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--