Progress of the Human Spirit

In the Renaissance context, a cyclical conception of the history of knowledge prevailed, according to which knowledge in the past had undergone several phases of growth and decline. At the end of the seventeenth century, the secretary of the Académie des sciences, Bernard de Fontenelle, introduced a new conception of the history of natural knowledge. He replaced the cyclical conception with a linear and cumulative one. Combining epistemology with the philosophy of history, Fontenelle argued that the historical development of human knowledge correlated with stages in the epistemological advancement of the individual: The epistemological phylogeny repeated the cognitive ontogeny. Fontenelle referred to the epistemological development of humankind as the progress of the human spirit and linked it to social history. Early societies had developed their knowledge only as fables based on imagination, anthropomorphism, and superstition. In the Middle Ages, humans were subject to blind faith in authority. In his view, it was only in modern times that natural philosophers had emancipated themselves from prejudice and begun to develop natural philosophy based on reason and experience, searching for general principles and laws. For Fontenelle, the progress of the human spirit was methodical, cumulative, linear, necessary, and lawful, and it avoided contingent skips in its growth. This conception also redefined the assessment of ancient natural philosophy. Bacon and Descartes had strictly rejected Greek philosophy; in Fontenelle’s conception, ancient natural philosophy was the first and initial stage in the long-term process that natural philosophy had to go through. Fontenelle’s colleagues from the Académie des sciences were rather reluctant to articulate their views on the history of the sciences; therefore, Fontenelle considered his task precisely to embed the specific reports of academicians in his overall narrative of the history of the human spirit. All the specific scientific achievements became parts of a large historical narrative.