The Idea of Progress

t that can be said for it is that, both here and in his astrological creed, Bodin is crudely attempting to bring human history into close connection with the rest of the universe, and t

to avoid fatalism. He asserts, as we have seen, that history depends largely on the will of me

that idea. Secondly, the unreserved claim that his own age was fully equal, and in some respects superior, to the age of classical antiquity, in respect of science and the arts. He leaves the ancients reverently on their pedestal, but he erects another pedestal for the moderns, and it is rather higher. We shall see the import of this when we come to consider the intellectual movement in which the idea of Progress was afterwards to emerge. In the third place, he had a conception of the common interest of all the peoples of the earth, a conception which corres

t periods in which particular peoples attained an exceptional state of dominion and prosperity, and it anticipates later histories of civilisation by dwelling but slightly on political events and bringing into prominence human achievements in science, philosophy, and the arts. Beginning with the advance of man from primitive rudeness to ordered society-a sketch based o

cene of prosperity from one people or set of peoples to another. Le Roy finds the cause in providential design. God, he believes, cares for all parts of the universe and has distributed excellence in arms and letters now to Asi

ored, and there have been new inventions, especially printing, and the mariner's compass, and "I would give the third place to gunnery but that it seems invented rather for the ruin than for the utility of the human race." In our knowledge of astronomy and cosmography we su

ould have disappeared utterly. Seneca long ago made the right criticism. Hoc maiores nostri questi sunt, hoc nos querimur, hoc posteri nostri querentur, eversos esse mores.... At ista stant loco eodem. Perhaps Le Roy was thinking particularly of that curious book the Apology for Herodotus, in which the eminent Greek scholar, He

ich it rivals or even surpasses? Our civilisation, too, having reached perfection, will inevitably decline and pass away: is not this th

I already foresee in imagination nations, strange in form, complexion, and costume, overwhelming Europe-like the Goths, Huns, Vandals, Lombards, Saracens of old-destroying our cities and palaces, burning our libraries, devastating all that is beautiful. I foresee in all countries wars, domestic and foreign, factions and heresies which will profane all things huma

gnant, and is unwilling to acquiesce in it. Like an embarrassed dramatist h

which is superior to nature and alone knows the predetermined times of events." That is to say, it depends, after all, on Providence whether the argument fr

s inexhaustible. "Let us not be so simple as to believe that the ancients have known and said everything and left nothing to their successors. Or that nature gave them all her favours in order to remain sterile ever after." Here Le Roy lays down Bodin's principle which was to be asserted more urgently in the following century-t

no conception of an increasing purpose or underlying unity in the history of man, but he thinks that Providence-the old Providence of St. Augustine, who arranged the events of Roman history with a view to the coming of Christ-may, f

uated, as the reader will have observed, the same three views which Bodin taught, and must have helped to propagate them: that the world has no