" But in the
revival of learning the old eclipsed truth reappeared, and in
the first part of the seventeenth century we find that, among
the crimes for which Vanini was sentenced at Toulouse to have
his tongue torn out and to be burned alive, was his belief that
there is a gradation extending upward from the lowest to the
highest form of created beings.
Yet, in the same century, the writings of Bodin, Bacon,
Descartes, and Pascal were evidently undermining the old idea of
"the Fall." Bodin especially, brilliant as were his services to
orthodoxy, argued lucidly against the doctrine of general human
deterioration.
Early in the eighteenth century Vico presented the philosophy of
history as an upward movement of man out of animalism and
barbarism. This idea took firm hold upon human thought, and in
the following centuries such men as Lessing and Turgot gave new
force to it.
The investigations of the last forty years have shown that
Lucretius and Horace were inspired prophets: what they saw by
the exercise of reason illumined by poetic genius, has been now
thoroughly based upon facts carefully ascertained and
arranged--until Thomsen and Nilsson, the northern
archaeologists, have brought these prophecies to evident
fulfilment, by presenting a scientific classification dividing
the age of prehistoric man in various parts of the world between
an old stone period, a new stone period, a period of beaten
copper, a period of bronze, and a period of iron, and arraying
vast masses of facts from all parts of the world, fitting
thoroughly into each other, strengthening each other, and
showing beyond a doubt that, instead of a _fall_, there has been
a _rise_ of man, from the earliest indications in the Quaternary,
or even, possibly, in the Tertiary period.
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