical Cartesian methods.

11.

That the issue between the claims of antiquity and the modern age should have been debated independently in England and France indicates that the controversy was an inevitable incident in the liberation of the human spirit from the authority of the ancients. Towards the end of the century the debate in France aroused attention in England and led to a literary quarrel, less important but not less acrimonious than that which raged in France. Sir William Temple's Essay, Wotton's Reflexions, and Swift's satire the Battle of the Books are the three outstanding works in the episode, which is however chiefly remembered on account of its connection with Bentley's masterly exposure of the fabricated letters of Phalaris.

The literary debate in France, indeed, could not have failed to reverberate across the Channel; for never perhaps did the literary world in England follow with more interest, or appreciate more keenly the productions of the great French writers of the time. In describing Will's coffee-house, which was frequented by Dryden and all who pretended to be interested in polite letters, Macaulay says, "there was a faction for Perrault and the moderns, a faction for Boileau and the ancients." In the discussions on this subject a remarkable Frenchman who had long lived in England as an exile, M. de Saint Evremond, must have constantly taken part. The disjointed pieces of which Saint Evremond's writings consist are tedious and superficial, but they reveal a mind of much cultivation and considerable common sense. His judgement on Perrault's Parallel is that the author "has discovered the defects of the ancients better than he has made out the advantage of the moderns; his book is good and capable of curing us of abundance of errors." [Footnote: In a letter to the Duchess of Mazarin, Works, Eng. tr., iii. 418.] He was not a partisan. But his friend, Sir William Temple, excited by the French depreciations of antiquity, rushed into the lists with greater courage than discretion.

Temple was ill equipped for the controversy, though his Essay on Ancient and Modern Learning (1690) is far from deserving the disdain of Macaulay, who describes its matter as "ludicrous and contemptible to the last degree." [Footnote: The only point in it which need be noted here is that the author questioned the cogency of Fontenelle's argument, that the forces of nature being permanent human ability is in all ages the same. "May there not," he asks, "many circumstances concur to one production that do not to any other in one or many ages?" Fontenelle speaks of trees. It is conceivable that various conditions and accidents "may produce an oak, a fig, or a plane-tree, that shall deserve to be renowned in story, and shall not perhaps be paralleled in other countries or times. May not the same have happened in the production, growth, and size of wit and genius in the world, or in some parts or ages of it, and from many more circumstances that contributed towards it than what may concur to the stupendous growth of a tree or animal?"] And it must be confessed that the most useful result of the Essay was the answer which it provoked from Wotton. For Wotton had a far wider range of knowledge, and a more judicious mind, than any of the other controversialists, with the exception of Fontenelle; and in knowledge of antiquity he was Fontenelle's superior. His inquiry stands out as the most sensible and unprejudiced contribution to the whole debate. He accepts as just the reasoning of Fontenelle "as to the comparative force of the geniuses of men in the several ages of the world and of the equal force of men's understandings absolutely considered in all times since learning first began to be cultivated amongst mankind." But this is not incompatible with the thesis that in some branches the ancients excelled all who came after them. For it is not necessary to explain such excellence by the hypothesis that there was a particular force of genius evidently discernible in former ages, but extinct long since, and that nature is now worn out and spent. There is an alternative explanation. There may have been special circumstances "which might suit with those ages which did exceed ours, and with those things wherein they did exceed us, and with no other age nor thing besides."

But we must begin our inquiry by sharply distinguishing two fields of mental activity—the field of art, including poetry, oratory, architecture, painting, and statuary; and the field of knowledge, including mathematics, natural science, physiology, with all their dependencies. In the case of the first group there is room for variety of opinion; but the superiority of the Greeks and Romans in poetry and literary style may be admitted without prejudice to the mental equality of the moderns, for it may be explained partly by the genius of their languages and partly by political circumstances—for example, in the case of oratory, [Footnote: This had been noted by Fontenelle in his Digression.] by the practical necessity of eloquence. But as regards the other group, knowledge is not a matter of opinion or taste, and a definite judgement is possible. Wotton then proceeds to review systematically the field of science, and easily shows, with more completeness and precision than Perrault, the superiority of modern methods and the enormous strides which had been made.

As to the future, Wotton expresses himself cautiously. It is not easy to say whether knowledge will advance in the next age proportionally to its advance in this. He has some fears that there may be a falling away, because ancient learning has still too great a hold over modern books, and physical and mathematical studies tend to be neglected. But he ends his Reflexions by the speculation that "some future age, though perhaps not the next, and in a country now possibly little thought of, may do that which our great men would be glad to see done; that is to say, may raise real knowledge, upon foundations laid in this age, to the utmost possible perfection to which it may be brought by mortal men in this imperfect state."

The distinction, on which Wotton insisted, between the sciences which require ages for their development and the imaginative arts which may reach perfection in a short time had been recognised by Fontenelle, whose argument on this point differs from that of his friend Perrault. For Perrault contended that in literature and art, as well as in science, later generations can, through the advantage of time and longer experience, attain to a higher excellence than their predecessors. Fontenelle, on the other hand, held that poetry and eloquence have a restricted field, and that therefore there must be a time at which they reach a point of excellence which cannot be exceeded. It was his personal opinion that eloquence and history actually reached the highest possible perfection in Cicero and Livy.

