During the Renaissance period the authority of the Greeks and Romans had been supreme in the realm of thought, and in the interest of further free development it was necessary that this authority should be weakened.  Bacon and others had begun the movement to break down this tyranny, but the influence of Descartes was weightier and more decisive, and his attitude was more uncompromising.  He had none of Bacon’s reverence for classical literature; he was proud of having forgotten the Greek which he had learned as a boy.  The inspiration of his work was the idea of breaking sharply and completely with the past, and constructing a system which borrows nothing from the dead.  He looked forward to an advancement of knowledge in the future, on the basis of his own method and his own discoveries, [Footnote:  Cf. for instance his remarks on medicine, at the end of the Discours de la methode.] and he conceived that this intellectual advance would have far-reaching effects on the condition of mankind.  The first title he had proposed to give to his Discourse on Method was “The Project of a Universal Science which can elevate our Nature to its highest degree of Perfection.”  He regarded moral and material improvement as depending on philosophy and science.

The justification of an independent attitude towards antiquity, on the ground that the world is now older and more mature, was becoming a current view. [Footnote:  Descartes wrote:  Non est quod antiquis multum tribuamus propter antiquitatem, sed nos potius iis seniores dicendi.  Jam enim senior est mundus quam tune majoremque habemus rerum experientiam. (A fragment quoted by Baillet, Vie de Descartes, viii. 10.) Passages to the same effect occur in Malebranche, Arnauld, and Nicole. (See Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartesienne, i. 482-3.)

A passage in La Mothe Le Vayer’s essay Sur l’opiniatrete in Orasius Tubero (ii. 218) is in point, if, as seems probable, the date of that work is 1632-33.  “Some defer to the ancients and allow themselves to be led by them like children; others hold that the ancients lived in the youth of the world, and it is those who live to-day who are really the ancients, and consequently ought to carry most weight.”  See Rigault, Histoire de la querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, p. 52.

The passage of Pascal occurs in the Fragment d’un traite du vide, not published till 1779 (now included in the Pensees, Premiere Partie, Art.  I), and therefore without influence on the origination of the theory of progress.  It has been pointed out that Guillaume Colletet had in 1636 expressed a similar view (Brunetiere, Etudes critiques, v. 185-6).]