d as necessary and certain. This is
the second essential feature of the theory. The theory would have
little value or significance, if the prospect of progress in the future
depended on chance or the unpredictable discretion of an external will.
Fontenelle asserts implicitly the certainty of progress when he declares
that the discoveries and improvements of the modern age would have been
made by the ancients if they exchanged places with the moderns; for
this amounts to saying that science will progress and knowledge increase
independently of particular individuals. If Descartes had not been born,
some one else would have done his work; and there could have been no
Descartes before the seventeenth century. For, as he says in a later
work, [Footnote: Preface des elemens de la geometrie de l'infini
(OEuvres, x. p. 40, ed. 1790).] "there is an order which regulates our
progress. Every science develops after a certain number of preceding
sciences have developed, and only then; it has to await its turn to
burst its shell."

Fontenelle, then, was the first to formulate the idea of the progress,
of knowledge, as a complete doctrine. At the moment the import and
far-reaching effects of the idea were not realised, either by himself or
by others, and his pamphlet, which appeared in the company of a perverse
theory of pastoral poetry, was acclaimed merely as an able defence of
the Moderns.

8.

If the theory of the indefinite progress of knowledge is true, it is one
of those truths which were originally established by false reasoning. It
was established on a principle which excluded degeneration, but equally
excluded evolution; and the whole conception of nature which Fontenelle
had learned from Descartes is long since dead and buried.

But it is more important to observe that this principle, which seemed
to secure the indefinite progress of knowledge, disabled Fontenelle from
suggesting a theory of the progress of society. The invariability of
nature, as he conceived it, was true of the emotions and the will,
as well as of the intellect. It implied that man himself would be
psychically always the same--unalterable, incurable. L'ordre general
de la Nature a Fair bien constant. His opinion of the human race was
expressed in the Dialogues of the Dead, [Footnote: It may be seen too in
the Plurality of Worlds.] and it never seems to have varied. The world
consists of a multitude of fools, and a mere handful of reasonable men.
Men