le men to realise an ideal civilisation,
in which all would be equal. The state, he said, is the machine of
Progress, and the Socialists are right in formulating the problem which
man has to solve, though their solution is a bad one. For individual
liberty, which socialism would seriously limit, is a definite conquest,
and ought to be preserved inviolate.

Renan wrote this work in 1848 and 1849, but did not publish it at the
time. He gave it to the world forty years later. Those forty years
had robbed him of his early optimism. He continues to believe that the
unfortunate conditions of our race might be ameliorated by science, but
he denounces the view that men can ever be equal. Inequality is written
in nature; it is not only a necessary consequence of liberty, but
a necessary postulate of Progress. There will always be a superior
minority. He criticises himself too for having fallen into the error of
Hegel, and assigned to man an unduly important place in the universe.

[Footnote: Renan, speaking of the Socialists, paid a high tribute
to Bazard (L'Avenir de la science, p. 104). On the other hand, he
criticised Comte severely (p. 149).

Renan returned to speculation on the future in 1863, in a letter to M.
Marcellin-Berthelot (published in Dialogues et fragments philosophiques,
1876): "Que sera Ie monde quand un million de fois se sera reproduit ce
qui s'est passe depuis 1763 quand la chimie, au lieu de quatre-vingt ans
de progres, en aura cent millions?" (p. 183). And again in the Dialogues
written in 1871 (ib.), where it is laid down that the end of humanity is
to produce great men: "le grand oeuvre s'accomplira par la science, non
par la democratic. Rien sans grands hommes; le salut se fera par des
grands hommes" (p. 103).]

In 1890 there was nothing left of the sentimental socialism which he had
studied in 1848; it had been blown away by the cold wind of scientific
socialism which Marx and Engels created. And Renan had come to think
that in this new form socialism would triumph. [Footnote: He reckoned
without the new forces, opposed to socialism as well as to parliamentary
democracy, represented by Bakunin and men like Georges Sorel.] He had
criticised Comte for believing that "man lives exclusively by science,
or rather little verbal tags, like geometrical theorems, dry formulae."
Was he satisfied by the concrete doctrine of Marx that all the phenomena
of civilisation at a given period are determined by the met