Chapter 2

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 the ideal society which he describes in the Critias 9000 years before Solon. The state which he plans in the Laws is indeed imagined as a practicable project in his own day, but then it is only a second-best. The ideal state of which Aristotle sketched an outline (Politics, iv. v.) is not set either in time or in place.] and exhibits its gradual deterioration, through the successive stages of timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and despotism. He explains this deterioration as primarily caused by a degeneration of the race, due to laxity and errors in the State regulation of marriages, and the consequent birth of biologically inferior individuals.

The theories of Plato are only the most illustrious example of the tendency characteristic of Greek philosophical thinkers to idealise the immutable as possessing a higher value than that which varies. This affected all their social speculations. They believed in the ideal of an absolute order in society, from which, when it is once established, any deviation must be for the worse. Aristotle, considering the subject from a practical point of view, laid down that changes in an established social order are undesirable, and should be as few and slight as possible. [Footnote: Politics, ii. 5.] This prejudice against change excluded the apprehension of civilisation as a progressive movement. It did not occur to Plato or any one else that a perfect order might be attainable by a long series of changes and adaptations. Such an order, being an embodiment of reason, could be created only by a deliberate and immediate act of a planning mind. It might be devised by the wisdom of a philosopher or revealed by the Deity. Hence the salvation of a community must lie in preserving intact, so far as possible, the institutions imposed by the enlightened lawgiver, since change meant corruption and disaster. These a priori principles account for the admiration of the Spartan state entertained by many Greek philosophers, because it was supposed to have preserved unchanged for an unusually long period a system established by an inspired legislator.

2.

Thus time was regarded as the enemy of humanity. Horace's verse,

Damnosa quid non imminuit dies?

"time depreciates the value of the world," expresses the pessimistic axiom accepted in most systems of ancient thought.

The theory of world-cycles was so widely current that it may almost be described as the orthodox theory of cosmic time among the Greeks, and it passed from them to the Romans.

[Footnote: Plato's world-cycle. I have omitted details not essential; e.g. that in the first period men were born from the earth and only in the second propagated themselves. The period of 36,000 years, known as the Great Platonic Year, was probably a Babylonian astronomical period, and was in any case based on the Babylonian sexagesimal system and connected with the solar year conceived as consisting of 360 days. Heraclitus seems to have accepted it as the duration of the world between his periodic universal conflagrations. Plato derived the number from predecessors, but based it on operations with the numbers 3, 4, 5, the length of the sides of the Pythagorean right-angled triangle. The Great Year of the Pythagorean Philolaus seems to have been different, and that of the Stoics was much longer (6,570,000 years).

I may refer here to Tacitus, Dialogus c. 16, as an appreciation of historical perspective unusual in ancient writers: "The four hundred years which separate us from the ancients are almost a vanishing quantity if you compare them with the duration of the ages." See the whole passage, where the Magnus Annus of 12,954 years is referred to.]

According to some of the Pythagoreans [Footnote: See Simplicius, Phys. 732, 26.] each cycle repeated to the minutest particular the course and events of the preceding. If the universe dissolves into the original chaos, there appeared to them to be no reason why the second chaos should produce a world differing in the least respect from its predecessor. The nth cycle would be indeed numerically distinct from the first, but otherwise would be identical with it, and no man could possibly discover the number of the cycle in which he was living. As no end seems to have been assigned to the whole process, the course of the world's history would contain an endless number of Trojan Wars, for instance; an endless number of Platos would write an endless number of Republics. Virgil uses this idea in his Fourth Eclogue, where he meditates a return of the Golden Age:

Alter erit tum Tiphys, et altera quae uehat Argo Delectos heroas; erunt etiam altera bella, Atque iterum ad Troiam magnus mittetur Achilles.

