not work out any “law” of progress, although he believed progress to be a law of the universe, in general, and an undeniable truth in regard to the life-history of mankind. [1] He was ultimately imprisoned and driven to suicide. Later, his friend Cabanis upheld a similarly optimistic view, and endeavoured to argue for it, against the Traditionalists, who we may remember endeavoured to restate Catholicism, and to make an appeal to those whom the events of the Revolution had disturbed and disillusioned. The outcome of the Terror had somewhat shaken the belief in a straightforward progress, but enthusiastic exponents of the doctrine were neither lacking nor silent. Madame de Staël continued the thought of Condorcet, thus forming a link between him and Saint-Simon and Comte. The influence of the Traditionalists and the general current of thought and literature known as Romanticism, helped also to solve a difficulty which distinguishes Condorcet from Comte. This difficulty lay in the eighteenth-century attitude to the Middle Ages, which Condorcet had accepted, and which seriously damaged his thesis of general progress, for in the eighteenth century the Middle Ages were looked upon as a black, dark regress, for which no thinker had a good word to say. The change of view is seen most markedly when we come to Comte, whose admiration of the Middle Ages is a conspicuous feature of his work. While, however, Saint-Simon and Comte were working out their ideas, great popularity was given to the belief in progress by the influence of Cousin, Jouffroy, Guizot, and by Michelet’s translation of the _Scienza nuova_ of the Italian thinker Vico, a book then a century old but practically unknown in France. For Cousin, the world process was a result of a necessary evolution of thought, which he conceived in rather Hegelian fashion. Jouffroy agreed with this fatal progress, although he endeavoured to reconcile it with that of personal freedom. Guizot’s main point was that progress and civilisation are the same thing, or rather, that civilisation is to be defined only by progress, for that is its fundamental idea. His definition of progress is not, however, strikingly clear, and he calls attention to two types of progress—one involving an improvement in social welfare, the other in the spiritual or intellectual life. Although Guizot tried to show that progress in both these forms is a fact, he did not touch ultimate questions, nor did he successfully show that progress is the universal key to human history. He did not really support his argument that civilisation _is_ progress in any convincing way, but he gave a stimulus to reflection on the question of the relationship of these two. Michelet’s translation of Vico came at an appropriate time, and served a useful purpose. It showed to France a thinker who, while not denying a certain progress over short periods, denied it over the long period, and reverted rather to the old notion of an eternal recurrence.