had imagined. The Marquise, in the Plurality of Worlds, reacts to
the startling illumination: "Voila l'univers si grand que je m'y
perds, je ne sais plus ou je suis; je ne suis plus rien.--La terre
est si effroyablement petite!"

Such a revolution in cosmic values could not fail to exert a
penetrating influence on human thought. The privileged position of
the earth had been a capital feature of the whole doctrine, as to
the universe and man's destinies, which had been taught by the
Church, and it had made that doctrine more specious than it might
otherwise have seemed. Though the Churches could reform their
teaching to meet the new situation, the fact remained that the
Christian scheme sounded less plausible when the central importance
of the human race was shown to be an illusion. Would man, stripped
of his cosmic pretensions, and finding himself lost in the
immensities of space, invent a more modest theory of his destinies
confined to his own little earth--si effroyablement petite? The
eighteenth century answered this question by the theory of Progress.

10.

Fontenelle is one of the most representative thinkers of that
period--we have no distinguishing name for it--which lies between
the characteristic thinkers of the seventeenth century and the
characteristic thinkers of the eighteenth. It is a period of over
sixty years, beginning about 1680, for though Montesquieu and
Voltaire were writing long before 1740, the great influential works
of the "age of illumination" begin with the Esprit des lois in 1748.
The intellectual task of this intervening period was to turn to
account the ideas provided by the philosophy of Descartes, and use