ero (ii. 218) is in point, if, as seems probable, the date of that
work is 1632-33. "Some defer to the ancients and allow themselves to be
led by them like children; others hold that the ancients lived in the
youth of the world, and it is those who live to-day who are really the
ancients, and consequently ought to carry most weight." See Rigault,
Histoire de la querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, p. 52.

The passage of Pascal occurs in the Fragment d'un traite du vide, not
published till 1779 (now included in the Pensees, Premiere Partie, Art.
I), and therefore without influence on the origination of the theory of
progress. It has been pointed out that Guillaume Colletet had in 1636
expressed a similar view (Brunetiere, Etudes critiques, v. 185-6).]

Descartes expressed it like Bacon, and it was taken up and repeated
by many whom Descartes influenced. Pascal, who till 1654 was a man of
science and a convert to Cartesian ideas, put it in a striking way.
The whole sequence of men (he says) during so many centuries should
be considered as a single man, continually existing and continually
learning. At each stage of his life this universal man profited by the
knowledge he had acquired in the preceding stages, and he is now in his
old age. This is a fuller, and probably an independent, development of
the comparison of the race to an individual which we found in Bacon. It
occurs in a fragment which remained unpublished for more than a hundred
years, and is often quoted as a recognition, not of a general progress
of man, but of a progress in human knowledge.

To those who reproached Descartes with disrespect towards ancient
thinkers he might have replied that, in repudiating their authority, he
was really paying them the compliment of imitation and acting far more
in their own spirit than those who slavishly followed them. Pascal saw
this point. "What can be more unjust," he wrote, "than to treat our
ancients with greater consideration than they showed towards their own
predecessors, and to have for them this incredible respect which they
deserve from us only because they entertained no such regard for
those who had the same advantage (of antiquity) over them?" [Footnote:
Pensees, ib.]

At the same time Pascal recognised that we are indebted to the ancients
for our very superiority to them in the extent of our knowledge. "They
reached a certain point, and the slightest effort enables us to mount
higher; so that we find ou