ABSTRACT
The vision of the scientific utopia expanded by great leaps and bounds, as if the new notion of the future was itself some magical cornucopia. One would have the real thing, a genuine manifesto of scientific utopianism, based on the irresistible forces of intellectual and social change, and announcing the practical stages of a profound transformation. The ingredients of political apology and literary excess in every ideology prove to be a very unstable basis for intellectual consistency or viability. Few disputes of the century were carried on with more modern political remorselessness than the critique which Pierre Bayle launched in 1695 against Comenius's astonishing defense of the three Central European prophets and their vision of a political apocalypse. Liberal and humane modern historians, like their rationalistic enlightened predecessors, find themselves in the grip of a curious spiritual paralysis when confronted with the contradictions of ideal and noble aspirations in impassioned politics.
