up problems which are now obscure. We divide the
few years of our lives unequally between study and vice, and it will
therefore be the work of many generations to explain such phenomena as
comets. One day our posterity will marvel at our ignorance of causes so
clear to them.

"How many new animals have we first come to know in the present age? In
time to come men will know much that is unknown to us. Many discoveries
are reserved for future ages, when our memory will have faded from men's
minds. We imagine ourselves initiated in the secrets of nature; we are
standing on the threshold of her temple."

[Footnote: The quotations from Seneca will be found in Naturales
Quaestiones, vii. 25 and 31. See also Epist. 64. Seneca implies
continuity in scientific research. Aristotle had stated this expressly,
pointing out that we are indebted not only to the author of the
philosophical theory which we accept as true, but also to the
predecessors whose views it has superseded (Metaphysics, i. ii. chap.
1). But he seems to consider his own system as final.]

But these predictions are far from showing that Seneca had the least
inkling of a doctrine of the Progress of humanity. Such a doctrine is
sharply excluded by the principles of his philosophy and his profoundly
pessimistic view of human affairs. Immediately after the passage which
I have quoted he goes on to enlarge on the progress of vice. "Are you
surprised to be told that human knowledge has not yet completed its
whole task? Why, human wickedness has not yet fully developed."

Yet, at least, it may be said, Seneca believed in a progress of
knowledge and recognised its value. Yes, but the value which he
attributed to it did not lie in any advantages which it would bring
to the general community of mankind. He did not expect from it any
improvement of the world. The value of natural science, from his point
of view, was this, that it opened to the philosopher a divine region, in
which, "wandering among the stars," he could laugh at the earth and all
its riches, and his mind "delivered as it were from prison could return
to its original home." In other words, its value lay not in its results,
but simply in the intellectual activity; and therefore it concerned not
mankind at large but a few chosen individuals who, doomed to live in a
miserable world, could thus deliver their souls from slavery.

For Seneca's belief in the theory of degeneration and the hopeless
corruption of