so popularised by an American physiologist, J. W. Draper, whose
HISTORY OF THE INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT OF EUROPE appeared in 1864 and
was widely read. His starting-point was a superficial analogy between
a society and an individual. "Social advancement is as completely under
the control of natural law as a bodily growth. The life of an individual
is a miniature of the life of a nation," and "particles" in the
individual organism answer to persons in the political organism. Both
have the same epochs--infancy, childhood, youth, manhood, old age--and
therefore European progress exhibits five phases, designated as
Credulity, Inquiry, Faith, Reason, Decrepitude. Draper's conclusion was
that Europe, now in the fourth period, is hastening to a long period
of decrepitude. The prospect did not dismay him; decrepitude is
the culmination of Progress, and means the organisation of national
intellect. That has already been achieved in China, and she owes to it
her well-being and longevity. "Europe is inevitably hastening to become
what China is. In her we may see what we shall be like when we are old."

Judged by any standard, Draper's work is much inferior to Buckle's, but
both these books, utterly different though they were in both conception
and treatment, performed a similar function. Each in its own way
diffused the view which had originated in France, that civilisation is
progression and, like nature, subject to general laws.

CHAPTER XVII. "PROGRESS" IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT (1830-1851)

1.

In 1850 there appeared at Paris a small book by M. A. Javary, with the
title DE L'IDEE DU PROGRES. Its interest lies in the express recognition
that Progress was the characteristic idea of the age, ardently received
by some, hotly denounced by others. [Footnote: Lamartine denounced in
his monthly journal Le Conseiller du peuple, vol. i. (1849), all the
progressive gospels of the day, socialist, communist, Saint-Simonian,
Fourierist, Icarian--in fact every school of social reform since the
First Republic--as purely materialistic, sprung from the "cold seed of
the century of Helvetius" (pp. 224, 287).]

"If there is any idea," he says, "that belongs properly to one century,
at least by the importance accorded to it, and that, whether accepted or
not, is familiar to all minds, it is the idea of Progress conceived as
the general law of history and the future of humanity."

He observes that some, intoxicated by the specta