But neither Fontenelle nor Wotton came into close quarters with the problem which was raised—not very clearly, it is true—by Perrault. Is there development in the various species of literature and art? Do they profit and enrich themselves by the general advance of civilisation? Perrault, as we have seen, threw out the suggestion that increased experience and psychological study enabled the moderns to penetrate more deeply into the recesses of the human soul, and therefore to bring to a higher perfection the treatment of the character, motives, and passions of men. This suggestion admits of being extended. In the Introduction to his Revolt of Islam, Shelley, describing his own intellectual and aesthetic experiences, writes:

The poetry of ancient Greece and Rome, and modern Italy, and our own country, has been to me like external nature, a passion and an enjoyment.... I have considered poetry in its most comprehensive sense; and have read the poets and the historians and the metaphysicians whose writings have been accessible to me—and have looked upon the beautiful and majestic scenery of the earth—as common sources of those elements which it is the province of the Poet to embody and combine. And he appends a note:

In this sense there may be such a thing as perfectibility in works of fiction, notwithstanding the concession often made by the advocates of human improvement, that perfectibility is a term applicable only to science.

In other words, all the increases of human experience, from age to age, all the speculative adventures of the intellect, provide the artist, in each succeeding generation, with more abundant sources for aesthetic treatment. As years go on, life in its widest sense offers more and more materials "which it is the province of the Poet to embody and combine." This is evidently true; and would it not seem to follow that literature is not excluded from participating in the common development of civilisation? One of the latest of the champions of the Moderns, the Abbe Terrasson, maintained that "to separate the general view of the progress of the human mind in regard to natural science, and in regard to belles-lettres, would be a fitting expedient to a man who had two souls, but it is useless to him who has only one." [Footnote: Abbe Terrasson, 1670-1750. His Philosophie applicable a tons les objets de l'esprit et de la raison was issued posthumously in 1754. His Dissertation critique sur l'Iliade appeared in 1715.]He put the matter in too abstract a way to carry conviction; but the nineteenth century was to judge that he was not entirely wrong. For the question was, as we shall see, raised anew by Madame de Stael, and the theory was finally to emerge that art and literature, like laws and institutions, are an expression of society and therefore inextricably linked with the other elements of social development—a theory, it may be observed, which while it has discredited the habit of considering works of art in a vacuum, dateless and detached, as they were generally considered by critics of the seventeenth century, leaves the aesthetic problem much where it was.

Perrault's suggestion as to the enrichment of the material of the artist by new acquisitions would have served to bring literature and art into the general field of human development, without compromising the distinction on which Wotton and others insisted between the natural sciences and the aesthetic arts. But that distinction, emphatically endorsed by Voltaire, had the effect of excluding literature and art from the view of those who in the eighteenth century recognised progress in the other activities of man.

12.

It is notable that in this literary controversy the Moderns, even Fontenelle, seem curiously negligent of the import of the theory which they were propounding of the intellectual progress of man. They treat it almost incidentally, as part of the case for the defence, not as an immensely important conclusion. Its bearings were more definitely realised by the Abbe Terrasson, whom I have just named. A geometer and a Cartesian, he took part in the controversy in its latest stage, when La Motte and Madame Dacier were the principal antagonists. The human mind, he said, has had its infancy and youth; its maturity began in the age of Augustus; the barbarians arrested its course till the Renaissance; in the seventeenth century, through the illuminating philosophy of Descartes, it passed beyond the stage which it had attained in the Augustan age, and the eighteenth century should surpass the seventeenth. Cartesianism is not final; it has its place in a development. It was made possible by previous speculations, and it will be succeeded by other systems. We must not pursue the analogy of humanity with an individual man and anticipate a period of old age. For unlike the individual, humanity "being composed of all ages," is always gaining instead of losing. The age of maturity will last indefinitely, because it is a progressive, not a stationary, maturity. Later generations will always be superior to the earlier, for progress is "a natural and necessary effect of the constitution of the human mind."



CHAPTER VI. THE GENERAL PROGRESS OF MAN: ABBE DE SAINT-PIERRE

The revolutionary speculations on the social and moral condition of man which were the outstanding feature of the eighteenth century in France, and began about 1750, were the development of the intellectual movement of the seventeenth, which had changed the outlook of speculative thought. It was one continuous rationalistic movement. In the days of Racine and Perrault men had been complacently conscious of the enlightenment of the age in which they were living, and as time went on, this consciousness became stronger and acuter; it is a note of the age of Voltaire. In the last years of Louis XIV., and in the years which followed, the contrast between this mental enlightenment and the dark background—the social evils and miseries of the kingdom, the gross misgovernment and oppression—began to insinuate itself into men's minds. What was the value of the achievements of science, and the improvement of the arts of life, if life itself could not be ameliorated? Was not some radical reconstruction possible, in the social fabric, corresponding to the radical reconstruction inaugurated by Descartes in the principles of science and in the methods of thought? Year by year the obscurantism of the ruling powers became more glaring, and the most gifted thinkers, towards the middle of the century, began to concentrate their brains on the problems of social science and to turn the light of reason on the nature of man and the roots of society. They wrought with unscrupulous resolution and with far-reaching effects.

