on to human nature for the calamities which it will experience
in all ages."

This indeed is not the tone of the Abbe de Saint-Pierre. Voltaire's
optimism was always tempered with cynicism. But the idea of Progress
is there, though moderately conceived. And it is based on the same
principle--universal reason implanted in man, which "subsists in spite
of all the passions which make war on it, in spite of all the tyrants
who would drown it in blood, in spite of the imposters who would
annihilate it by superstition." And this was certainly his considered
view. His common sense prevented him from indulging in Utopian
speculations about the future; and his cynicism constantly led him to
use the language of a pessimist. But at an early stage of his career he
had taken up arms for human nature against that "sublime misanthrope"
Pascal, who "writes against human nature almost as he wrote against
the Jesuits"; and he returned to the attack at the end of his life. Now
Pascal's Pensees enshrined a theory of life--the doctrine of original
sin, the idea that the object of life is to prepare for death--which was
sternly opposed to the spirit of Progress. Voltaire instinctively felt
that this was an enemy that had to be dealt with. In a lighter vein he
had maintained in a well-known poem, Le Mondain, [Footnote: 1756.] the
value of civilisation and all its effects, including luxury, against
those who regretted the simplicity of ancient times, the golden age of
Saturn.

O le bon temps que ce siecle de fer!

Life in Paris, London, or Rome to-day is infinitely preferable to life
in the garden of Eden.

D'un bon vin frais ou la mousse ou la seve
Ne gratta point le triste gosier d'Eve.
La soie et l'or ne brillaient point chez eux.
Admirez-vous pour cela nos aieux?
Il leur manquait l'industrie et l'aisance:
Est-ce vertu? c'etait pure ignorance.

To return to the Essay, it flung down the gage of battle to that
conception of the history of the world which had been brilliantly
represented by Bossuet's Discours sur l'histoire universelle. This work
was constantly in Voltaire's mind. He pointed out that it had no claim
to be universal; it related only to four or five peoples, and especially
the little Jewish nation which "was unknown to the rest of the world or
justly despised," but which Bossuet made the centre of interest, as
if the final cause of all the great empires of antiquity lay in their
relations to the Je