Chapter 4
From the Laws of their internal Nature, Reason and Justice must gain more Footing among Men in the Course of Time, and promote a more durable Humanity
All the doubts and complaints of men, respecting the uncertainty and little observable progress of good in history, arise from this, that the melancholy wanderer sees too little on his way. If he extended his view, and impartially compared with each other the times, that we most accurately know from history; farther, if he dived into the nature of man, and weighed what truth and reason are; he would doubt as little of their progress, as of the most indisputable physical truth. For thousands of years our sun and all the fixed stars were supposed to be immovable: a fortunate telescope now permits us no longer to doubt of their movement. So in some future age, a more accurate comparison of the periods exhibited in the history of our species will not merely give us a superficial view of this exhilarating truth, but, in spite of all apparent disorder, will enable us to calculate the laws, according to which this progress is effected by the power of human nature. Standing on the verge of ancient history, as on a central point, I shall do no more than cursorily note a few general principles, which will serve as leading stars, to guide us on our future way.
First. Times connect themselves together, in virtue of their nature; and with them the child of Time, the race of mankind, with all its operations and productions.
No sophistical argument can lead us to deny, that our Earth has grown older in the course of some thousands of years; and that this wanderer round the Sun is greatly altered since its origin. In its bowels we perceive how it once was constituted; and we need but look around us, to see its present constitution. The ocean foams no longer; it is subsided peaceably into its bed: the wandering streams have found their shores; and plants and animals have run through a progressive series of years in their different races. As not a sunbeam has been lost upon our Earth since its creation; so no falling leaf, no wasted seed, no carcass of a decaying animal, and still less an action of any living being, has been without effect. Vegetation, for example, has increased, and extended itself as far as it could: every living race has spread within the limits nature assigned it, through the means of others: and even the senseless devastations of man, as well as his industry, have been active implements in the hand of Time. Fresh harvests have waved over the ruins of the cities he has destroyed: the elements have strewed the dust of oblivion upon them; and soon new generations have arisen, who have erected new buildings upon the old, and even with their ancient remains. Omnipotence itself cannot ordain that effects shall not be effects: it cannot restore the Earth to what it was thousands of years ago, so that these thousands of years, with all their consequences, shall not have been.
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