With the extension of rationalism into the social domain, it came about naturally that the idea of intellectual progress was enlarged into the idea of the general Progress of man. The transition was easy. If it could be proved that social evils were due neither to innate and incorrigible disabilities of the human being nor to the nature of things, but simply to ignorance and prejudices, then the improvement of his state, and ultimately the attainment of felicity, would be only a matter of illuminating ignorance and removing errors, of increasing knowledge and diffusing light. The growth of the "universal human reason"—a Cartesian phrase, which had figured in the philosophy of Malebranche—must assure a happy destiny to humanity.

Between 1690 and 1740 the conception of an indefinite progress of enlightenment had been making its way in French intellectual circles, and must often have been a topic of discussion in the salons, for instance, of Madame de Lambert, Madame de Tencin, and Madame Dupin, where Fontenelle was one of the most conspicuous guests. To the same circle belonged his friend the Abbe de Saint-Pierre, and it is in his writings that we first find the theory widened in its compass to embrace progress towards social perfection. [Footnote: For his life and works the best book is J. Drouet's monograph, L'Abbe de Saint-Pierre: l'homme et l'oeuvre (1912), but on some points Goumy's older study (1859) is still worth consulting. I have used the edition of his works in 12 volumes published during his lifetime at Rotterdam, 1733-37.]

1.

He was brought up on Cartesian principles, and he idealised Descartes somewhat as Lucretius idealised Epicurus. But he had no aptitude for philosophy, and he prized physical science only as far as it directly administered to the happiness of men. He was a natural utilitarian, and perhaps no one was ever more consistent in making utility the criterion of all actions and theories. Applying this standard he obliterated from the roll of great men most of those whom common opinion places among the greatest. Alexander, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne receive short shrift from the Abbe de Saint-Pierre. [Footnote: Compare Voltaire, Lettres sur les Anglais, xii., where Newton is acclaimed as the greatest man who ever lived.] He was superficial in his knowledge both of history and of science, and his conception of utility was narrow and a little vulgar. Great theoretical discoverers like Newton and Leibnitz he sets in a lower rank than ingenious persons who used their scientific skill to fashion some small convenience of life. Monuments of art, like Notre Dame, possessed little value in his eyes compared with a road, a bridge, or a canal.

Like most of his distinguished contemporaries he was a Deist. On his deathbed he received the usual rites of the Church in the presence of his household, and then told the priest that he did not believe a word of all that. His real views are transparent in some of his works through the conventional disguises in which prudent writers of the time were wont to wrap their assaults on orthodoxy. To attack Mohammedanism by arguments which are equally applicable to Christianity was a device for propagating rationalism in days when it was dangerous to propagate it openly. This is what the Abbe did in his Discourse against Mohammedanism. Again, in his Physical Explanation of an Apparition he remarks: "To diminish our fanatical proclivities, it would be useful if the Government were to establish an annual prize, to be awarded by the Academy of Sciences, for the best explanation, by natural laws, of the extraordinary effects of imagination, of the prodigies related in Greek and Latin literature, and of the pretended miracles told by Protestants, Schismatics, and Mohammedans." The author carefully keeps on the right side of the fence. No Catholic authorities could take exception to this. But no intelligent reader could fail to see that all miracles were attacked. The miracles accepted by the Protestants were also believed in by the Catholics.

He was one of the remarkable figures of his age. We might almost say that he was a new type—a nineteenth century humanitarian and pacifist in an eighteenth century environment. He was a born reformer, and he devoted his life to the construction of schemes for increasing human happiness. He introduced the word bienfaisance into the currency of the French language, and beneficence was in his eyes the sovran virtue. There were few departments of public affairs in which he did not point out the deficiencies and devise ingenious plans for improvement. Most of his numerous writings are projets—schemes of reform in government, economics, finance, education, all worked out in detail, and all aiming at the increase of pleasure and the diminution of pain. The Abbe's nimble intelligence had a weak side, which must have somewhat compromised his influence. He was so confident in the reasonableness of his projects that he always believed that if they were fairly considered the ruling powers could not fail to adopt them in their own interests. It is the nature of a reformer to be sanguine, but the optimism of Saint-Pierre touched naivete. Thousands might have agreed with his view that the celibacy of the Catholic clergy was an unwholesome institution, but when he drew up a proposal for its abolition and imagined that the Pope, unable to resist his arguments, would immediately adopt it, they might be excused for putting him down as a crank who could hardly be taken seriously. The form in which he put forward his memorable scheme for the abolition of war exhibits the same sanguine simplicity. All his plans, Rousseau observed, showed a clear vision of what their effects would be, "but he judged like a child of means to bring them about." But his abilities were great, and his actual influence was considerable. It would have been greater if he had possessed the gift of style.

2.

He was not the first to plan a definite scheme for establishing a perpetual peace. Long ago Emeric Cruce had given to the world a proposal for a universal league, including not only the Christian nations of Europe, but the Turks, Persians, and Tartars, which by means of a court of arbitration sitting at Venice should ensure the settlement of all disputes by peaceful means. [Footnote: Le Nouveau Cynee (Paris, 1623). It has recently been reprinted with an English translation by T. W. Balch, Philadelphia (1909).] The consequence of universal peace, he said, will be the arrival of "that beautiful century which the ancient theologians promise after there have rolled by six thousand years. For they say that then the world will live happily and in repose. Now it happens that that time has nearly expired, and even if it is not, it depends only on the Princes to give beforehand this happiness to their peoples." Later in the century, others had ventilated similar projects in obscure publications, but the Abbe does not refer to any of his predecessors.

