But the idea of Progress is there, though moderately conceived.

And it is based on the same principle--universal reason implanted in man, which "subsists in spite of all the passions which make war on it, in spite of all the tyrants who would drown it in blood, in spite of the imposters who would annihilate it by superstition." And this was certainly his considered view.

His common sense prevented him from indulging in Utopian speculations about the future; and his cynicism constantly led him to use the language of a pessimist.

But at an early stage of his career he had taken up arms for human nature against that "sublime misanthrope" Pascal, who "writes against human nature almost as he wrote against the Jesuits"; and he returned to the attack at the end of his life.

Now Pascal's Pensees enshrined a theory of life--the doctrine of original sin, the idea that the object of life is to prepare for death--which was sternly opposed to the spirit of Progress.