For Vico, the course of human history was not rectilineal but rather spiral, although he, too, refrained from indicating any law. He claimed clearly enough that each civilisation must give way to barbarism and anarchy, and the cycle be again begun. Such were the ideas upon progress which were current at the time when Saint-Simon, Fourier and Comte were busily thinking out their doctrines, the main characteristics of which we have already noted in our Introduction on the immediate antecedents of our period. The thought given to the question of progress in modern France is almost unintelligible save in the light of the doctrines current from Condorcet, through Saint-Simon to Comte, for the second half of the century is again characterised by a criticism and indeed a reaction against the idea professed in the first half. This was true in regard to Science and to Freedom. We shall see a similar type of development illustrated again respecting Progress. Already we have noted the general aim and object which both Saint-Simon and Comte had in view. The important fact for our discussion here is that Saint-Simon, by his respect for the Middle Ages, and for the power of religion, was able to rectify the defects which the ideas of the eighteenth century had left in Condorcet’s doctrine of progress. Moreover, he claimed, as Condorcet had not done, to indicate a “law of progress,” which gives rise alternately to “organic” and to “critical” periods. The Middle Ages were, in the opinion of Saint-Simon, an admirable period, displaying as they did an organic society, where there was a temporal and spiritual authority. With Luther began an anarchical, critical period. According to Saint-Simon s law of progress a new organic period will succeed this, and the characteristic of that period will be socialism. He advocated a gradual change, not a violent revolutionary one, but he saw in socialism the inevitable feature of the new era. With its triumph would come a new world organisation and a league of peoples in which war would be no more, and in which the lot of the proletariat would be free from oppression and misery. The Saint-Simonist School became practically a religious sect, and the chief note in its gospel was “Progress.”