As a test of the progress which reason has already made, Saint-Pierre asserts that a comparison of the best English and French works on morals and politics with the best works of Plato and Aristotle proves that the human race has made a sensible advance.  But that advance would have been infinitely greater were it not that three general obstacles retarded it and even, at some times and in some countries, caused a retrogression.  These obstacles were wars, superstition, and the Jealousy of rulers who feared that progress in the science of politics would be dangerous to themselves.  In consequence of these impediments it was only in the time of Bodin and Bacon that the human race began to start anew from the point which it had reached in the days of Plato and Aristotle.

Since then the rate of progress has been accelerated, and this has been due to several causes.  The expansion of sea commerce has produced more wealth, and wealth means greater leisure, and more writers and readers.  In the second place, mathematics and physics are more studied in colleges, and their tendency is to liberate us from subjection to the authority of the ancients.  Again, the foundation of scientific Academies has given facilities both for communicating and for correcting new discoveries; the art of printing provides a means for diffusing them; and, finally, the habit of writing in the vulgar tongue makes them accessible.  The author might also have referred to the modern efforts to popularise science, in which his friend Fontenelle had been one of the leaders.

He proceeds, in this connection, to lay down a rather doubtful principle, that in any two countries the difference in enlightenment between the lowest classes will correspond to the difference between the most highly educated classes.  At present, he says, Paris and London are the places where human wisdom has reached the most advanced stage.  It is certain that the ten best men of the highest class at Ispahan or Constantinople will be inferior in their knowledge of politics and ethics to the ten most distinguished sages of Paris or London.  And this will be true in all classes.  The thirty most intelligent children of the age of fourteen at Paris will be more enlightened than the thirty most intelligent children of the same age at Constantinople, and the same proportional difference will be true of the lowest classes of the two cities.

But while the progress of speculative reason has been rapid, practical reason—­the distinction is the Abbe’s—­has made little advance.  In point of morals and general happiness the world is apparently much the same as ever.  Our mediocre savants know twenty times as much as Socrates and Confucius, but our most virtuous men are not more virtuous than they.  The growth of science has added much to the arts and conveniences of life, and to the sum of pleasures, and will add more.  The progress in physical science is part of the progress of the “universal human reason,” whose