But progress must not only be conceived as extending indefinitely into the future; it must also be conceived as necessary and certain.  This is the second essential feature of the theory.  The theory would have little value or significance, if the prospect of progress in the future depended on chance or the unpredictable discretion of an external will.  Fontenelle asserts implicitly the certainty of progress when he declares that the discoveries and improvements of the modern age would have been made by the ancients if they exchanged places with the moderns; for this amounts to saying that science will progress and knowledge increase independently of particular individuals.  If Descartes had not been born, some one else would have done his work; and there could have been no Descartes before the seventeenth century.  For, as he says in a later work, [Footnote:  Preface des elemens de la geometrie de l’infini (OEuvres, x. p. 40, ed. 1790).] “there is an order which regulates our progress.  Every science develops after a certain number of preceding sciences have developed, and only then; it has to await its turn to burst its shell.”

Fontenelle, then, was the first to formulate the idea of the progress, of knowledge, as a complete doctrine.  At the moment the import and far-reaching effects of the idea were not realised, either by himself or by others, and his pamphlet, which appeared in the company of a perverse theory of pastoral poetry, was acclaimed merely as an able defence of the Moderns.

8.

If the theory of the indefinite progress of knowledge is true, it is one of those truths which were originally established by false reasoning.  It was established on a principle which excluded degeneration, but equally excluded evolution; and the whole conception of nature which Fontenelle had learned from Descartes is long since dead and buried.

But it is more important to observe that this principle, which seemed to secure the indefinite progress of knowledge, disabled Fontenelle from suggesting a theory of the progress of society.  The invariability of nature, as he conceived it, was true of the emotions and the will, as well as of the intellect.  It implied that man himself would be psychically always the same—­unalterable, incurable.  L’ordre general de la Nature a Fair bien constant.  His opinion of the human race was expressed in the Dialogues of the Dead, [Footnote:  It may be seen too in the Plurality of Worlds.] and it never seems to have varied.  The world consists of a multitude of fools, and a mere handful of reasonable men.  Men’s passions will always be the same and will produce wars in the future as in the past.  Civilisation makes no difference; it is little more than a veneer.