From his point of view, an “old age” of humanity, which if it meant anything meant decay as well as the wisdom of experience, was contrary to the principle of the permanence of natural forces.  Man, he asserts, will have no old age.  He will be always equally capable, of achieving the successes of his youth; and he will become more and more expert in the things which become the age of virility.  Or “to drop metaphor, men will never degenerate.”  In ages to come we may be regarded—­say in America—­with the same excess of admiration with which we regard the ancients.  We might push the prediction further.  In still later ages the interval of time which divides us from the Greeks and Romans will appear so relatively small to posterity that they will classify us and the ancients as virtually contemporary; just in the same way as we group together the Greeks and Romans, though the Romans in their own day were moderns in relation to the Greeks.  In that remote period men will be able to judge without prejudice the comparative merits of Sophocles and Corneille.

Unreasonable admiration for the ancients is one of the chief obstacles to progress (le progres des choses).  Philosophy not only did not advance, but even fell into an abyss of unintelligible ideas, because, through devotion to the authority of Aristotle, men sought truth in his enigmatic writings instead of seeking it in nature.  If the authority of Descartes were ever to have the same fortune, the results would be no less disastrous.

7.

This memorable brochure exhibits, without pedantry, perspicuous arrangement and the “geometrical” precision on which Fontenelle remarked as one of the notes of the new epoch introduced by Descartes.  It displays too the author’s open-mindedness, and his readiness to follow where the argument leads.  He is able already to look beyond Cartesianism; he knows that it cannot be final.  No man of his time was more open-minded and free from prejudice than Fontenelle.  This quality of mind helped him to turn his eyes to the future.  Perrault and his predecessors were absorbed in the interest of the present and the past.  Descartes was too much engaged in his own original discoveries to do more than throw a passing glance at posterity.

Now the prospect of the future was one of the two elements which were still needed to fashion the theory of the progress of knowledge.  All the conditions for such a theory were present.  Bodin and Bacon, Descartes and the champions of the Moderns—­the reaction against the Renaissance, and the startling discoveries of science—­ had prepared the way; progress was established for the past and present.  But the theory of the progress of knowledge includes and acquires its value by including the indefinite future.  This step was taken by Fontenelle.  The idea had been almost excluded by Bacon’s misleading metaphor of old age, which Fontenelle expressly rejects.  Man will have no old age; his intellect will never degenerate; and “the sound views of intellectual men in successive generations will continually add up.”