orical interest, his genius exercised
a more extensive and transforming influence on the future development of
thought than any other man of his century.

Cartesianism affirmed the two positive axioms of the supremacy of
reason, and the invariability of the laws of nature; and its instrument
was a new rigorous analytical method, which was applicable to history as
well as to physical knowledge. The axioms had destructive corollaries.
The immutability of the processes of nature collided with the theory
of an active Providence. The supremacy of reason shook the thrones from
which authority and tradition had tyrannised over the brains of men.
Cartesianism was equivalent to a declaration of the Independence of Man.

It was in the atmosphere of the Cartesian spirit that a theory of
Progress was to take shape.

1.

Let us look back. We saw that all the remarks of philosophers prior to
the seventeenth century, which have been claimed as enunciations of the
idea of Progress, amount merely to recognitions of the obvious fact that
in the course of the past history of men there have been advances
and improvements in knowledge and arts, or that we may look for some
improvements in the future. There is not one of them that adumbrates
a theory that can be called a theory of Progress. We have seen several
reasons why the idea could not emerge in the ancient or in the
Middle Ages. Nor could it have easily appeared in the period of the
Renaissance. Certain preliminary conditions were required, and these
were not fulfilled till the seventeenth century. So long as men believed
that the Greeks and Romans had attained, in the best days of their
civilisation, to an intellectual plane which posterity could never
hope to reach, so long as the authority of their thinkers was set up as
unimpeachable, a theory of degeneration held the field, which excluded
a theory of Progress. It was the work of Bacon and Descartes to liberate
science and philosophy from the yoke of that authority; and at the same
time, as we shall see, the rebellion began to spread to other fields.

Another condition for the organisation of a theory of Progress was a
frank recognition of the value of mundane life and the subservience of
knowledge to human needs. The secular spirit of the Renaissance prepared
the world for this new valuation, which was formulated by Bacon, and has
developed into modern utilitarianism.

There was yet a third preliminary condition. There can