Renan’s own belief was essentially religious, and was coloured by Christian and Hebrew conceptions. It was a rationalised belief in a Divine Providence. He professed a confidence in the final triumph of truth and goodness, and has faith in a dim, far-off divine event which he terms “the complete advent of God.” The objections which are so frequently urged by learned men against finalism or teleology of any kind whatsoever Renan deemed superficial and claimed, rightly enough, that they are not so much directed against teleology but against theology, against obsolete ideas of God, particularly against the dogma of a deliberate and omnipotent Creator. Renan’s own doctrine of the Deity is by no means clear, but he believed in a spiritual power capable of becoming some day conscious, omniscient and omnipotent. God will then have come to himself. From this point of view the universe is a progress to God, to an increasing realisation of the Divinity in truth, beauty and goodness. The universe, Renan claims, must be ultimately rooted and grounded in goodness; there must be, in spite of all existing “evils,” a balance on the side of goodness, otherwise the universe would, like a vast banking-concern, fail. This balance of goodness is the _raison d’être_ of the world and the means of its existence. The general life of the universe can be illustrated, according to Renan, by that of the oyster, and the formation within it of the pearl, by a malady, a process vague, obscure and painful. The pearl is the spirit which is the end, the final cause and last result, and assuredly the most brilliant outcome of this universe. Through suffering the pearl is formed; and likewise, through constant pain and conflict, suffering and hardship, the spirit of man moves intellectually and morally onward and upward, to the completed realisation of justice, beauty, truth and infinite goodness and love, to the complete and triumphant realisation of God. We must have patience, claims Renan, and have faith in these things, and have hope and take courage. “One day virtue will prove itself to have been the better part.” Such is his doctrine of progress. II With Cournot and Renouvier our discussion takes a new form. Renan, Taine, Vacherot and the host of social and political writers, together with August Comte himself, had accepted the fact of progress and clung to the idea of a law of progress. With these two thinkers, however, there is a more careful consideration given to the problem of progress. It was recognised as a problem and this was an immense advance upon the previous period, whose thinkers accepted it as a dogma.