"Read the journals of France and England," he says, "and glance at the publications of the Academies of these great kingdoms, and you will be convinced that within the last twenty or thirty years more discoveries have been made in natural science than throughout the period of learned antiquity.

I own that I consider myself fortunate to know the happiness we enjoy; it is a great pleasure to survey all the past ages in which I can see the birth and the progress of all things, but nothing which has not received a new increase and lustre in our own times.

Our age has, in some sort, arrived at the summit of perfection.

And since for some years the rate of the progress is much slower and appears almost insensible--as the days seem to cease lengthening when the solstice is near--it is pleasant to think that probably there are not many things for which we need envy future generations." Indifference to the future, or even a certain scepticism about it, is the note of this passage, and accords with the view that the world has reached its old age.

The idea of the progress of knowledge, which Perrault expounds, is still incomplete.
3.
Independently of this development in France, the doctrine of degeneration had been attacked, and the comparison of the ancients with the moderns incidentally raised, in England.
A divine named George Hakewill published in 1627 a folio of six hundred pages to confute "the common error touching Nature's perpetual and universal decay." [Footnote: An Apologie or Declaration of the Power and Providence of God in the Government of the World, consisting in an Examination and Censure of the common Errour, etc.