Erasmus & Luther; Their Attitude to Toleration (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1920. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... APPENDIX THE CONCEPTION OF PROGRESS IN CLASSICAL AND RENAISSANCE WRITERS Most of us to-day are inclined to regard progress as a matter of course. Knowledge expands, we think, and there is no reason why it should not continue to do so indefinitely. This was not so with the Greeks. They, for the most part, conceived on the contrary the possibility of a process of deterioration, a cycle or succession of cycles. The majority thought that there had been a Golden Age, but it is long since past. Moreover, there seems to have been the feeling that this age was distinctly dull. Beyond the "Pillars of Hercules" once existed Plato's "Atlantis" it is now lost to the sight of men in the depths of the sea. In it innocence and happiness reached the highest possible stage: the utmost man can expect is to return, however distantly, to this stage. This view had a great practical value, for it kept men from that fanciful and foolish idealizing which is the curse of the modern world. Similarly there had once been a complete body of knowledge: the past knew far more than the present can ever hope to know. What George Meredith called "the rapture of the forward view" was for the most part denied to the writers. There is, however, a hint of the conception of progress in the introduction to Thucydides (471-396 B.C.), in Herodotus (486-400 B.c), in the Prometheus Vinctus of iEschylus (525-456 B.C.), in the speech of Protagoras (480-411 B.C.), in Plato (428-347 B.C.), in the Physics of Aristotle (384-322 B.c), and more than a hint in the Natural Questions of Seneca (d. A.d. 65). In the midst of a conflagration in which civilization is burning, it is easy for us to hold that development includes retrogression. There are many side-currents as well as the main current in the strea...