He was not blinded by the superficial brilliancy of the reign of Louis XIV. to the general misery which the ambitious war-policy of that sovran brought both upon France and upon her enemies. His Annales politiques are a useful correction to the Siecle de Louis Quatorze. It was in the course of the great struggle of the Spanish Succession that he turned his attention to war and came to the conclusion that it is an unnecessary evil and even an absurdity. In 1712 he attended the congress at Utrecht in the capacity of secretary to Cardinal de Polignac, one of the French delegates. His experiences there confirmed his optimistic mind in the persuasion that perpetual peace was an aim which might readily be realised; and in the following year he published the memoir which he had been preparing, in two volumes, to which he added a third four years later.

Though he appears not to have known the work of Cruce he did not claim originality. He sheltered his proposal under an august name, entitling it Project of Henry the Great to render Peace Perpetual, explained by the Abbe de Saint-Pierre. The reference is to the "great design" ascribed to Henry IV. by Sully, and aimed at the abasement of the power of Austria: a federation of the Christian States of Europe arranged in groups and under a sovran Diet, which would regulate international affairs and arbitrate in all quarrels. [Footnote: It is described in Sully's Memoires, Book XXX.] Saint-Pierre, ignoring the fact that Sully's object was to eliminate a rival power, made it the text for his own scheme of a perpetual alliance of all the sovrans of Europe to guarantee to one another the preservation of their states and to renounce war as a means of settling their differences. He drew up the terms of such an alliance, and taking the European powers one by one demonstrated that it was the plain interest of each to sign the articles. Once the articles were signed the golden age would begin. [Footnote: For Sully's grand Design compare the interesting article of Sir Geoffrey Butler in the Edinburgh Review, October 1919.]

It is not to our present purpose to comment on this plan which the author with his characteristic simplicity seriously pressed upon the attention of statesmen. It is easy to criticise it in the light of subsequent history, and to see that, if the impossible had happened and the experiment had been tried and succeeded, it might have caused more suffering than all the wars from that day to this. For it was based on a perpetuation of the political status quo in Europe. It assumed that the existing political distribution of power was perfectly satisfactory and conformable to the best interests of all the peoples concerned. It would have hindered the Partition of Poland, but it would have maintained the Austrian oppression of Italians. The project also secured to the sovrans the heritage of their authority and guarded against civil wars. This assumed that the various existing constitutions were fundamentally just. The realisation of the scheme would have perpetuated all the evils of autocratic governments. Its author did not perceive that the radical evil in France was irresponsible power. It needed the reign of Louis XV. and the failure of attempts at reform under his successor to bring this home. The Abbe even thought that an increase of the despotic authority of the government was desirable, provided this were accompanied by an increase in the enlightenment and virtue of its ministers.

In 1729 he published an abridgment of his scheme, and here he looks beyond its immediate results to its value for distant posterity. No one, he says, can imagine or foresee the advantages which such an alliance of European states will yield to Europe five hundred years after its establishment. Now we can see the first beginnings, but it is beyond the powers of the human mind to discern its infinite effects in the future. It may produce results more precious than anything hitherto experienced by man. He supports his argument by observing that our primitive ancestors could not foresee the improvements which the course of ages would bring in their rudimentary arrangements for securing social order.

3.

It is characteristic that the Abbe de Saint-Pierre's ideas about Progress were a by-product of his particular schemes. In 1773 he published a Project to Perfect the Government of States, and here he sketched his view of the progressive course of civilisation. The old legend of the golden age, when men were perfectly happy, succeeded by the ages of silver, bronze, and iron, exactly reverses the truth of history. The age of iron came first, the infancy of society, when men were poor and ignorant of the arts; it is the present condition of the savages of Africa and America. The age of bronze ensued, in which there was more security, better laws, and the invention of the most necessary arts began. There followed the age of silver, and Europe has not yet emerged from it. Our reason has indeed reached the point of considering how war may be abolished, and is thus approaching the golden age of the future; but the art of government and the general regulation of society, notwithstanding all the improvements of the past, is still in its infancy. Yet all that is needed is a short series of wise reigns in our European states to reach the age of gold or, in other words, a paradise on earth.

A few wise reigns. The Abbe shared the illusion of many that government is omnipotent and can bestow happiness on men. The imperfections of governments were, he was convinced, chiefly due to the fact that hitherto the ablest intellects had not been dedicated to the study of the science of governing. The most essential part of his project was the formation of a Political Academy which should do for politics what the Academy of Sciences did for the study of nature, and should act as an advisory body to ministers of state on all questions of the public welfare. If this proposal and some others were adopted, he believed that the golden age would not long be delayed. These observations—hardly more than obiter dicta—show that Saint-Pierre's general view of the world was moulded by a conception of civilisation progressing towards a goal of human happiness. In 1737 he published a special work to explain this conception: the Observations on the Continuous Progress of Universal Reason.