The periodic theory might be held in forms in which this uncanny doctrine of absolute identity was avoided; but at the best it meant an endless monotonous iteration, which was singularly unlikely to stimulate speculative interest in the future. It must be remembered that no thinker had any means of knowing how near to the end of his cycle the present hour might be. The most influential school of the later Greek age, the Stoics, adopted the theory of cycles, and the natural psychological effect of the theory is vividly reflected in Marcus Aurelius, who frequently dwells on it in his Meditations. "The rational soul," he says, "wanders round the whole world and through the encompassing void, and gazes into infinite time, and considers the periodic destructions and rebirths of the universe, and reflects that our posterity will see nothing new, and that our ancestors saw nothing greater than we have seen. A man of forty years, possessing the most moderate intelligence, may be said to have seen all that is past and all that is to come; so uniform is the world." [Footnote: xi. I. The cyclical theory was curiously revived in the nineteenth; century by Nietzsche, and it is interesting to note his avowal that it took him a long time to overcome the feeling of pessimism which the doctrine inspired.]

3.

And yet one Stoic philosopher saw clearly, and declared emphatically, that increases in knowledge must be expected in the future.

"There are many peoples to-day," Seneca wrote, "who are ignorant of the cause of eclipses of the moon, and it has only recently been demonstrated among ourselves. The day will come when time and human diligence will clear 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 the race is uncompromising. Human life on the earth is periodically destroyed, alternately by fire and flood; and each period begins with a golden age in which men live in rude simplicity, innocent because they are ignorant not because they are wise. When they degenerate from this state, arts and inventions promote deterioration by ministering to luxury and vice.

Interesting, then, as Seneca's observations on the prospect of some future scientific discoveries are, and they are unique in ancient literature, [Footnote: They are general and definite. This distinguishes them, for instance, from Plato's incidental hint in the Republic as to the prospect of the future development of solid geometry.] they were far from adumbrating a doctrine of the Progress of man. For him, as for Plato and the older philosophers, time is the enemy of man. [Footnote: The quotations and the references here will be found in Nat. Quaest. i. Praef.; Epist. 104, Sec. 16 (cp. 110, Sec. 8; 117, Sec. 20, and the fine passage in 65, Sec. 16-21); Nat. Quaest. iii. 28-30; and finally Epist. 90, Sec. 45, cp. Sec. 17. This last letter is a criticism on Posidonius, who asserted that the arts invented in primitive times were due to philosophers. Seneca repudiates this view: omnia enim ista sagacitas hominum, non sapientia inuenit.

Seneca touches on the possibility of the discovery of new lands beyond the ocean in a passage in his Medea (374 sqq.) which has been often quoted:

uenient annis secula seris, quibus oceanus uincula rerum laxet et ingens pateat tellus Tiphysque novos detegat orbes,... nec sit terris ultima Thule.]

4.

There was however a school of philosophical speculation, which might have led to the foundation of a theory of Progress, if the historical outlook of the Greeks had been larger and if their temper had been different. The Atomic theory of Democritus seems to us now, in many ways, the most wonderful achievement of Greek thought, but it had a small range of influence in Greece, and would have had less if it had not convinced the brilliant mind of Epicurus. The Epicureans developed it, and it may be that the views which they put forward as to the history of the human race are mainly their own superstructure. These philosophers rejected entirely the doctrine of a Golden Age and a subsequent degeneration, which was manifestly incompatible with their theory that the world was mechanically formed from atoms without the intervention of a Deity. For them, the earliest condition of men resembled that of the beasts, and from this primitive and miserable condition they laboriously reached the existing state of civilisation, not by external guidance or as a consequence of some initial design, but simply by the exercise of human intelligence throughout a long period. [Footnote: Lucretius v. 1448 sqq. (where the word PROGRESS is pronounced):

Usus et impigrae simul experientia mentis Paulatim docuit pedetemtim progredientis. Sic unum quicquid paulatim protrahit aetas In medium ratioque in luminis erigit oras. Namque alid ex alio clarescere et ordine debet Artibus, ad summum donee uenere cacumen.]

The gradual amelioration of their existence was marked by the discovery of fire and the use of metals, the invention of language, the invention of weaving, the growth of arts and industries, navigation, the development of family life, the establishment of social order by means of kings, magistrates, laws, the foundation of cities. The last great step in the amelioration of life, according to Lucretius, was the illuminating philosophy of Epicurus, who dispelled the fear of invisible powers and guided man from intellectual darkness to light.

