undred 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