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,