aim is the augmentation of our happiness.  But there are two other sciences which are much more important for the promotion of happiness—­Ethics and Politics—­and these, neglected by men of genius, have made little way in the course of two thousand years.  It is a grave misfortune that Descartes and Newton did not devote themselves to perfecting these sciences, so incomparably more useful for mankind than those in which they made their great discoveries.  They fell into a prevailing error as to the comparative values of the various domains of knowledge, an error to which we must also ascribe the fact that while Academies of Sciences and Belles-Lettres exist there are no such institutions for Politics or Ethics.

By these arguments he establishes to his own satisfaction that there are no irremovable obstacles to the Progress of the human race towards happiness, no hindrances that could not be overcome if governments only saw eye to eye with the Abbe de Saint-Pierre.  Superstition is already on the decline; there would be no more wars if his simple scheme for permanent peace were adopted.  Let the State immediately found Political and Ethical Academies; let the ablest men consecrate their talents to the science of government; and in a hundred years we shall make more progress than we should make in two thousand at the rate we are moving.  If these things are done, human reason will have advanced so far in two or three millenniums that the wisest men of that age will be as far superior to the wisest of to-day as these are to the wisest African savages.  This “perpetual and unlimited augmentation of reason” will one day produce an increase in human happiness which would astonish us more than our own civilisation would astonish the Kaffirs.

4.

The Abbe de Saint-Pierre was indeed terribly at ease in confronting the deepest and most complex problems which challenge the intellect of man.  He had no notion of their depth and complexity, and he lightly essayed them, treating human nature, as if it were an abstraction, by a method which he would doubtless have described as Cartesian.  He was simply operating with the ideas which were all round him in a society saturated with Cartesianism,—­supremacy of human reason, progressive enlightenment, the value of this life for its own sake, and the standard of utility.  Given these ideas and the particular bias of his own mind, it required no great ingenuity to advance from the thought of the progress of science to the thought of progress in man’s moral nature and his social conditions.  The omnipotence of governments to mould the destinies of peoples, the possibility of the creation of enlightened governments, and the indefinite progress of enlightenment—­all articles of his belief—­ were the terms of an argument of the sorites form, which it was a simple matter to develop in his brief treatise.