know it.  Is it easier to penetrate the secrets of the human heart than the secrets of nature, or will it take less time?  We are always making new discoveries about its passions and desires.  To take only the tragedies of Corneille you will find there finer and more delicate reflections on ambition, vengeance, and jealousy than in all the books of antiquity.  At the close of his Parallel, however, Perrault, while he declares the general superiority of the moderns, makes a reservation in regard to poetry and eloquence “for the sake of peace.”

The discussion of Perrault falls far short of embodying a full idea of Progress.  Not only is he exclusively concerned with progress in knowledge—­though he implies, indeed, without developing, the doctrine that happiness depends on knowledge—­but he has no eyes for the future, and no interest in it.  He is so impressed with the advance of knowledge in the recent past that he is almost incapable of imagining further progression.  “Read the journals of France and England,” he says, “and glance at the publications of the Academies of these great kingdoms, and you will be convinced that within the last twenty or thirty years more discoveries have been made in natural science than throughout the period of learned antiquity.  I own that I consider myself fortunate to know the happiness we enjoy; it is a great pleasure to survey all the past ages in which I can see the birth and the progress of all things, but nothing which has not received a new increase and lustre in our own times.  Our age has, in some sort, arrived at the summit of perfection.  And since for some years the rate of the progress is much slower and appears almost insensible—­as the days seem to cease lengthening when the solstice is near—­it is pleasant to think that probably there are not many things for which we need envy future generations.”

Indifference to the future, or even a certain scepticism about it, is the note of this passage, and accords with the view that the world has reached its old age.  The idea of the progress of knowledge, which Perrault expounds, is still incomplete.

3.

Independently of this development in France, the doctrine of degeneration had been attacked, and the comparison of the ancients with the moderns incidentally raised, in England.

A divine named George Hakewill published in 1627 a folio of six hundred pages to confute “the common error touching Nature’s perpetual and universal decay.” [Footnote:  An Apologie or Declaration of the Power and Providence of God in the Government of the World, consisting in an Examination and Censure of the common Errour, etc. (1627, 1630, 1635).] He and his pedantic book, which breathes the atmosphere of the sixteenth century, are completely forgotten; and though it ran to three editions, it can hardly have attracted the attention of many except theologians.  The writer’s object is to prove that the power and providence of God in the government of the world are not consistent with the current view that the physical universe, the heavens and the elements, are undergoing a process of decay, and that man is degenerating physically, mentally, and morally.  His arguments in general are futile as well as tedious.  But he has profited by reading Bodin and Bacon, whose ideas, it would appear, were already agitating theological minds.