The events of the Revolution quenched in him as little as in Condorcet the sanguine confidence that it was the opening of a new era for science and art, and thereby for the general Progress of man. "The present is one of those great periods of history to which posterity will often look back" with gratitude. [Footnote: Picavet, Les Ideologues, p. 203. Cabanis was born in 1757 and died in 1808.] He took an active part in the coup d'etat of the 18th of Brumaire (1799) which was to lead to the despotism of Napoleon. He imagined that it would terminate oppression, and was as enthusiastic for it as he and Condorcet had been for the Revolution ten years before. "You philosophers," he wrote, [Footnote: Ib. p. 224.] "whose studies are directed to the improvement and happiness of the race, you no longer embrace vain shadows. Having watched, in alternating moods of hope and sadness, the great spectacle of our Revolution, you now see with joy the termination of its last act; you will see with rapture this new era, so long promised to the French people, at last open, in which all the benefits of nature, all the creations of genius, all the fruits of time, labour, and experience will be utilised, an era of glory and prosperity in which the dreams of your philanthropic enthusiasm should end by being realised." It was an over-sanguine and characteristic greeting of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. Cabanis was one of the most important of those thinkers who, living into the new period, took care that the ideas of their own generation should not be overwhelmed in the rising flood of reaction. CHAPTER XII. THE THEORY OF PROGRESS IN ENGLAND 1. The idea of Progress could not help crossing the Channel. France and England had been at war in the first year of the eighteenth century, they were at war in the last, and their conflict for supremacy was the leading feature of the international history of the whole century. But at no period was there more constant intellectual intimacy or more marked reciprocal influence between the two countries. It was a commonplace that Paris and London were the two great foci of civilisation, and they never lost touch of each other in the intellectual sphere. Many of the principal works of literature that appeared in either country were promptly translated, and some of the French books, which the censorship rendered it dangerous to publish in Paris, were printed in London.