quotes Seneca: See Opus Majus, i. pp. 37, 55, 14.

Much has been made out of a well-known passage in his short Epistle de
secretis operibus artis et naturae et de militate magiae, c. iv. (ed.
Brewer, p. 533), in which he is said to PREDICT inventions which have
been realised in the locomotives, steam navigation, and aeroplanes of
modern times. But Bacon predicts nothing. He is showing that science can
invent curious and, to the vulgar, incredible things without the aid of
magic. All the inventions which he enumerates have, he declares, been
actually made in ancient times, with the exception of a flying-machine
(instrumentum volandi quod non vidi nec hominem qui vidisset cognovi,
sed sapientem qui hoc artificium excogitavit explere cognosco).

Compare the remarks of S. Vogl, Die Physik Roger Bacos (1906), 98 sqq.]

4.

Thus Friar Bacon's theories of scientific reform, so far from amounting
to an anticipation of the idea of Progress, illustrate how impossible it
was that this idea could appear in the Middle Ages. The whole spirit
of medieval Christianity excluded it. The conceptions which were
entertained of the working of divine Providence, the belief that the
world, surprised like a sleeping household by a thief in the night,
might at any moment come to a sudden end, had the same effect as the
Greek theories of the nature of change and of recurring cycles of the
world. Or rather, they had a more powerful effect, because they were
not reasoned conclusions, but dogmas guaranteed by divine authority. And
medieval pessimism as to man's mundane condition was darker and sterner
than the pessimism of the Greeks. There was the prospect of happiness in
another sphere to compensate, but this, engrossing the imagination, only
rendered it less likely that any one should think of speculating about
man's destinies on earth.

III

1.

The civilised countries of Europe spent about three hundred years in
passing from the mental atmosphere of the Middle Ages into the mental
atmosphere of the modern world. These centuries were one of the
conspicuously progressive periods in history, but the conditions were
not favourable to the appearance of an idea of Progress, though the
intellectual milieu was being prepared in which that idea could be born.
This progressive period, which is conveniently called the Renaissance,
lasted from the fourteenth into the seventeenth century. The great
results, significant for our present purpose, whic