ulers of the Roman Empire, but of mankind as a whole. This is
Christian, or perhaps we should say, Stoical-Christian. Thus Descartes
tells us that he looks to science to furnish us ultimately with an art
which will make us 'masters and possessors of nature ... and this not
solely for the pleasure of enjoying with ease the good things of the
world, but principally for the preservation and improvement of human
health which is both the foundation of all other goods and the means of
strengthening the spirit itself' ('Discours de la Methode'). It is
significant that the two words Progress and Humanity come into use in
their modern sense side by side. The latter is the basis and the ideal
of the former.

But the new thing which had come into the world at this point, and gives
a fresh impulse and content to the idea of progress, is the development
of science. The Greeks had founded it and, as we shall see in a later
chapter, it was the recovery of the Greek thread which gave the moderns
their clue. But no one before the sixteenth century, before the marvels
revealed by Galileo's telescope and knit up by Newton's synthetic
genius, could have conceived the visions of human regeneration by
science which light up the pioneers of the seventeenth century and are
the gospel of the eighteenth.

We turn to the eighteenth century, and primarily to the school of
thinkers called 'philosophes' in France, for the fullest and most
enthusiastic statement of progress as a gospel. It is, of course,
European, as all the greatest advances of thought have been; and German
thinkers, as well as English, stand with the French in the vanguard.
Kant and Herder, from different points of view, thought it out perhaps
more thoroughly than any one else at that time; but the French believed
in it as a nation and were willing to stake their lives and souls on the
belief. Thus Turgot, before the Revolution, declared that 'the total
mass of the human race marches continually though sometimes slowly
towards an ever-increasing perfection'. And Condorcet, in the midst of
the Revolution, while himself under its ban, painted a picture 'of the
human race, freed from its chains, and marching with a firm tread on the
road of truth and virtue and happiness'.

Here is the gospel in its purest and simplest form, and when we are
inclined to think that the crimes and the partial failure of the
Revolution discredit its principles, it is well to remember that the man
who b