A few wise reigns.  The Abbe shared the illusion of many that government is omnipotent and can bestow happiness on men.  The imperfections of governments were, he was convinced, chiefly due to the fact that hitherto the ablest intellects had not been dedicated to the study of the science of governing.  The most essential part of his project was the formation of a Political Academy which should do for politics what the Academy of Sciences did for the study of nature, and should act as an advisory body to ministers of state on all questions of the public welfare.  If this proposal and some others were adopted, he believed that the golden age would not long be delayed.  These observations—­hardly more than obiter dicta—­show that Saint-Pierre’s general view of the world was moulded by a conception of civilisation progressing towards a goal of human happiness.  In 1737 he published a special work to explain this conception:  the Observations on the Continuous Progress of Universal Reason.

He recurs to the comparison of the life of collective humanity to that of an individual, and, like Fontenelle and Terrasson, accentuates the point where the analogy fails.  We may regard our race as composed of all the nations that have been and will be—­and assign to it different ages.  For instance, when the race is ten thousand years old a century will be what a single year is in the life of a centenarian.  But there is this prodigious difference.  The mortal man grows old and loses his reason and happiness through the enfeeblement of his bodily machine; whereas the human race, by the perpetual and infinite succession of generations, will find itself at the end of ten thousand years more capable of growing in wisdom and happiness than it was at the end of four thousand.

At present the race is apparently not more than seven or eight thousand years old, and is only “in the infancy of human reason,” compared with what it will be five or six thousand years hence.  And when that stage is reached, it will only have entered on what we may call its first youth, when we consider what it will be when it is a hundred thousand years older still, continually growing in reason and wisdom.

Here we have for the first time, expressed in definite terms, the vista of an immensely long progressive life in front of humanity.  Civilisation is only in its infancy.  Bacon, like Pascal, had conceived it to be in its old age.  Fontenelle and Perrault seem to have regarded it as in its virility; they set no term to its duration, but they did not dwell on future prospects.  The Abbe was the first to fix his eye on the remote destinies of the race and name immense periods of time.  It did not occur to him to consider that our destinies are bound up with those of the solar system, and that it is useless to operate with millennial periods of progress unless you are assured of a corresponding stability in the cosmic environment.