'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 e