But Lucretius and the school to which he belonged did not look forward to a steady and continuous process of further amelioration in the future. They believed that a time would come when the universe would fall into ruins, [Footnote: Ib. 95.] but the intervening period did not interest them. Like many other philosophers, they thought that their own philosophy was the final word on the universe, and they did not contemplate the possibility that important advances in knowledge might be achieved by subsequent generations. And, in any case, their scope was entirely individualistic; all their speculations were subsidiary to the aim of rendering the life of the individual as tolerable as possible here and now. Their philosophy, like Stoicism, was a philosophy of resignation; it was thoroughly pessimistic and therefore incompatible with the idea of Progress. Lucretius himself allows an underlying feeling of scepticism as to the value of civilisation occasionally to escape. [Footnote: His eadem sunt omnia semper (iii. 945) is the constant refrain of Marcus Aurelius.]

Indeed, it might be said that in the mentality of the ancient Greeks there was a strain which would have rendered them indisposed to take such an idea seriously, if it had been propounded. No period of their history could be described as an age of optimism. They were never, by their achievements in art or literature, in mathematics or philosophy, exalted into self-complacency or lured into setting high hopes on human capacity. Man has resourcefulness to meet everything--[words in Greek],--they did not go further than that.

This instinctive pessimism of the Greeks had a religious tinge which perhaps even the Epicureans found it hard entirely to expunge. They always felt that they were in the presence of unknown incalculable powers, and that subtle dangers lurked in human achievements and gains. Horace has taken this feeling as the motif of a criticism on man's inventive powers. A voyage of Virgil suggests the reflection that his friend's life would not be exposed to hazards on the high seas if the art of navigation had never been discovered--if man had submissively respected the limits imposed by nature. But man is audacious:

Nequiquam deus abscidit Prudens oceano dissociabili Terras.

In vain a wise god sever'd lands By the dissociating sea.

Daedalus violated the air, as Hercules invaded hell. The discovery of fire put us in possession of a forbidden secret. Is this unnatural conquest of nature safe or wise? Nil mortalibus ardui est:

Man finds no feat too hard or high; Heaven is not safe from man's desire. Our rash designs move Jove to ire, He dares not lay his thunder by.

The thought of this ode [Footnote: i. 3.] roughly expresses what would have been the instinctive sense of thoughtful Greeks if the idea of Progress had been presented to them. It would have struck them as audacious, the theory of men unduly elated and perilously at ease in the presence of unknown incalculable powers.

This feeling or attitude was connected with the idea of Moira. If we were to name any single idea as generally controlling or pervading Greek thought from Homer to the Stoics, [Footnote: The Stoics identified Moira with Pronoia, in accordance with their theory that the universe is permeated by thought.] it would perhaps be Moira, for which we have no equivalent. The common rendering "fate" is misleading. Moira meant a fixed order in the universe; but as a fact to which men must bow, it had enough in common with fatality to demand a philosophy of resignation and to hinder the creation of an optimistic atmosphere of hope. It was this order which kept things in their places, assigned to each its proper sphere and function, and drew a definite line, for instance, between men and gods. Human progress towards perfection--towards an ideal of omniscience, or an ideal of happiness, would have been a breaking down of the bars which divide the human from the divine. Human nature does not alter; it is fixed by Moira.

5.

We can see now how it was that speculative Greek minds never hit on the idea of Progress. In the first place, their limited historical experience did not easily suggest such a synthesis; and in the second place, the axioms of their thought, their suspiciousness of change, their theories of Moira, of degeneration and cycles, suggested a view of the world which was the very antithesis of progressive development. Epicurean, philosophers made indeed what might have been an important step in the direction of the doctrine of Progress, by discarding the theory of degeneration, and recognising that civilisation had been created by a series of successive improvements achieved by the effort of man alone. But here they stopped short. For they had their eyes fixed on the lot of the individual here and now, and their study of the history of humanity was strictly subordinate to this personal interest. The value of their recognition of human progress in the past is conditioned by the general tenor and purpose of their theory of life. It was simply one item in their demonstration that man owed nothing to supernatural intervention and had nothing to fear from supernatural powers. It is however no accident that the school of thought which struck on a path that might have led to the idea of Progress was the most uncompromising enemy of superstition that Greece produced.

