It was well to be assured that nature is not decaying or man degenerating.  But was the doctrine that the end of the world does not “depend upon the law of nature,” and that the growth of human civilisation may be cut off at any moment by a fiat of the Deity, less calculated to “quail the hopes and blunt the edge of men’s endeavours?” Hakewill asserted with confidence that the universe will be suddenly wrecked by fire.  Una dies dabit exitio.  Was the prospect of an arrest which might come the day after to-morrow likely to induce men to exert themselves to make provision for posterity?

The significance of Hakewill lies in the fact that he made the current theory of degeneration, which stood in the way of all possible theories of progress, the object of a special inquiry.  And his book illustrates the close connection between that theory and the dispute over the Ancients and Moderns.  It cannot be said that he has added anything valuable to what may be found in Bodin and Bacon on the development of civilisation.  The general synthesis of history which he attempts is equivalent to theirs.  He describes the history of knowledge and arts, and all things besides, as exhibiting “a kind of circular progress,” by which he means that they have a birth, growth, nourishing, failing and fading, and then within a while after a resurrection and reflourishing. [Footnote:  Book iii. chap. 6, Section i, p. 259.] In this method of progress the lamp of learning passed from one people to another.  It passed from the Orientals (Chaldeans and Egyptians) to the Greeks; when it was nearly extinguished in Greece it began to shine afresh among the Romans; and having been put out by the barbarians for the space of a thousand years it was relit by Petrarch and his contemporaries.  In stating this view of “circular progress,” Hakewill comes perilously near to the doctrine of Ricorsi or Returns which had been severely denounced by Bacon.

In one point indeed Hakewill goes far beyond Bodin.  It was suggested, as we saw, by the French thinker that in some respects the modern age is superior in conduct and morals to antiquity, but he said little on the matter.  Hakewill develops the suggestion at great length into a severe and partial impeachment of ancient manners and morals.  Unjust and unconvincing though his arguments are, and inspired by theological motives, his thesis nevertheless deserves to be noted as an assertion of the progress of man in social morality.  Bacon, and the thinkers of the seventeenth century generally, confined their views of progress in the past to the intellectual field.  Hakewill, though he overshot the mark and said nothing actually worth remembering, nevertheless anticipated the larger problem of social progress which was to come to the front in the eighteenth century.

4.