his optimism by astrological data. "If you only knew what their
astrologers say about the coming age. Our times, they assert, have more
history in a hundred years than the whole world in four thousand. More
books have been published in this century than in five thousand
years before. They dwell on the wonderful inventions of printing, of
artillery, and of the use of the magnet,--clear signs of the times--and
also instruments for the assembling of the inhabitants of the world into
one fold," and show that these discoveries were conditioned by stellar
influences.

But Campanella is not very sure or clear about the future. Astrology
and theology cause him to hesitate. Like Bacon, he dreams of a great
Renovation and sees that the conditions are propitious, but his faith is
not secure. The astronomers of his imaginary state scrutinise the stars
to discover whether the world will perish or not, and they believe in
the oracular saying of Jesus that the end will come like a thief in the
night. Therefore they expect a new age, and perhaps also the end of the
world.

The new age of knowledge was about to begin. Campanella, Bruno, and
Bacon stand, as it were, on the brink of the dividing stream, tenduntque
manus ripae ulterioris amore.

CHAPTER III. CARTESIANISM

If we are to draw any useful lines of demarcation in the continuous flux
of history we must neglect anticipations and announcements, and we need
not scruple to say that, in the realm of knowledge and thought, modern
history begins in the seventeenth century. Ubiquitous rebellion against
tradition, a new standard of clear and precise thought which affects
even literary expression, a flow of mathematical and physical
discoveries so rapid that ten years added more to the sum of knowledge
than all that had been added since the days of Archimedes, the
introduction of organised co-operation to increase knowledge by the
institution of the Royal Society at London, the Academy of Sciences at
Paris, Observatories--realising Bacon's Atlantic dream--characterise the
opening of a new era.

For the ideas with which we are concerned, the seventeenth century
centres round Descartes, whom an English admirer described as "the grand
secretary of Nature." [Footnote: Joseph Glanvill, Vanity of Dogmatising,
p. 211, 64] Though his brilliant mathematical discoveries were the sole
permanent contribution he made to knowledge, though his metaphysical and
physical systems are only of hist