was forgotten for many ages,--he would have been the author of a
progressive reform; but how many reformers have there been before
and after Bacon on whose minds the idea of Progress never dawned?

[Footnote: Bacon quotes Seneca: See Opus Majus, i. pp. 37, 55, 14.

Much has been made out of a well-known passage in his short Epistle
de secretis operibus artis et naturae et de militate magiae, c. iv.
(ed. Brewer, p. 533), in which he is said to PREDICT inventions
which have been realised in the locomotives, steam navigation, and
aeroplanes of modern times. But Bacon predicts nothing. He is
showing that science can invent curious and, to the vulgar,
incredible things without the aid of magic. All the inventions which
he enumerates have, he declares, been actually made in ancient
times, with the exception of a flying-machine (instrumentum volandi
quod non vidi nec hominem qui vidisset cognovi, sed sapientem qui
hoc artificium excogitavit explere cognosco).

Compare the remarks of S. Vogl, Die Physik Roger Bacos (1906), 98
sqq.]

4.

Thus Friar Bacon's theories of scientific reform, so far from
amounting to an anticipation of the idea of Progress, illustrate how
impossible it was that this idea could appear in the Middle Ages.
The whole spirit of medieval Christianity excluded it. The
conceptions which were entertained of the working of divine
Providence, the belief that the world, surprised like a sleeping
household by a thief in the night, might at any moment come to a