casual reader, to be sure, will find
occasional flares of expectancy about the future or of pride in the
advance of the past which at first suggest progressive interpretations of
history. So Seneca, rejoicing because he thought he knew the explanation
of the moon's eclipses, wrote: "The days will come when those things
which now lie hidden time and human diligence will bring to light. . . .
The days will come when our posterity will marvel that we were ignorant
of truths so obvious." [2] So, too, the Epicureans, like the Greek
tragedians before them, believed that human knowledge and effort had
lifted mankind out of primitive barbarism and Lucretius described how man
by the development of agriculture and navigation, the building of cities
and the establishment of laws, the manufacture of physical conveniences
and the creation of artistic beauty, had risen, "gradually progressing,"
to his present height.[3] Such hopeful changes in the past, however, were
not the prophecies of continuous advance; they were but incidental
fluctuations in a historic process which knew no progress as a whole.
Even the Stoics saw in history only a recurrent rise and fall in endless
repetition so that all apparent change for good or evil was but the
influx or the ebbing of the tide in an essentially unchanging sea. The
words of Marcus Aurelius are typical: "The periodic movements of the
universe are the same, up and down from age to age"; "He who has seen
present things has seen all, both everything which has taken place from
all eternity and everything which will be for time without end; for all
are of one kin and of one form"; "He who is forty years old, if he has
any understanding at all, has, by virtue of the uniformity that prevails,
seen all things which have been and all that will be." [4]

When with these Greek and Roman ideas the Hebrew-Christian influences
blended, no conception of progress in the modern sense was added by the
Church's contribution. To be sure, the Christians' uncompromising faith
in personality as the object of divine redemption and their vigorous hope
about the future of God's people in the next world, if not in this,
calcined some elements in the classical tradition. Belief in cycles,
endlessly repeating themselves through cosmic ages, went by the board.
This earth became the theatre of a unique experiment made once for all;
in place of the ebb and flow of tides in a changeless sea, mankind's
story became a dr