In France, as we saw, the theory of Progress was generally associated with ethical views which could find a metaphysical basis in the sensationalism of Locke.  A moral system which might be built on sensation, as the primary mental fact, was worked out by Helvetius.  But the principle that the supreme law of conduct is to obey nature had come down as a practical philosophy from Rabelais and Montaigne through Moliere to the eighteenth century.  It was reinforced by the theory of the natural goodness of man.  Jansenism had struggled against it and was defeated.  After theology it was the turn of metaphysics.  Kant’s moral imperative marked the next stage in the conflict of the two opposite tendencies which seek natural and ultra-natural sanctions for morality.

Hence the idea of progress had a different significance for Kant and for its French exponents, though his particular view of the future possibly in store for the human species coincided in some essential points with theirs.  But his theory of life gives a different atmosphere to the idea.  In France the atmosphere is emphatically eudaemonic; happiness is the goal.  Kant is an uncompromising opponent of eudaemonism.  “If we take enjoyment or happiness as the measure, it is easy,” he says, “to evaluate life.  Its value is less than nothing.  For who would begin one’s life again in the same conditions, or even in new natural conditions, if one could choose them oneself, but of which enjoyment would be the sole end?”

There was, in fact, a strongly-marked vein of pessimism in Kant.  One of the ablest men of the younger generation who were brought up on his system founded the philosophical pessimism—­very different in range and depth from the sentimental pessimism of Rousseau—­which was to play a remarkable part in German thought in the nineteenth century. [Footnote:  Kant’s pessimism has been studied at length by von Hartmann, in Zur Geschichte und Begrundung des Pessimismus (1880).] Schopenhauer’s unpleasant conclusion that of all conceivable worlds this is the worst, is one of the speculations for which Kant may be held ultimately responsible. [Footnote:  Schopenhauer recognised progress social, economic, and political, but as a fact that contains no guarantee of happiness; on the contrary, the development of the intelligence increases suffering.  He ridiculed the optimistic ideals of comfortable, well-regulated states.  His views on historical development have been collected by G. Sparlinsky, Schopenhauers Verhaltnis zur Geschichte, in Berner Studien s.  Philosophie, Bd. lxxii. (1910).]

4.