He recurs to the comparison of the life of collective humanity to that of an individual, and, like Fontenelle and Terrasson, accentuates the point where the analogy fails. We may regard our race as composed of all the nations that have been and will be—and assign to it different ages. For instance, when the race is ten thousand years old a century will be what a single year is in the life of a centenarian. But there is this prodigious difference. The mortal man grows old and loses his reason and happiness through the enfeeblement of his bodily machine; whereas the human race, by the perpetual and infinite succession of generations, will find itself at the end of ten thousand years more capable of growing in wisdom and happiness than it was at the end of four thousand.

At present the race is apparently not more than seven or eight thousand years old, and is only "in the infancy of human reason," compared with what it will be five or six thousand years hence. And when that stage is reached, it will only have entered on what we may call its first youth, when we consider what it will be when it is a hundred thousand years older still, continually growing in reason and wisdom.

Here we have for the first time, expressed in definite terms, the vista of an immensely long progressive life in front of humanity. Civilisation is only in its infancy. Bacon, like Pascal, had conceived it to be in its old age. Fontenelle and Perrault seem to have regarded it as in its virility; they set no term to its duration, but they did not dwell on future prospects. The Abbe was the first to fix his eye on the remote destinies of the race and name immense periods of time. It did not occur to him to consider that our destinies are bound up with those of the solar system, and that it is useless to operate with millennial periods of progress unless you are assured of a corresponding stability in the cosmic environment.

As a test of the progress which reason has already made, Saint-Pierre asserts that a comparison of the best English and French works on morals and politics with the best works of Plato and Aristotle proves that the human race has made a sensible advance. But that advance would have been infinitely greater were it not that three general obstacles retarded it and even, at some times and in some countries, caused a retrogression. These obstacles were wars, superstition, and the Jealousy of rulers who feared that progress in the science of politics would be dangerous to themselves. In consequence of these impediments it was only in the time of Bodin and Bacon that the human race began to start anew from the point which it had reached in the days of Plato and Aristotle.

Since then the rate of progress has been accelerated, and this has been due to several causes. The expansion of sea commerce has produced more wealth, and wealth means greater leisure, and more writers and readers. In the second place, mathematics and physics are more studied in colleges, and their tendency is to liberate us from subjection to the authority of the ancients. Again, the foundation of scientific Academies has given facilities both for communicating and for correcting new discoveries; the art of printing provides a means for diffusing them; and, finally, the habit of writing in the vulgar tongue makes them accessible. The author might also have referred to the modern efforts to popularise science, in which his friend Fontenelle had been one of the leaders.

He proceeds, in this connection, to lay down a rather doubtful principle, that in any two countries the difference in enlightenment between the lowest classes will correspond to the difference between the most highly educated classes. At present, he says, Paris and London are the places where human wisdom has reached the most advanced stage. It is certain that the ten best men of the highest class at Ispahan or Constantinople will be inferior in their knowledge of politics and ethics to the ten most distinguished sages of Paris or London. And this will be true in all classes. The thirty most intelligent children of the age of fourteen at Paris will be more enlightened than the thirty most intelligent children of the same age at Constantinople, and the same proportional difference will be true of the lowest classes of the two cities.

But while the progress of speculative reason has been rapid, practical reason—the distinction is the Abbe's—has made little advance. In point of morals and general happiness the world is apparently much the same as ever. Our mediocre savants know twenty times as much as Socrates and Confucius, but our most virtuous men are not more virtuous than they. The growth of science has added much to the arts and conveniences of life, and to the sum of pleasures, and will add more. The progress in physical science is part of the progress of the "universal human reason," whose aim is the augmentation of our happiness. But there are two other sciences which are much more important for the promotion of happiness—Ethics and Politics—and these, neglected by men of genius, have made little way in the course of two thousand years. It is a grave misfortune that Descartes and Newton did not devote themselves to perfecting these sciences, so incomparably more useful for mankind than those in which they made their great discoveries. They fell into a prevailing error as to the comparative values of the various domains of knowledge, an error to which we must also ascribe the fact that while Academies of Sciences and Belles-Lettres exist there are no such institutions for Politics or Ethics.

By these arguments he establishes to his own satisfaction that there are no irremovable obstacles to the Progress of the human race towards happiness, no hindrances that could not be overcome if governments only saw eye to eye with the Abbe de Saint-Pierre. Superstition is already on the decline; there would be no more wars if his simple scheme for permanent peace were adopted. Let the State immediately found Political and Ethical Academies; let the ablest men consecrate their talents to the science of government; and in a hundred years we shall make more progress than we should make in two thousand at the rate we are moving. If these things are done, human reason will have advanced so far in two or three millenniums that the wisest men of that age will be as far superior to the wisest of to-day as these are to the wisest African savages. This "perpetual and unlimited augmentation of reason" will one day produce an increase in human happiness which would astonish us more than our own civilisation would astonish the Kaffirs.

4.

The Abbe de Saint-Pierre was indeed terribly at ease in confronting the deepest and most complex problems which challenge the intellect of man. He had no notion of their depth and complexity, and he lightly essayed them, treating human nature, as if it were an abstraction, by a method which he would doubtless have described as Cartesian. He was simply operating with the ideas which were all round him in a society saturated with Cartesianism,—supremacy of human reason, progressive enlightenment, the value of this life for its own sake, and the standard of utility. Given these ideas and the particular bias of his own mind, it required no great ingenuity to advance from the thought of the progress of science to the thought of progress in man's moral nature and his social conditions. The omnipotence of governments to mould the destinies of peoples, the possibility of the creation of enlightened governments, and the indefinite progress of enlightenment—all articles of his belief—were the terms of an argument of the sorites form, which it was a simple matter to develop in his brief treatise.