It might be thought that the establishment of Roman rule and order in a large part of the known world, and the civilising of barbarian peoples, could not fail to have opened to the imagination of some of those who reflected on it in the days of Virgil or of Seneca, a vista into the future. But there was no change in the conditions of life likely to suggest a brighter view of human existence. With the loss of freedom pessimism increased, and the Greek philosophies of resignation were needed more than ever. Those whom they could not satisfy turned their thoughts to new mystical philosophies and religions, which were little interested in the earthly destinies of human society.

II

1.

The idea of the universe which prevailed throughout the Middle Ages, and the general orientation of men's thoughts were incompatible with some of the fundamental assumptions which are required by the idea of Progress. According to the Christian theory which was worked out by the Fathers, and especially by St. Augustine, the whole movement of history has the purpose of securing the happiness of a small portion of the human race in another world; it does not postulate a further development of human history on earth. For Augustine, as for any medieval believer, the course of history would be satisfactorily complete if the world came to an end in his own lifetime. He was not interested in the question whether any gradual amelioration of society or increase of knowledge would mark the period of time which might still remain to run before the day of Judgment. In Augustine's system the Christian era introduced the last period of history, the old age of humanity, which would endure only so long as to enable the Deity to gather in the predestined number of saved people. This theory might be combined with the widely-spread belief in a millennium on earth, but the conception of such a dispensation does not render it a theory of Progress.

Again, the medieval doctrine apprehends history not as a natural development but as a series of events ordered by divine intervention and revelations. If humanity had been left to go its own way it would have drifted to a highly undesirable port, and all men would have incurred the fate of everlasting misery from which supernatural interference rescued the minority. A belief in Providence might indeed, and in a future age would, be held along with a belief in Progress, in the same mind; but the fundamental assumptions were incongruous, and so long as the doctrine of Providence was undisputedly in the ascendant, a doctrine of Progress could not arise. And the doctrine of Providence, as it was developed in Augustine's "City of God," controlled the thought of the Middle Ages.

There was, moreover, the doctrine of original sin, an insuperable obstacle to the moral amelioration of the race by any gradual process of development. For since, so long as the human species endures on earth, every child will be born naturally evil and worthy of punishment, a moral advance of humanity to perfection is plainly impossible. [Footnote: It may be added that, as G. Monod observed, "les hommes du moyen age n'avaient pas conscience des modifications successives que le temps apporte avec lui dans les choses humaines" (Revue Historique, i. p. 8).]

2.

But there are certain features in the medieval theory of which we must not ignore the significance. In the first place, while it maintained the belief in degeneration, endorsed by Hebrew mythology, it definitely abandoned the Greek theory of cycles. The history of the earth was recognised as a unique phenomenon in time; it would never occur again or anything resembling it. More important than all is the fact that Christian theology constructed a synthesis which for the first time attempted to give a definite meaning to the whole course of human events, a synthesis which represents the past as leading up to a definite and desirable goal in the future. Once this belief had been generally adopted and prevailed for centuries men might discard it along with the doctrine of Providence on which it rested, but they could not be content to return again to such views as satisfied the ancients, for whom human history, apprehended as a whole, was a tale of little meaning. [Footnote: It may be observed that Augustine (De Civ. Dei, x. 14) compares the teaching (recta eruditio) of the people of God, in the gradual process of history, to the education of an individual. Prudentius has a similar comparison for a different purpose (c. Symmachum, ii. 315 sqq.):

Tardis semper processibus aucta Crescit vita hominis et longo proficit usu. Sic aevi mortalis habet se mobilis ordo, Sic variat natura vices, infantia repit, etc.

Floras (Epitome, ad init.) had already divided Roman history into four periods corresponding to infancy, adolescence, manhood, and old age.]

They must seek for some new synthesis to replace it.

