which was familiar. Yet what was at first a hesitant questioning gained increasing momentum and increasing confidence, slowly robbing the past of its authority to direct the shape of the present. Not only did respect for the learn- ing of the Ancients seep away; their teachings could even become a source of derision. "How was it," asked one sceptic, "that men were attracted to tales so manifestly absurd?"
This sense of rupture between "tradition" and "the modern" was intimately connected with other comparisons as global explorations brought Europe into increasing contact with the peoples of the Americas, Africa and Asia. The fasci nation of the unknown, the curiousity which engaged a growing number of west- ern Europeans, was critical in feeding the judgements and evaluations by which they eventually came to "define themselves as different in significant aspects from the rest of the world." But despite this movement from puzzlement to arrogance, Europe's global hegemony was still far from being established. Militar ily, for instance, several European countries still lived in expectation of an inva- sion by Turkey, which had once stood at the gates of Vienna. At a time of religious ferment and questioning within European Christianity, Jesuit mission- aries in China drew parallels between the teachings of Confucius and those of St. Paul, while Parisian intellectuals lauded the king of Siam's willingness to tolerate different forms of religious belief. A favorite ploy among satirists was to attribute disparaging remarks about European customs to a chinese, an Indian or Persian traveller. Even the standard bearer for the "Enlightenment," Voltaire, contended that China was the "best-governed and wisest nation on earth."
Notwithstanding Voltaire's advocacy, by the end of the seventeenth century any serious suggestion that European culture ranked behind that of other nations was heard only among a few intellectual rebels. The general view that European cultures stood at the forefront of human development was well established among the general population. Words such as "modern" became culturally loaded as they were linked with other new but shared concepts such as "civilization." Europeans increasingly saw themselves as more advanced, more civilized, more "modern" than other societies. These attitudes were parlayed into the idiom