But we must not do him injustice. He was a much more considerable thinker than posterity for a long time was willing to believe. It is easy to ridicule some of his projets, and dismiss him as a crank who was also somewhat of a bore. The truth, however, is that many of his schemes were sound and valuable. His economic ideas, which he thought out for himself, were in advance of his time, and he has even been described by a recent writer as "un contemporain egare au xviii siecle." Some of his financial proposals were put into practice by Turgot. But his significance in the development of the revolutionary ideas which were to gain control in the second half of the eighteenth century has hardly been appreciated yet, and it was imperfectly appreciated by his contemporaries.

It is easy to see why. His theories are buried in his multitudinous projets. If, instead of working out the details of endless particular reforms, he had built up general theories of government and society, economics and education, they might have had no more intrinsic value, but he would have been recognised as the precursor of the Encyclopaedists.

For his principles are theirs. The omnipotence of government and laws to mould the morals of peoples; the subordination of all knowledge to the goddess of utility; the deification of human reason; and the doctrine of Progress. His crude utilitarianism led him to depreciate the study of mathematical and physical sciences—notwithstanding his veneration for Descartes—as comparatively useless, and he despised the fine arts as waste of time and toil which might be better spent. He had no knowledge of natural science and he had no artistic susceptibility. The philosophers of the Encyclopaedia did not go so far, but they tended in this direction. They were cold and indifferent towards speculative science, and they were inclined to set higher value on artisans than on artists.

In his religious ideas the Abbe differed from Voltaire and the later social philosophers in one important respect, but this very difference was a consequence of his utilitarianism. Like them he was a Deist, as we saw; he had imbibed the spirit of Bayle and the doctrine of the English rationalists, which were penetrating French society during the later part of his life. His God, however, was more than the creator and organiser of the Encyclopaedists, he was also the "Dieu vengeur et remunerateur" in whom Voltaire believed. But here his faith was larger than Voltaire's. For while Voltaire referred the punishments and rewards to this life, the Abbe believed in the immortality of the soul, in heaven and hell. He acknowledged that immortality could not be demonstrated, that it was only probable, but he clung to it firmly and even intolerantly. It is clear from his writings that his affection for this doctrine was due to its utility, as an auxiliary to the magistrate and the tutor, and also to the consideration that Paradise would add to the total of human happiness.

But though his religion had more articles, he was as determined a foe of "superstition" as Voltaire, Diderot, and the rest. He did not go so far as they in aggressive rationalism—he belonged to an older generation—but his principles were the same.

The Abbe de Saint-Pierre thus represents the transition from the earlier Cartesianism, which was occupied with purely intellectual problems, to the later thought of the eighteenth century, which concentrated itself on social problems. He anticipated the "humanistic" spirit of the Encyclopaedists, who were to make man, in a new sense, the centre of the world. He originated, or at least was the first to proclaim, the new creed of man's destinies, indefinite social progress.



CHAPTER VII. NEW CONCEPTIONS OF HISTORY: MONTESQUIEU, VOLTAIRE, TURGOT

The theory of human Progress could not be durably established by abstract arguments, or on the slender foundations laid by the Abbe de Saint-Pierre. It must ultimately be judged by the evidence afforded by history, and it is not accidental that, contemporaneously with the advent of this idea, the study of history underwent a revolution. If Progress was to be more than the sanguine dream of an optimist it must be shown that man's career on earth had not been a chapter of accidents which might lead anywhere or nowhere, but is subject to discoverable laws which have determined its general route, and will secure his arrival at the desirable place. Hitherto a certain order and unity had been found in history by the Christian theory of providential design and final causes. New principles of order and unity were needed to replace the principles which rationalism had discredited. Just as the advance of science depended on the postulate that physical phenomena are subject to invariable laws, so if any conclusions were to be drawn from history some similar postulate as to social phenomena was required.

It was thus in harmony with the general movement of thought that about the middle of the eighteenth century new lines of investigation were opened leading to sociology, the history of civilisation, and the philosophy of history. Montesquieu's De l'esprit des lois, which may claim to be the parent work of modern social science, Voltaire's Essai sur les moeurs, and Turgot's plan of a Histoire universelle begin a new era in man's vision of the past.

1.

Montesquieu was not among the apostles of the idea of Progress. It never secured any hold upon his mind. But he had grown up in the same intellectual climate in which that idea was produced; he had been nurtured both on the dissolving, dialectic of Bayle, and on the Cartesian enunciation of natural law. And his work contributed to the service, not of the doctrine of the past, but of the doctrine of the future.

For he attempted to extend the Cartesian theory to social facts. He laid down that political, like physical, phenomena are subject to general laws. He had already conceived this, his most striking and important idea, when he wrote the Considerations on the Greatness and Decadence of the Romans (1734), in which he attempted to apply it:

It is not Fortune who governs the world, as we see from the history of the Romans. There are general causes, moral or physical, which operate in every monarchy, raise it, maintain it, or overthrow it; all that occurs is subject to these causes; and if a particular cause, like the accidental result of a battle, has ruined a state, there was a general cause which made the downfall of this state ensue from a single battle. In a word, the principal movement (l'allure principale) draws with it all the particular occurrences.