Another feature of the medieval theory, pertinent to our inquiry, was an idea which Christianity took over from Greek and Roman thinkers. In the later period of Greek history, which began with the conquests of Alexander the Great, there had emerged the conception of the whole inhabited world as a unity and totality, the idea of the whole human race as one. We may conveniently call it the ecumenical idea--the principle of the ecumene or inhabited world, as opposed to the principle of the polis or city. Promoted by the vast extension of the geographical limits of the Greek world resulting from Alexander's conquests, and by his policy of breaking down the barriers between Greek and barbarian, the idea was reflected in the Stoic doctrine that all men are brothers, and that a man's true country is not his own particular city, but the ecumene. [Footnote: Plutarch long ago saw the connection between the policy of Alexander and the cosmopolitan teaching of Zeno. De Alexandri Magni virtute, i. Sec. 6.] It soon became familiar, popularised by the most popular of the later philosophies of Greece; and just as it had been implied in the imperial aspiration and polity of Alexander, so it was implied, still more clearly, in the imperial theory of Rome. The idea of the Roman Empire, its theoretical justification, might be described as the realisation of the unity of the world by the establishment of a common order, the unification of mankind in a single world-embracing political organism. The term "world," orbis (terrarum), which imperial poets use freely in speaking of the Empire, is more than a mere poetical or patriotic exaggeration; it expresses the idea, the unrealised ideal of the Empire. There is a stone from Halicarnassus in the British Museum, on which the idea is formally expressed from another point of view. The inscription is of the time of Augustus, and the Emperor is designated as "saviour of the community of mankind." There we have the notion of the human race apprehended as a whole, the ecumenical idea, imposing upon Rome the task described by Virgil as regere imperio populos, and more humanely by Pliny as the creation of a single fatherland for all the peoples of the world. [Footnote: Pliny, Nat. Hist. iii. 6. 39.]

This idea, which in the Roman Empire and in the Middle Ages took the form of a universal State and a universal Church, passed afterwards into the conception of the intercohesion of peoples as contributors to a common pool of civilisation--a principle which, when the idea of Progress at last made its appearance in the world, was to be one of the elements in its growth.

3.

One remarkable man, the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, [Footnote: c. A.D. 1210-92. Of Bacon's Opus Majus the best and only complete edition is that of J. H. Bridges, 2 vols. 1897 (with an excellent Introduction). The associated works, Opus Minus and Opus Tertium, have been edited by Brewer, Fr. Rogeri Bacon Opera Inedita, 1859.]who stands on an isolated pinnacle of his own in the Middle Ages, deserves particular consideration. It has been claimed for him that he announced the idea of Progress; he has even been compared to Condorcet or Comte. Such claims are based on passages taken out of their context and indulgently interpreted in the light of later theories. They are not borne out by an examination of his general conception of the universe and the aim of his writings.

His aim was to reform higher education and introduce into the universities a wide, liberal, and scientific programme of secular studies. His chief work, the "Opus Majus," was written for this purpose, to which his exposition of his own discoveries was subordinate. It was addressed and sent to Pope Clement IV., who had asked Bacon to give him an account of his researches, and was designed to persuade the Pontiff of the utility of science from an ecclesiastical point of view, and to induce him to sanction an intellectual reform, which without the approbation of the Church would at that time have been impossible. With great ingenuity and resourcefulness he sought to show that the studies to which he was devoted--mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry--were indispensable to an intelligent study of theology and Scripture. Though some of his arguments may have been urged simply to capture the Pope's good-will, there can be no question that Bacon was absolutely sincere in his view that theology was the mistress (dominatrix) of the sciences and that their supreme value lay in being necessary to it.

It was, indeed, on this principle of the close interconnection of all branches of knowledge that Bacon based his plea and his scheme of reform. And the idea of the "solidarity" of the sciences, in which he anticipated a later age, is one of his two chief claims to be remembered. [Footnote: Cp. Opus Tertium, c. iv. p. 18, omnes scientiae sunt connexae et mutuis se fovent auxiliis sicut partes ejusdem totius, quarum quaelibet opus suum peragit non solum propter se sed pro aliis.] It is the motif of the Opus Majus, and it would have been more fully elaborated if he had lived to complete the encyclopaedic work, Scriptum Principale, which he had only begun before his death. His other title to fame is well-known. He realised, as no man had done before him, the importance of the experimental method in investigating the secrets of nature, and was an almost solitary pioneer in the paths to which his greater namesake, more than three hundred years later, was to invite the attention of the world.

But, although Roger Bacon was inspired by these enlightened ideas, although he cast off many of the prejudices of his time and boldly revolted against the tyranny of the prevailing scholastic philosophy, he was nevertheless in other respects a child of his age and could not disencumber himself of the current medieval conception of the universe. His general view of the course of human history was not materially different from that of St. Augustine. When he says that the practical object of all knowledge is to assure the safety of the human race, he explains this to mean "things which lead to felicity in the next life." [Footnote: Opus Majus, vii. p. 366.]

