The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth

Nine months before the first part of Perrault's work appeared a younger and more brilliant man had formulated, in a short tract, the essential points of the doctrine of the prog...

his own Utopian aristocracy as having existed somewhere towards the beginning of the period of the world's relapse, when things were not so bad, [Footnote: Similarly he places t...

The philosophical views current in Germany during the period in which the psychology of Locke was in fashion in France and before the genius of Kant opened a new path, were base...

Auguste Comte did more than any preceding thinker to establish the idea of Progress as a luminary which could not escape men's vision. The brilliant suggestions of Saint-Simon,...

The idea of Progress could not help crossing the Channel. France and England had been at war in the first year of the eighteenth century, they were at war in the last, and their...

Outside the circle of systematic thinkers the prevalent theory of degeneration was being challenged early in the seventeenth century. The challenge led to a literary war, which...

The intellectual movement which prepared French opinion for the Revolution and supplied the principles for reconstituting society may be described as humanistic in the sense tha...

The failure of the Revolution to fulfil the visionary hopes which had dazzled France for a brief period--a failure intensified by the horrors that had attended the experiment--w...

In the sixties of the nineteenth century the idea of Progress entered upon the third period of its history. During the FIRST period, up to the French Revolution, it had been tre...

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 de...

The optimistic theory of civilisation was not unchallenged by rationalists. In the same year (1750) in which Turgot traced an outline of historical Progress at the Sorbonne, Rou...

The authority which the advanced thinkers of France gained among the middle classes during the third quarter of the eighteenth century was promoted by the influence of fashion....

If we are to draw any useful lines of demarcation in the continuous flux of history we must neglect anticipations and announcements, and we need not scruple to say that, in the...

Among the great precursors of a new order of thought Francis Bacon occupies a unique position. He drew up a definite programme for a "great Renovation" of knowledge; he is more...

The theory of human Progress could not be durably established by abstract arguments, or on the slender foundations laid by the Abbe de Saint-Pierre. It must ultimately be judged...

It is a long descent from the genius of Machiavelli to the French historian, Jean Bodin, who published his introduction to historical studies [Footnote: Methodus ad facilem hist...

In 1850 there appeared at Paris a small book by M. A. Javary, with the title DE L'IDEE DU PROGRES. Its interest lies in the express recognition that Progress was the characteris...

Amid the intellectual movements in France described in the last chapter the idea of Progress passed into a new phase of its growth. Hitherto it had been a vague optimistic doctr...

When we say that ideas rule the world, or exercise a decisive power in history, we are generally thinking of those ideas which express human aims and depend for their realisatio...

It is not easy for a new idea of the speculative order to penetrate and inform the general consciousness of a community until it has assumed some external and concrete embodimen...

The leaders of thought in France did not look far forward into the future or attempt to trace the definite lines on which the human race might be expected to develop. They conte...

creations of a single brain; and the only chance for a satisfactory constitution or for a religion to maintain itself for any length of time is constantly to repress any tendenc...