But if this excludes Fortune it also dispenses with Providence, design, and final causes; and one of the effects of the Considerations which Montesquieu cannot have overlooked was to discredit Bossuet's treatment of history.

The Esprit des lois appeared fourteen years later. Among books which have exercised a considerable influence on thought few are more disappointing to a modern reader. The author had not the gift of what might be called logical architecture, and his work produces the effect of a collection of ideas which he was unable to co-ordinate in the clarity of a system. A new principle, the operation of general causes, is enthroned; but, beyond the obvious distinction of physical and moral, they are not classified. We have no guarantee that the moral causes are fully enumerated, and those which are original are not distinguished from those which are derived. The general cause which Montesquieu impresses most clearly on the reader's mind is that of physical environment—geography and climate.

The influence of climate on civilisation was not a new idea. In modern times, as we have seen, it was noticed by Bodin and recognised by Fontenelle. The Abbe de Saint-Pierre applied it to explain the origin of the Mohammedan religion, and the Abbe Du Bos in his Reflexions on Poetry and Painting maintained that climate helps to determine the epochs of art and science. Chardin in his Travels, a book which Montesquieu studied, had also appreciated its importance. But Montesquieu drew general attention to it, and since he wrote, geographical conditions have been recognised by all inquirers as an influential factor in the development of human societies. His own discussion of the question did not result in any useful conclusions. He did not determine the limits of the action of physical conditions, and a reader hardly knows whether to regard them as fundamental or accessory, as determining the course of civilisation or only perturbing it. "Several things govern men," he says, "climate, religion, laws, precepts of government, historical examples, morals, and manners, whence is formed as their result a general mind (esprit general)." This co-ordination of climate with products of social life is characteristic of his unsystematic thought. But the remark which the author went on to make, that there is always a correlation between the laws of a people and its esprit general, was important. It pointed to the theory that all the products of social life are closely interrelated.

In Montesquieu's time people were under the illusion that legislation has an almost unlimited power to modify social conditions. We have seen this in the case of Saint-Pierre. Montesquieu's conception of general laws should have been an antidote to this belief. It had however less effect on his contemporaries than we might have expected, and they found more to their purpose in what he said of the influence of laws on manners. There may be something in Comte's suggestion that he could not give his conception any real consistency or vigour, just because he was himself unconsciously under the influence of excessive faith in the effects of legislative action.

A fundamental defect in Montesquieu's treatment of social phenomena is that he abstracted them from their relations in time. It was his merit to attempt to explain the correlation of laws and institutions with historical circumstances, but he did not distinguish or connect stages of civilisation. He was inclined to confound, as Sorel has observed, all periods and constitutions. Whatever be the value of the idea of Progress, we may agree with Comte that, if Montesquieu had grasped it, he would have produced a more striking work. His book announces a revolution in the study of political science, but in many ways belongs itself to the pre-Montesquieu era.

2.

In the same years in which Montesquieu was busy on the composition of the Esprit des lois, Voltaire was writing his Age of Louis XIV. and his Essay on the Manners and Mind of Nations, and on the Principal Facts of History from Charlemagne to the Death of Louis XIII. The former work, which everybody reads still, appeared in 1751. Parts of the Essay, which has long since fallen into neglect, were published in the Mercure de France between 1745 and 1751; it was issued complete in 1756, along with the Age of Louis XIV., which was its continuation. If we add the Precis of the Reign of Louis XV. (1769), and observe that the Introduction and first fourteen chapters of the Essay sketch the history of the world before Charlemagne, and that China, India, and America are included in the survey, Voltaire's work amounts to a complete survey of the civilisation of the world from the earliest times to his own. If Montesquieu founded social science, Voltaire created the history of civilisation, and the Essay, for all its limitations, stands out as one of the considerable books of the century.

In his Age of Louis XIV. he announced that his object was "to paint not the actions of a single man, but the mind of men (l'esprit des hommes) in the most enlightened age that had ever been," and that "the progress of the arts and sciences" was an essential part of his subject. In the same way he proposed in the Essay to trace "l'histoire de l'esprit humain," not the details of facts, and to show by what steps man advanced "from the barbarous rusticity" of the times of Charlemagne and his successors "to the politeness of our own." To do this, he said, was really to write the history of opinion, for all the great successive social and political changes which have transformed the world were due to changes of opinion. Prejudice succeeded prejudice, error followed error; "at last, with time men came to correct their ideas and learn to think."

The motif of the book is, briefly, that wars and religions have been the great obstacles to the progress of humanity, and that if they were abolished, with the prejudices which engender them, the world would rapidly improve.

"We may believe," he says, "that reason and industry will always progress more and more; that the useful arts will be improved; that of the evils which have afflicted men, prejudices, which are not their least scourge, will gradually disappear among all those who govern nations, and that philosophy, universally diffused, will give some consolation to human nature for the calamities which it will experience in all ages."

