a greater
progress in men and works of learning than our ancestors had seen in the
whole course of the previous fourteen centuries." [Footnote: Praefat.
Scholarum Mathematicarum, maiorem doctorum hominum et operum proventum
seculo uno vidimus quam totis antea 14 seculis maiores nostri viderent.
(Ed. Basel, 1569.)] [Footnote 1. Guillaume Postel observed in his
De magistratibus Atheniensium liber (1541) that the ages are always
progressing (secula semper proficere), and every day additions are made
to human knowledge, and that this process would only cease if Providence
by war, or plague, or some catastrophe were to destroy all the
accumulated stores of knowledge which have been transmitted from
antiquity in books (Praef., B verso). What is known of the life of this
almost forgotten scholar has been collected by G. Weill (De Gulielmi
Postelli vita et indole, 1892). He visited the East, brought back
oriental MSS., and was more than once imprisoned on charges of heresy.
He dreamed of converting the Mohammedans, and of uniting the whole world
under the empire of France.]

In this last stage of the Renaissance, which includes the first quarter
of the seventeenth century, soil was being prepared in which the idea of
Progress could germinate, and our history of it origin definitely begins
with the work of two men who belong to this age, Bodin, who is hardly
known except to special students of political science, and Bacon, who
is known to all the world. Both had a more general grasp of the
significance of their own time than any of their contemporaries, and
though neither of them discovered a theory of Progress, they both made
contributions to thought which directly contributed to its subsequent
appearance.

CHAPTER I. SOME INTERPRETATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY: BODIN AND LE ROY

1.

It is a long descent from the genius of Machiavelli to the French
historian, Jean Bodin, who published his introduction to historical
studies [Footnote: Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem, 1566.]
about forty years after Machiavelli's death. His views and his method
differ widely from those of that great pioneer, whom he attacks. His
readers were not arrested by startling novelties or immoral doctrine; he
is safe, and dull.

But Bodin had a much wider range of thought than Machiavelli, whose mind
was entirely concentrated on the theory of politics; and his importance
for us lies not in the political speculations by which he sought