The Idea of Progress

f degeneration had been attacked, and the comparison of the

5).] He and his pedantic book, which breathes the atmosphere of the sixteenth century, are completely forgotten; and though it ran to three editions, it can hardly have attracted the attention of many except theologians. The writer's object is to prove that the power and providence of God in the government of the world are not consistent with t

admiration of antiquity, just because it encourages the opinion of the world's decay. He gives his argument a much wider scope than the French controversialists. For him the field of debate includes not only science, arts, and literature, but physical qualities and mora

riusque labor

it in

ents in poetry, and in almost all other things excel them. [Footnote: Among modern poets equal to the ancients,

fect on human energy. "The opinion of the world's universal decay quails the hopes and blunts the edg

ssors or forward in providing for posterity, but as our predecessors worthily provided, for us, so let our posterity bless us in pro

inks that he is living in the last age of the world; but how long it shall last is a question which cannot be resolved, "it being one of those secrets which the Almighty hath locked up in the cabinet of His own counsel." Yet he consoles himself and his readers with a consideration which suggests that the end is not yet very near. [Footnote

ilisation may be cut off at any moment by a fiat of the Deity, less calculated to "quail the hopes and blunt the edge of men's endeavours?" Hakewill asserted with confidence that the universe will

thesis of history which he attempts is equivalent to theirs. He describes the history of knowledge and arts, and all things besides, as exhibiting "a kind of circular progress," by which he means that they have a birth, growth, nourishing, failing and fading, and then within a while after a resurrection and reflourishing. [Footnote: Book iii. chap. 6, Section i, p. 259.] In this method of progress the lamp of learning passed from one people to

partial impeachment of ancient manners and morals. Unjust and unconvincing though his arguments are, and inspired by theological motives, his thesis nevertheless deserves to be noted as an assertion of the progress of man in social morality. Bacon, and the thinkers of the seventeenth cent