These are some of the leading features of the ideal future to which Mercier’s imagination reached.  He did not put it forward as a final term.  Later ages, he said, will go further, for “where can the perfectibility of man stop, armed with geometry and the mechanical arts and chemistry?” But in his scanty prophecies of what science might effect he showed curiously little resource.  The truth is that this had not much interest for him, and he did not see that scientific discoveries might transmute social conditions.  The world of 2440, its intolerably docile and virtuous society, reflects two capital weaknesses in the speculation of the Encyclopaedist period:  a failure to allow for the strength of human passions and interests, and a deficient appreciation of the meaning of liberty.  Much as the reformers acclaimed and fought for toleration, they did not generally comprehend the value of the principle.  They did not see that in a society organised and governed by Reason and Justice themselves, the unreserved toleration of false opinions would be the only palladium of progress; or that a doctrinaire State, composed of perfectly virtuous and deferential people, would arrest development and stifle origiality, by its ungenial if mild tyranny.  Mercier’s is no exception to the rule that ideal societies are always repellent; and there are probably few who would not rather be set down in Athens in the days of the “vile” Aristophanes, whose works Mercier condemned to the flames, than in his Paris of 2440.

4.

That Bohemian man of letters, Restif de la Bretonne, whose unedifying novels the Parisians of 2440 would assuredly have rejected from their libraries, published in 1790 a heroic comedy representing how marriages would be arranged in “the year 2000,” by which epoch he conceived that all social equalities would have disappeared in a fraternal society and twenty nations be allied to France under the wise supremacy of “our well-beloved monarch Louis Francois XXII.”  It was the Revolution that converted Restif to the conception of Progress, for hitherto his master had been Rousseau; but it can hardly be doubted that the motif and title of his play were suggested by the romance of Mercier.  L’an 2440 and L’an 2000 are the first examples of the prophetic fiction which Mr. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward was to popularise a hundred years later.

The Count de Volney’s Ruins was another popular presentation of the hopes which the theory of Progress had awakened in France.  Although the work was not published till after the outbreak of the Revolution, [Footnote:  Les Ruines des empires, 1789.  An English translation ran to a second edition (1795).] the plan had been conceived some years before.  Volney was a traveller, deeply interested in oriental and classical antiquities, and, like Louis Le Roy, he approached the problem of man’s destinies from the point of view of a student of the revolutions of empires.