p. 148 (1853). This
monograph is chiefly devoted to a full analysis of La Republique.] He is
careful, however, to avoid fatalism. He asserts, as we have seen, that
history depends largely on the will of men. And he comes nearer to the
idea of Progress than any one before him; he is on the threshold.

For if we eliminate his astrological and Pythagorean speculations, and
various theological parentheses which do not disturb his argument, his
work announces a new view of history which is optimistic regarding man's
career on earth, without any reference to his destinies in a future
life. And in this optimistic view there are three particular points
to note, which were essential to the subsequent growth of the idea of
Progress. In the first place, the decisive rejection of the theory of
degeneration, which had been a perpetual obstacle to the apprehension
of 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
corresponded to the old ecumenical idea of the Greeks and Romans,
[Footnote: See above, p. 23.] but had now a new significance through the
discoveries of modern navigators. He speaks repeatedly of the world as a
universal state, and suggests that the various races, by their peculiar
aptitudes and qualities, contribute to the common good of the whole.
This idea of the "solidarity" of peoples was to be an important element
in the growth of the doctrine of Progress. [Footnote: Republique, Book
v. cap. 1 (p. 690; ed. 1593); Methodus, cap. vi. p. 194; cap. vii. p.
360.]

These ideas were in the air. Another Frenchman, the classical scholar,
Louis Le Roy, translator of Plato and Aristotle, put forward similar
views in a work of less celebrity, On the Vicissitude or Variety of
the Things in the Universe. [Footnote: De la vicissitude ou variete
des choses en l'univers, 1577, 2nd ed. (which I have used), 1584.] It
contains a survey of great periods in which particular peoples attained
an exceptional state of dominion and prosperity