Cartesian, he took part in the controversy in its latest stage, when La
Motte and Madame Dacier were the principal antagonists. The human mind,
he said, has had its infancy and youth; its maturity began in the age
of Augustus; the barbarians arrested its course till the Renaissance;
in the seventeenth century, through the illuminating philosophy of
Descartes, it passed beyond the stage which it had attained in the
Augustan age, and the eighteenth century should surpass the seventeenth.
Cartesianism is not final; it has its place in a development. It was
made possible by previous speculations, and it will be succeeded by
other systems. We must not pursue the analogy of humanity with an
individual man and anticipate a period of old age. For unlike the
individual, humanity "being composed of all ages," is always gaining
instead of losing. The age of maturity will last indefinitely, because
it is a progressive, not a stationary, maturity. Later generations
will always be superior to the earlier, for progress is "a natural and
necessary effect of the constitution of the human mind."

CHAPTER VI. THE GENERAL PROGRESS OF MAN: ABBE DE SAINT-PIERRE

The revolutionary speculations on the social and moral condition of man
which were the outstanding feature of the eighteenth century in France,
and began about 1750, were the development of the intellectual movement
of the seventeenth, which had changed the outlook of speculative
thought. It was one continuous rationalistic movement. In the days
of Racine and Perrault men had been complacently conscious of the
enlightenment of the age in which they were living, and as time went on,
this consciousness became stronger and acuter; it is a note of the age
of Voltaire. In the last years of Louis XIV., and in the years which
followed, the contrast between this mental enlightenment and the dark
background--the social evils and miseries of the kingdom, the gross
misgovernment and oppression--began to insinuate itself into men's
minds. What was the value of the achievements of science, and
the improvement of the arts of life, if life itself could not be
ameliorated? Was not some radical reconstruction possible, in the social
fabric, corresponding to the radical reconstruction inaugurated by
Descartes in the principles of science and in the methods of thought?
Year by year the obscurantism of the ruling powers became more glaring,
and the most gifted thinkers, towards the middle of the c