the ground that the world is now older and more mature, was becoming
a current view. [Footnote: Descartes wrote: Non est quod antiquis
multum tribuamus propter antiquitatem, sed nos potius iis seniores
dicendi. Jam enim senior est mundus quam tune majoremque habemus
rerum experientiam. (A fragment quoted by Baillet, Vie de Descartes,
viii. 10.) Passages to the same effect occur in Malebranche,
Arnauld, and Nicole. (See Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie
cartesienne, i. 482-3.)

A passage in La Mothe Le Vayer's essay Sur l'opiniatrete in Orasius
Tubero (ii. 218) is in point, if, as seems probable, the date of
that work is 1632-33. "Some defer to the ancients and allow
themselves to be led by them like children; others hold that the
ancients lived in the youth of the world, and it is those who live
to-day who are really the ancients, and consequently ought to carry
most weight." See Rigault, Histoire de la querelle des Anciens et
des Modernes, p. 52.

The passage of Pascal occurs in the Fragment d'un traite du vide,
not published till 1779 (now included in the Pensees, Premiere
Partie, Art. I), and therefore without influence on the origination
of the theory of progress. It has been pointed out that Guillaume
Colletet had in 1636 expressed a similar view (Brunetiere, Etudes
critiques, v. 185-6).]

Descartes expressed it like Bacon, and it was taken up and repeated
by many whom Descartes influenced. Pascal, who till 1654 was a man
of science and a convert to Cartesian ideas, put it in a striking
way. The whole sequence of men (he says) during so many centuries
should be considered as a single man, continually existing and