nation: "Voila l'univers si grand que je m'y
perds, je ne sais plus ou je suis; je ne suis plus rien.--La terre est
si effroyablement petite!"

Such a revolution in cosmic values could not fail to exert a penetrating
influence on human thought. The privileged position of the earth had
been a capital feature of the whole doctrine, as to the universe and
man's destinies, which had been taught by the Church, and it had made
that doctrine more specious than it might otherwise have seemed. Though
the Churches could reform their teaching to meet the new situation, the
fact remained that the Christian scheme sounded less plausible when the
central importance of the human race was shown to be an illusion. Would
man, stripped of his cosmic pretensions, and finding himself lost in
the immensities of space, invent a more modest theory of his destinies
confined to his own little earth--si effroyablement petite? The
eighteenth century answered this question by the theory of Progress.

10.

Fontenelle is one of the most representative thinkers of that
period--we have no distinguishing name for it--which lies between
the characteristic thinkers of the seventeenth century and the
characteristic thinkers of the eighteenth. It is a period of over sixty
years, beginning about 1680, for though Montesquieu and Voltaire were
writing long before 1740, the great influential works of the "age of
illumination" begin with the Esprit des lois in 1748. The intellectual
task of this intervening period was to turn to account the ideas
provided by the philosophy of Descartes, and use them as solvents of
the ideas handed down from the Middle Ages. We might almost call it the
Cartesian period for, though Descartes was dead, it was in these years
that Cartesianism performed its task and transformed human thought.

When we speak of Cartesianism we do not mean the metaphysical system of
the master, or any of his particular views such as that of innate
ideas. We mean the general principles, which were to leave an abiding
impression on the texture of thought: the supremacy of reason over
authority, the stability of the laws of Nature, rigorous standards of
proof. Fontenelle was far from accepting all the views of Descartes,
whom he does not scruple to criticise; but he was a true Cartesian
in the sense that he was deeply imbued with these principles, which
generated, to use an expression of his own, "des especes de rebelles,
qui conspiraient contre l'ign