This indeed is not the tone of the Abbe de Saint-Pierre. Voltaire's optimism was always tempered with cynicism. But the idea of Progress is there, though moderately conceived. And it is based on the same principle—universal reason implanted in man, which "subsists in spite of all the passions which make war on it, in spite of all the tyrants who would drown it in blood, in spite of the imposters who would annihilate it by superstition." And this was certainly his considered view. His common sense prevented him from indulging in Utopian speculations about the future; and his cynicism constantly led him to use the language of a pessimist. But at an early stage of his career he had taken up arms for human nature against that "sublime misanthrope" Pascal, who "writes against human nature almost as he wrote against the Jesuits"; and he returned to the attack at the end of his life. Now Pascal's Pensees enshrined a theory of life—the doctrine of original sin, the idea that the object of life is to prepare for death—which was sternly opposed to the spirit of Progress. Voltaire instinctively felt that this was an enemy that had to be dealt with. In a lighter vein he had maintained in a well-known poem, Le Mondain, [Footnote: 1756.] the value of civilisation and all its effects, including luxury, against those who regretted the simplicity of ancient times, the golden age of Saturn.

O le bon temps que ce siecle de fer!

Life in Paris, London, or Rome to-day is infinitely preferable to life in the garden of Eden.

D'un bon vin frais ou la mousse ou la seve Ne gratta point le triste gosier d'Eve. La soie et l'or ne brillaient point chez eux. Admirez-vous pour cela nos aieux? Il leur manquait l'industrie et l'aisance: Est-ce vertu? c'etait pure ignorance.

To return to the Essay, it flung down the gage of battle to that conception of the history of the world which had been brilliantly represented by Bossuet's Discours sur l'histoire universelle. This work was constantly in Voltaire's mind. He pointed out that it had no claim to be universal; it related only to four or five peoples, and especially the little Jewish nation which "was unknown to the rest of the world or justly despised," but which Bossuet made the centre of interest, as if the final cause of all the great empires of antiquity lay in their relations to the Jews. He had Bossuet in mind when he said "we will speak of the Jews as we would speak of Scythians or Greeks, weighing probabilities and discussing facts." In his new perspective the significance of Hebrew history is for the first time reduced to moderate limits.

But it was not only in this particular, though central, point that Voltaire challenged Bossuet's view. He eliminated final causes altogether, and Providence plays no part on his historical stage. Here his work reinforced the teaching of Montesquieu. Otherwise Montesquieu and Voltaire entirely differed in their methods. Voltaire concerned himself only with the causal enchainment of events and the immediate motives of men. His interpretation of history was confined to the discovery of particular causes; he did not consider the operation of those larger general causes which Montesquieu investigated. Montesquieu sought to show that the vicissitudes of societies were subject to law; Voltaire believed that events were determined by chance where they were not consciously guided by human reason. The element of chance is conspicuous even in legislation: "almost all laws have been instituted to meet passing needs, like remedies applied fortuitously, which have cured one patient and kill others."

On Voltaire's theory, the development of humanity might at any moment have been diverted into a different course; but whatever course it took the nature of human reason would have ensured a progress in civilisation. Yet the reader of the Essay and Louis XIV. might well have come away with a feeling that the security of Progress is frail and precarious. If fortune has governed events, if the rise and fall of empires, the succession of religions, the revolutions of states, and most of the great crises of history were decided by accidents, is there any cogent ground for believing that human reason, the principle to which Voltaire attributes the advance of civilisation, will prevail in the long run? Civilisation has been organised here and there, now and then, up to a certain point; there have been eras of rapid progress, but how can we be sure that these are not episodes, themselves also fortuitous? For growth has been followed by decay, progress by regress; can it be said that history, authorises the conclusion that reason will ever gain such an ascendancy that the play of chance will no longer be able to thwart her will? Is such a conclusion more than a hope, unsanctioned by the data of past experience, merely one of the characteristics of the age of illumination?

Voltaire and Montesquieu thus raised fundamental questions of great moment for the doctrine of Progress, questions which belong to what was soon to be known as the Philosophy of History, a name invented by Voltaire, though hardly meant by him in the sense which it afterwards assumed.

3.

Six years before Voltaire's Essay was published in its complete form a young man was planning a work on the same subject. Turgot is honourably remembered as an economist and administrator, but if he had ever written the Discourses on Universal History which he designed at the age of twenty-three his position in historical literature might have overshadowed his other claims to be remembered. We possess a partial sketch of its plan, which is supplemented by two lectures he delivered at the Sorbonne in 1750; so that we know his general conceptions.

He had assimilated the ideas of the Esprit des lois, and it is probable that he had read the parts of Voltaire's work which had appeared in a periodical. His work, like Voltaire's, was to be a challenge to Bossuet's view of history; his purpose was to trace the fortunes of the race in the light of the idea of Progress. He occasionally refers to Providence but this is no more than a prudent lip-service. Providence has no functions in his scheme. The part which it played in Bossuet is usurped by those general causes which he had learned from Montesquieu. But his systematic mind would have organised and classified the ideas which Montesquieu left somewhat confused. He criticised the inductions drawn in the Esprit des lois concerning the influence of climate as hasty and exaggerated; and he pointed out that the physical causes can only produce their effects by acting on "the hidden principles which contribute to form our mind and character." It follows that the psychical or moral causes are the first element to consider, and it is a fault of method to try to evaluate physical causes till we have exhausted the moral, and are certain that the phenomena cannot be explained by these alone. In other words, the study of the development of societies must be based on psychology; and for Turgot, as for all his progressive contemporaries, psychology meant the philosophy of Locke.