It is pertinent to observe that he not only shared in the belief in astrology, which was then universal, but considered it one of the most important parts of "mathematics." It was looked upon with disfavour by the Church as a dangerous study; Bacon defended its use in the interests of the Church itself. He maintained, like Thomas Aquinas, the physiological influence of the celestial bodies, and regarded the planets as signs telling us what God has decreed from eternity to come to pass either by natural processes or by acts of human will or directly at his own good pleasure. Deluges, plagues, and earthquakes were capable of being predicted; political and religious revolutions were set in the starry rubric. The existence of six principal religions was determined by the combinations of Jupiter with the other six planets. Bacon seriously expected the extinction of the Mohammedan religion before the end of the thirteenth century, on the ground of a prediction by an Arab astrologer. [Footnote: Ib. iv. p. 266; vii. p. 389.]

One of the greatest advantages that the study of astrological lore will bring to humanity is that by its means the date of the coming of Anti-Christ may be fixed with certainty, and the Church may be prepared to face the perils and trials of that terrible time. Now the arrival of Anti-Christ meant the end of the world, and Bacon accepted the view, which he says was held by all wise men, that "we are not far from the times of Anti-Christ." Thus the intellectual reforms which he urged would have the effect, and no more, of preparing Christendom to resist more successfully the corruption in which the rule of Anti-Christ would involve the world. "Truth will prevail," by which he meant science will make advances, "though with difficulty, until Anti-Christ and his forerunners appear;" and on his own showing the interval would probably be short.

The frequency with which Bacon recurs to this subject, and the emphasis he lays on it, show that the appearance of Anti-Christ was a fixed point in his mental horizon. When he looked forward into the future, the vision which confronted him was a scene of corruption, tyranny, and struggle under the reign of a barbarous enemy of Christendom; and after that, the end of the world. [Footnote: (1) His coming may be fixed by astrology: Opus Majus, iv. p. 269 (inveniretur sufficiens suspicio vel magis certitudo de tempore Antichristi; cp. p. 402). (2) His coming means the end of the world: ib. p. 262. (3) We are not far from it: ib. p. 402. One of the reasons which seem to have made this view probable to Bacon was the irruption of the Mongols into Europe during his lifetime; cp. p. 268 and vii. p. 234. Another was the prevalent corruption, especially of the clergy, which impressed him deeply; see Compendium studii philosophiae, ed. Brewer, p. 402. (4) "Truth will prevail," etc.: Opus Majus, i. pp. 19, 20. He claimed for experimental science that it would produce inventions which could be usefully employed against Antichrist: ib. vii. p. 221.] It is from this point of view that we must appreciate the observations which he made on the advancement of knowledge. "It is our duty," he says, "to supply what the ancients have left incomplete, because we have entered into their labours, which, unless we are asses, can stimulate us to achieve better results"; Aristotle corrected the errors of earlier thinkers; Avicenna and Averroes have corrected Aristotle in some matters and have added much that is new; and so it will go on till the end of the world. And Bacon quotes passages from Seneca's "Physical Inquiries" to show that the acquisition of knowledge is gradual. Attention has been already called to those passages, and it was shown how perverse it is, on the strength of such remarks, to claim Seneca as a teacher of the doctrine of Progress. The same claim has been made for Bacon with greater confidence, and it is no less perverse. The idea of Progress is glaringly incongruous with his vision of the world. If his programme of revolutionising secular learning had been accepted--it fell completely dead, and his work was forgotten for many ages,--he would have been the author of a progressive reform; but how many reformers have there been before and after Bacon on whose minds the idea of Progress never dawned?

[Footnote: Bacon quotes Seneca: See Opus Majus, i. pp. 37, 55, 14.

Much has been made out of a well-known passage in his short Epistle de secretis operibus artis et naturae et de militate magiae, c. iv. (ed. Brewer, p. 533), in which he is said to PREDICT inventions which have been realised in the locomotives, steam navigation, and aeroplanes of modern times. But Bacon predicts nothing. He is showing that science can invent curious and, to the vulgar, incredible things without the aid of magic. All the inventions which he enumerates have, he declares, been actually made in ancient times, with the exception of a flying-machine (instrumentum volandi quod non vidi nec hominem qui vidisset cognovi, sed sapientem qui hoc artificium excogitavit explere cognosco).

