the seventeenth century with the writings of Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes; it is seen in France with the new emphasis on unaided reason as expressed in the works of RenT Descartes. Another writer of the period, Condorcet, shows faith in progress and in the fact that such progress has already taken place, and he contrasts the past with his present:
After long periods of error, after being led astray by vague of incomplete theories, publicists have at last discovered the true rights of man and how they can all be deduced from the single truth, that man is a sentient being, capable of reasoning and of acquiring moral ideas. . . .
Montesquieu is a representative of this same mode of thought, and as such he exemplifies a dedication to rational thought:
Cosmopolitan in outlook, and fascinated by the diversity of human societies, he believed that behind this diversity there lay intelligible principles discoverable by reason.
His cosmopolitan attitude is evident as he develops his Persian characters a
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