elatively small to posterity that they will classify us and the
ancients as virtually contemporary; just in the same way as we group
together the Greeks and Romans, though the Romans in their own day were
moderns in relation to the Greeks. In that remote period men will be
able to judge without prejudice the comparative merits of Sophocles and
Corneille.

Unreasonable admiration for the ancients is one of the chief obstacles
to progress (le progres des choses). Philosophy not only did not
advance, but even fell into an abyss of unintelligible ideas, because,
through devotion to the authority of Aristotle, men sought truth in his
enigmatic writings instead of seeking it in nature. If the authority of
Descartes were ever to have the same fortune, the results would be no
less disastrous.

7.

This memorable brochure exhibits, without pedantry, perspicuous
arrangement and the "geometrical" precision on which Fontenelle remarked
as one of the notes of the new epoch introduced by Descartes. It
displays too the author's open-mindedness, and his readiness to
follow where the argument leads. He is able already to look beyond
Cartesianism; he knows that it cannot be final. No man of his time was
more open-minded and free from prejudice than Fontenelle. This quality
of mind helped him to turn his eyes to the future. Perrault and his
predecessors were absorbed in the interest of the present and the past.
Descartes was too much engaged in his own original discoveries to do
more than throw a passing glance at posterity.

Now the prospect of the future was one of the two elements which were
still needed to fashion the theory of the progress of knowledge. All the
conditions for such a theory were present. Bodin and Bacon, Descartes
and the champions of the Moderns--the reaction against the Renaissance,
and the startling discoveries of science--had prepared the way; progress
was established for the past and present. But the theory of the progress
of knowledge includes and acquires its value by including the indefinite
future. This step was taken by Fontenelle. The idea had been almost
excluded by Bacon's misleading metaphor of old age, which Fontenelle
expressly rejects. Man will have no old age; his intellect will never
degenerate; and "the sound views of intellectual men in successive
generations will continually add up."

But progress must not only be conceived as extending indefinitely into
the future; it must also be conceive