Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

by Peter Watson

Probably the most complete–certainly the most elaborate–idea about progress was that devised by the marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794) in his Outline of an Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, released in 1795. He took the view that ‘nature has assigned no limit to the perfecting of the human faculties, that the perfectibility of man…has no other limit than the duration of the globe on which nature has placed us’.110 He divided history into ten stages: hunters and fishermen; shepherds; tillers of the soil; the time of commerce, science and philosophy in Greece; science and philosophy from Alexander to the fall of the Roman empire; decadence to the crusades; the crusades to the invention of printing; printing to the attacks on authority by Luther, Descartes and Bacon; Descartes to the Revolution, ‘when reason, tolerance and humanity were becoming the watchwords of all’.