abolished, and is thus approaching the golden age of the
future; but the art of government and the general regulation of society,
notwithstanding all the improvements of the past, is still in its
infancy. Yet all that is needed is a short series of wise reigns in our
European states to reach the age of gold or, in other words, a paradise
on earth.

A few wise reigns. The Abbe shared the illusion of many that government
is omnipotent and can bestow happiness on men. The imperfections
of governments were, he was convinced, chiefly due to the fact that
hitherto the ablest intellects had not been dedicated to the study of
the science of governing. The most essential part of his project was the
formation of a Political Academy which should do for politics what the
Academy of Sciences did for the study of nature, and should act as
an advisory body to ministers of state on all questions of the public
welfare. If this proposal and some others were adopted, he believed that
the golden age would not long be delayed. These observations--hardly
more than obiter dicta--show that Saint-Pierre's general view of the
world was moulded by a conception of civilisation progressing towards a
goal of human happiness. In 1737 he published a special work to
explain this conception: the Observations on the Continuous Progress of
Universal Reason.

He recurs to the comparison of the life of collective humanity to that
of an individual, and, like Fontenelle and Terrasson, accentuates the
point where the analogy fails. We may regard our race as composed of all
the nations that have been and will be--and assign to it different ages.
For instance, when the race is ten thousand years old a century will be
what a single year is in the life of a centenarian. But there is this
prodigious difference. The mortal man grows old and loses his reason and
happiness through the enfeeblement of his bodily machine; whereas the
human race, by the perpetual and infinite succession of generations,
will find itself at the end of ten thousand years more capable of
growing in wisdom and happiness than it was at the end of four thousand.

At present the race is apparently not more than seven or eight thousand
years old, and is only "in the infancy of human reason," compared with
what it will be five or six thousand years hence. And when that stage is
reached, it will only have entered on what we may call its first youth,
when we consider what it will be when it is a h