s phrase, when Italy was in the
twilight of its past grandeur and when modern society was in the dawn of
the great industry.) Henceforth we are in a position to take up the
guiding thread of what, by abstraction, is called the scientific spirit;
and no one is any longer astonished at finding that everything in
scientific discoveries has come about, as was the case in other
primitive times, when the clumsy elementary geometry of the Egyptians
arose from the necessity of measuring the fields exposed to the annual
inundations of the Nile, and when the periodicity of these inundations
suggested, in Egypt and in Babylon, the discovery of the rudiments of
the astronomical movements.

It is certainly true that when science is once created and partially
ripened, as had already happened in the Hellenic period, the work of
abstraction, of deduction and of combination continues among scientists
in such a way that it possibly obliterates the consciousness of the
social causes of the first production of science itself. But if we
examine in their main features the epochs of the development of science,
and if we confront the periods which the ideologists would characterize
as periods of progress and of retrogression of intelligence, we perceive
clearly the social reason for the impulses, sometimes increasing,
sometimes decreasing, toward scientific activity. What need had the
feudal society of Western Europe for this ancient science, which the
Byzantines preserved, at least materially, while the Arabs, free
agriculturists, industrious artisans, or skillful merchants, had
succeeded in increasing it a little. What is the Renaissance, if not the
joining of the initiatory movement of the bourgeoisie to the traditions
of ancient learning, which had become usable? What is all the
accelerated movement of scientific knowledge, since the seventeenth
century, but the series of acts accomplished by intelligence, refined by
experience, to assure human labor, in the forms of an improved
technique, the dominion over natural forces and conditions? Thence
arises the war against darkness, superstition, the Church, religion;
thence arise naturalism, atheism, materialism; thence the installation
of the domain of reason. The bourgeois epoch is the epoch of minds in
full play. (Vico.) It is worth remembering that this government of the
Directory, which was the prototype and the compendium of all liberal
corruption, was the first to introduce in the Univer