es with principles
and vague generalities, and they had no illusions as to the slowness of
the process of social amelioration; a rational morality, the condition
of improvement, was only in its infancy. A passage in a work of the Abbe
Morellet probably reflects faithfully enough the comfortable though not
extravagant optimism which was current. [Footnote: Reflexions sur les
avantages d'ecrire et d'imprimer sur les matieres de l'administration
(1764); in Melanges, vol. iii. p. 55. Morellet held, like d'Holbach,
that society is only the development and improvement of nature itself
(ib. p. 6).]

Let us hope for the amelioration of man's lot as a consequence of the
progress of the enlightenment (des lumieres) and labours of the
educated (des gens instruits); let us trust that the errors and even the
injustices of our age may not rob us of this consoling hope. The history
of society presents a continuous alternation of light and darkness,
reason and extravagance, humanity and barbarism; but in the succession
of ages we can observe good gradually increasing in ever greater
proportion. What educated man, if he is not a misanthrope or misled by
vain declamations, would really wish he had lived in the barbarous and
poetical time which Homer paints in such fair and terrifying colours?
Who regrets that he was not born at Sparta among those pretended heroes
who made it a virtue to insult nature, practised theft, and gloried in
the murder of a Helot; or at Carthage, the scene of human sacrifices,
or at Rome amid the proscriptions or under the rule of a Nero or a
Caligula? Let as agree that man advances, though slowly, towards light
and happiness.

But though the most influential writers were sober in speculating about
the future, it is significant of their effectiveness in diffusing the
idea of Progress that now for the first time a prophetic Utopia was
constructed. Hitherto, as I have before observed, ideal states
were either projected into the remote past or set in some distant,
vaguely-known region, where fancy could build freely. To project them
into the future was a new thing, and when in 1770 Sebastien Mercier
described what human civilisation would be in A.D. 2440, it was a
telling sign of the power which the idea of Progress was beginning to
exercise.

2.

Mercier has been remembered, or rather forgotten, as an inferior
dramatist. He was a good deal more, and the researches of M. Beclard
into his life and works enable