“How many new animals have we first come to know in the present age?  In time to come men will know much that is unknown to us.  Many discoveries are reserved for future ages, when our memory will have faded from men’s minds.  We imagine ourselves initiated in the secrets of nature; we are standing on the threshold of her temple.”

[Footnote:  The quotations from Seneca will be found in Naturales Quaestiones, vii. 25 and 31.  See also Epist. 64.  Seneca implies continuity in scientific research.  Aristotle had stated this expressly, pointing out that we are indebted not only to the author of the philosophical theory which we accept as true, but also to the predecessors whose views it has superseded (Metaphysics, i. ii. chap. 1).  But he seems to consider his own system as final.]

But these predictions are far from showing that Seneca had the least inkling of a doctrine of the Progress of humanity.  Such a doctrine is sharply excluded by the principles of his philosophy and his profoundly pessimistic view of human affairs.  Immediately after the passage which I have quoted he goes on to enlarge on the progress of vice.  “Are you surprised to be told that human knowledge has not yet completed its whole task?  Why, human wickedness has not yet fully developed.”

Yet, at least, it may be said, Seneca believed in a progress of knowledge and recognised its value.  Yes, but the value which he attributed to it did not lie in any advantages which it would bring to the general community of mankind.  He did not expect from it any improvement of the world.  The value of natural science, from his point of view, was this, that it opened to the philosopher a divine region, in which, “wandering among the stars,” he could laugh at the earth and all its riches, and his mind “delivered as it were from prison could return to its original home.”  In other words, its value lay not in its results, but simply in the intellectual activity; and therefore it concerned not mankind at large but a few chosen individuals who, doomed to live in a miserable world, could thus deliver their souls from slavery.

For Seneca’s belief in the theory of degeneration and the hopeless corruption of the race is uncompromising.  Human life on the earth is periodically destroyed, alternately by fire and flood; and each period begins with a golden age in which men live in rude simplicity, innocent because they are ignorant not because they are wise.  When they degenerate from this state, arts and inventions promote deterioration by ministering to luxury and vice.

Interesting, then, as Seneca’s observations on the prospect of some future scientific discoveries are, and they are unique in ancient literature, [Footnote:  They are general and definite.  This distinguishes them, for instance, from Plato’s incidental hint in the Republic as to the prospect of the future development of solid geometry.] they were far from adumbrating a doctrine of the Progress of man.  For him, as