The Idea of Progress

cipal Facts of History from Charlemagne to the Death of Louis XIII. The former work, which everybody reads still, appeared in 1751. Parts of the Essay, which has long since fallen into neglect, were

rica are included in the survey, Voltaire's work amounts to a complete survey of the civilisation of the world from the earliest times to his own. If Montesquieu fou

he same way he proposed in the Essay to trace "l'histoire de l'esprit humain," not the details of facts, and to show by what steps man advanced "from the barbarous rusticity" of the times of Charlemagne and his successors "to the politeness of our own." To do this, he said, was real

reat obstacles to the progress of humanity, and that if they were abolishe

vils which have afflicted men, prejudices, which are not their least scourge, will gradually disappear among all those who govern nations, an

is considered view. His common sense prevented him from indulging in Utopian speculations about the future; and his cynicism constantly led him to use the language of a pessimist. But at an early stage of his career he had taken up arms for human nature against that "sublime misanthrope" Pascal, who "writes against human nature almost as he wrote against the Jesuits"; and he returned to the attack at the end of his life. Now Pascal's Pensees enshrined a theory

ps que ce si

to-day is infinitely preferable

rais ou la mou

nt le triste

ne brillaient

s pour cela

it l'industrie

? c'etait pu

universal; it related only to four or five peoples, and especially the little Jewish nation which "was unknown to the rest of the world or justly despised," but which Bossuet made the centre of interest, as if the final cause of all the great empires of antiquity lay in their r

cerned himself only with the causal enchainment of events and the immediate motives of men. His interpretation of history was confined to the discovery of particular causes; he did not consider the operation of those larger general causes which Montesquieu investigated. Montesquieu sought to show that the vicissitudes of societies

cession of religions, the revolutions of states, and most of the great crises of history were decided by accidents, is there any cogent ground for believing that human reason, the principle to which Voltaire attributes the advance of civilisation, will prevail in the long run? Civilisation has been organised here and there, now and then, up to a certain point; there have been eras of rapid progress, but how can we be sure t

Progress, questions which belong to what was soon to be known as the Philosophy of History, a