for past occurrences and afford some openings and
anticipations into the eventual history of the world.]

The problem of dark ages, which an advocate of Progress must explain,
was waved away by Priestley in his Lectures on History with the
observation that they help the subsequent advance of knowledge by
"breaking the progress of authority." [Footnote: This was doubtless
suggested to him by some remarks of Hume in The Rise of Arts and
Sciences.] This is not much of a plea for such periods viewed as
machinery in a Providential plan. The great history of the Middle Ages,
which in the words of its author describes "the triumph of barbarism and
religion," had been completed before Priestley's Lectures appeared, and
it is remarkable that he takes no account of it, though it might seem to
be a work with which a theory of Progress must come to terms.

Yet the sceptical historian of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, who was more at home in French literature than any of his
fellow-countrymen, was not opposed to the theory of Progress, and he
even states it in a moderate form. Having given reasons for believing
that civilised society will never again be threatened by such
an irruption of barbarians as that which oppressed the arms and
institutions of Rome, he allows us to "acquiesce in the pleasing
conclusion that every age of the world has increased, and still
increases, the real wealth, the happiness, the knowledge and perhaps the
virtue of the human race."

"The discoveries of ancient and modern navigators, and the domestic
history or tradition of the most enlightened nations, represent the
HUMAN SAVAGE, naked both in mind and body, and destitute of laws, of
arts, of ideas, and almost of language. From this abject condition,
perhaps the primitive and universal state of man, he has gradually
arisen to command the animals, to fertilise the earth, to traverse the
ocean, and to measure the heavens. His progress in the improvement and
exercise of his mental and corporeal faculties has been irregular and
various, infinitely slow in the beginning, and increasing by degrees
with redoubled velocity; ages of laborious ascent have been followed by
a moment of rapid downfall; and the several climates of the globe have
felt the vicissitudes of light and darkness. Yet the experience of four
thousand years should enlarge our hopes and diminish our apprehensions;
we cannot determine to what height the human species may aspire in
th