Compare the remarks of S. Vogl, Die Physik Roger Bacos (1906), 98 sqq.]

4.

Thus Friar Bacon's theories of scientific reform, so far from amounting to an anticipation of the idea of Progress, illustrate how impossible it was that this idea could appear in the Middle Ages. The whole spirit of medieval Christianity excluded it. The conceptions which were entertained of the working of divine Providence, the belief that the world, surprised like a sleeping household by a thief in the night, might at any moment come to a sudden end, had the same effect as the Greek theories of the nature of change and of recurring cycles of the world. Or rather, they had a more powerful effect, because they were not reasoned conclusions, but dogmas guaranteed by divine authority. And medieval pessimism as to man's mundane condition was darker and sterner than the pessimism of the Greeks. There was the prospect of happiness in another sphere to compensate, but this, engrossing the imagination, only rendered it less likely that any one should think of speculating about man's destinies on earth.

III

1.

The civilised countries of Europe spent about three hundred years in passing from the mental atmosphere of the Middle Ages into the mental atmosphere of the modern world. These centuries were one of the conspicuously progressive periods in history, but the conditions were not favourable to the appearance of an idea of Progress, though the intellectual milieu was being prepared in which that idea could be born. This progressive period, which is conveniently called the Renaissance, lasted from the fourteenth into the seventeenth century. The great results, significant for our present purpose, which the human mind achieved at this stage of its development were two. Self-confidence was restored to human reason, and life on this planet was recognised as possessing a value independent of any hopes or fears connected with a life beyond the grave.

But in discarding medieval naivete and superstition, in assuming a freer attitude towards theological authority, and in developing a new conception of the value of individual personality, men looked to the guidance of Greek and Roman thinkers, and called up the spirit of the ancient world to exorcise the ghosts of the dark ages. Their minds were thus directed backwards to a past civilisation which, in the ardour of new discovery, and in the reaction against medievalism, they enthroned as ideal; and a new authority was set up, the authority of ancient writers. In general speculation the men of the Renaissance followed the tendencies and adopted many of the prejudices of Greek philosophy. Although some great discoveries, with far-reaching, revolutionary consequences, were made in this period, most active minds were engaged in rediscovering, elaborating, criticising, and imitating what was old. It was not till the closing years of the Renaissance that speculation began to seek and feel its way towards new points of departure. It was not till then that a serious reaction set in against the deeper influences of medieval thought.

2.

To illustrate the limitations of this period let us take Machiavelli, one of the most original thinkers that Italy ever produced.

There are certain fundamental principles underlying Machiavelli's science of politics, which he has indicated incidentally in his unsystematic way, but which are essential to the comprehension of his doctrines. The first is that at all times the world of human beings has been the same, varying indeed from land to land, but always presenting the same aspect of some societies advancing towards prosperity, and others declining. Those which are on the upward grade will always reach a point beyond which they cannot rise further, but they will not remain permanently on this level, they will begin to decline; for human things are always in motion and therefore must go up or down. Similarly, declining states will ultimately touch bottom and then begin to ascend. Thus a good constitution or social organisation can last only for a short time. [Footnote: Machiavelli's principle of advance and decline: Discorsi, ii. Introduction; Istorie fiorentine, v. ad init. For the cycle of constitutions through which all states tend to move see Discorsi, ii. 2 (here we see the influence of Polybius).]

It is obvious that in this view of history Machiavelli was inspired and instructed by the ancients. And it followed from his premisses that the study of the past is of the highest value because it enables men to see what is to come; since to all social events at any period there are correspondences in ancient times. "For these events are due to men, who have and always had the same passions, and therefore of necessity the effects must be the same." [Footnote: Discorsi, iii. 43.]

Again, Machiavelli follows his ancient masters in assuming as evident that a good organisation of society can be effected only by the deliberate design of a wise legislator. [Footnote: Ib. iii. 1. The lawgiver must assume for his purposes that all men are bad: ib. i. 3. Villari has useful remarks on these principles in his Machiavelli,