increase knowledge by the institution of the Royal Society at
London, the Academy of Sciences at Paris, Observatories--realising
Bacon's Atlantic dream--characterise the opening of a new era.

For the ideas with which we are concerned, the seventeenth century
centres round Descartes, whom an English admirer described as "the
grand secretary of Nature." [Footnote: Joseph Glanvill, Vanity of
Dogmatising, p. 211, 64] Though his brilliant mathematical
discoveries were the sole permanent contribution he made to
knowledge, though his metaphysical and physical systems are only of
historical interest, his genius exercised a more extensive and
transforming influence on the future development of thought than any
other man of his century.

Cartesianism affirmed the two positive axioms of the supremacy of
reason, and the invariability of the laws of nature; and its
instrument was a new rigorous analytical method, which was
applicable to history as well as to physical knowledge. The axioms
had destructive corollaries. The immutability of the processes of
nature collided with the theory of an active Providence. The
supremacy of reason shook the thrones from which authority and
tradition had tyrannised over the brains of men. Cartesianism was
equivalent to a declaration of the Independence of Man.

It was in the atmosphere of the Cartesian spirit that a theory of
Progress was to take shape.

1.

Let us look back. We saw that all the remarks of philosophers prior