ddenly
wrecked by fire. Una dies dabit exitio. Was the prospect of an arrest
which might come the day after to-morrow likely to induce men to exert
themselves to make provision for posterity?

The significance of Hakewill lies in the fact that he made the current
theory of degeneration, which stood in the way of all possible theories
of progress, the object of a special inquiry. And his book illustrates
the close connection between that theory and the dispute over the
Ancients and Moderns. It cannot be said that he has added anything
valuable to what may be found in Bodin and Bacon on the development
of civilisation. The general synthesis of history which he attempts is
equivalent to theirs. He describes the history of knowledge and arts,
and all things besides, as exhibiting "a kind of circular progress," by
which he means that they have a birth, growth, nourishing, failing and
fading, and then within a while after a resurrection and reflourishing.
[Footnote: Book iii. chap. 6, Section i, p. 259.] In this method of
progress the lamp of learning passed from one people to another. It
passed from the Orientals (Chaldeans and Egyptians) to the Greeks; when
it was nearly extinguished in Greece it began to shine afresh among the
Romans; and having been put out by the barbarians for the space of
a thousand years it was relit by Petrarch and his contemporaries. In
stating this view of "circular progress," Hakewill comes perilously near
to the doctrine of Ricorsi or Returns which had been severely denounced
by Bacon.

In one point indeed Hakewill goes far beyond Bodin. It was suggested,
as we saw, by the French thinker that in some respects the modern age is
superior in conduct and morals to antiquity, but he said little on the
matter. Hakewill develops the suggestion at great length into a severe
and partial impeachment of ancient manners and morals. Unjust and
unconvincing though his arguments are, and inspired by theological
motives, his thesis nevertheless deserves to be noted as an assertion of
the progress of man in social morality. Bacon, and the thinkers of the
seventeenth century generally, confined their views of progress in the
past to the intellectual field. Hakewill, though he overshot the mark
and said nothing actually worth remembering, nevertheless anticipated
the larger problem of social progress which was to come to the front in
the eighteenth century.

4.

During the forty years that followed the appeara