Renouvier brands the search for any law of progress a futile one, since we cannot scientifically or logically define the goal of humanity or the course of its development because of the fact of freedom and because of our ignorance. We must realise that we, personally at firsthand, see only an infinitesimal part of humanity’s life on this planet alone, not to speak of a destiny possible beyond this globe, and that, at second-hand, we have only evidence of a portion of the great procession of human events. We do not know humanity’s beginning and primitive history, nor do we know its goal, if it has one. These factors alone are grave hindrances to the formulation of any conception of progress. Reflection upon them might have saved men, Renouvier observes, from the presumptuous belief in assured progress. We cannot presume even to estimate the tendencies, the direction of its course, because of the enormous and ever-increasing complexity of free human activity. By his large work on the “Philosophy of History,” Renouvier shows that the facts of history themselves are against the theory of a universal and continuous progress, for the record shows us conflict, advance, retrogression, peoples rising, others degenerating, empires establishing themselves and passing away by inward ruin or outer assaults, or both, and civilisations evolving and disintegrating in their turn. The spectacle does not readily promote an optimistic view of human development at all, much less support the doctrine of a sure and certain progress. Renouvier does not blind himself to the constant struggle and suffering. The theatre, or rather the arena, of history presents a curious spectacle. In politics and in religion he shows us that there are conflicts of authority and of free thought, a warfare of majorities with minorities, a method of fighting issues slightly less savage than the appeal to pure force, but amounting to what he terms “a pacific application of the principle of force.” History shows us the corruption, tyranny and blindness of many majorities, and the tragic and necessary resort to force as the only path to liberty for down-trodden minorities. How, Renouvier asks, can we fit this in with a doctrine of assured progress, or, indeed, progress at all? Further, he does not find it difficult to show that much unthinking utterance on the part of the optimists may be somewhat checked by calm reflection on even one or two questions. For example, Was progress involved in the change from ancient slavery to the wage-slavery of modern industrialism? Was Christianity, as Nietzsche and others have attempted to maintain, a retrogression? Or, again, Was the change from Greek city life to the conditions of the Middle Ages in any way to be regarded as a progress?