THE RENAISSANCE 149 



England, at any rate, we can almost circumscribe the 

 portions of the nation, geographical and social, that 

 ministered chiefly to the success of the whole move- 

 ment. Thus we lose confidence in the idea of any 

 general regeneration - of the race by artificial means 

 working from the outside, and recognize that there is 

 some more fundamental, more elusive principle at 

 the bottom of success or failure in scientific discovery 

 as in all the other various walks of life. 



It is difficult to realize that in the eighteenth century 

 the idea of progress, still unproven perhaps, but 

 familiar to ourselves, was strange and new. Scattered 

 traces of the doctrine of the sustained and progressive 

 advance of mankind are found in history " from 

 Lucretius and Seneca to Pascal and Leibniz," but its 

 first clear exponent seems to have been Turgot. When 

 combined with the ideas of Rousseau about the 

 natural equality of men, it did much to prepare the 

 atmosphere of the French Revolution. It led to the 

 conclusion, equally far from truth, that given favourable 

 circumstances the people in the mass would prove 

 necessarily as sincere, incorrupt, true and infallible 

 as their greatest men a conclusion indeed as old as 

 Alcuin, though now first provided with a basis, demon- 

 strably false to us, but convincing to certain minds 

 in that age. 



' The reign of reason," and the pathetic follies to 

 which it led, are the real and tragic end of the period 

 which began with the bright hopes of the Renaissance. 

 After the French Revolution, we enter a new 

 scientific age, which starts with the advantage of one 

 more great disillusion, and a fresh determination on 

 the part of the leaders of thought, as far as may be, 



