Descartes expressed it like Bacon, and it was taken up and repeated by many whom Descartes influenced.  Pascal, who till 1654 was a man of science and a convert to Cartesian ideas, put it in a striking way.  The whole sequence of men (he says) during so many centuries should be considered as a single man, continually existing and continually learning.  At each stage of his life this universal man profited by the knowledge he had acquired in the preceding stages, and he is now in his old age.  This is a fuller, and probably an independent, development of the comparison of the race to an individual which we found in Bacon.  It occurs in a fragment which remained unpublished for more than a hundred years, and is often quoted as a recognition, not of a general progress of man, but of a progress in human knowledge.

To those who reproached Descartes with disrespect towards ancient thinkers he might have replied that, in repudiating their authority, he was really paying them the compliment of imitation and acting far more in their own spirit than those who slavishly followed them.  Pascal saw this point.  “What can be more unjust,” he wrote, “than to treat our ancients with greater consideration than they showed towards their own predecessors, and to have for them this incredible respect which they deserve from us only because they entertained no such regard for those who had the same advantage (of antiquity) over them?” [Footnote:  Pensees, ib.]

At the same time Pascal recognised that we are indebted to the ancients for our very superiority to them in the extent of our knowledge.  “They reached a certain point, and the slightest effort enables us to mount higher; so that we find ourselves on a loftier plane with less trouble and less glory.”  The attitude of Descartes was very different.  Aspiring to begin ab integro and reform the foundations of knowledge, he ignored or made little of what had been achieved in the past.  He attempted to cut the threads of continuity as with the shears of Atropos.  This illusion [Footnote:  He may be reproached himself with scholasticism in his metaphysical reasoning.] hindered him from stating a doctrine of the progress of knowledge as otherwise he might have done.  For any such doctrine must take account of the past as well as of the future.

But a theory of progress was to grow out of his philosophy, though he did not construct it.  It was to be developed by men who were imbued with the Cartesian spirit.

3.

The theological world in France was at first divided on the question whether the system of Descartes could be reconciled with orthodoxy or not.  The Jesuits said no, the Fathers of the Oratory said yes.  The Jansenists of Port Royal were enthusiastic Cartesians.  Yet it was probably the influence of the great spiritual force of Jansenism that did most to check the immediate spread of Cartesian ideas.  It was preponderant in France for fifty years.  The date of the Discourse