ABSTRACT
The period of English history that lies roughly between the accession of James I in 1603 and the English Civil War has much in common with the present day. One symptom of the new spirit of inquiry was, of course, the foundation of the Royal Society and of sister academies in Italy and France. Many reflective people nowadays believe that the people are back in the kind of intellectual and spiritual turmoil that disturbed the first half of the seventeenth century. The idea of an end of history is incompatible with a new feeling about the great things human beings might achieve through their own ingenuity and exertions. There were, however, two elements of seventeenth-century thought that imply the idea of progress even if it is not explicitly affirmed. Many of the ingredients of the seventeenth-century antidote to melancholy have lost their power to bring peace of mind today, and have become a source of anxiety in themselves.
