ngs proceed according to the fatal law of the
world, and have their natural causes, yet events depend principally
on Divine Providence 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 from past experience is valid. Who
knows whether the modern age may not prove the exception to the law
which has hitherto prevailed? Let us act as if it would.

This is the practical moral that Le Roy enforces in the last book of his
dissertation. We must not allow ourselves to be paralysed or dismayed by
the destinies of past civilisations, but must work hard to transmit to
posterity all that has been achieved, and augment the discoveries of the
past by new researches. For knowledge is 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--the permanence of natural forces. Nature is the same
now as always, and can produce as great intellects as ever. The elements
have the same power, the constellations keep their old order, men are
made of the same material. There is nothing to hinder the birth in this
age of men equal in brains to Plato, Aristotle, or Hippocrates.

Philosophically, Le Roy's conclusion is lame enough. We are asked to
set aside the data of experience and act on an off-chance. But the
determination of the optimist to escape from the logic of his own
argument is significant. He has 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, for some
unknown reason, prolong indefinitely the modern age. He is obeying
the instinct of optimism and confidence which was already beginning to
create the appropriate atmosphere for the intellectual revolution of the
coming century.

His book was translated into English, but neither in France nor in
England had it the same influence as the speculations of Bodin. But it
insinuated, as the reader will have observed, the same three views which
Bodin taught, and must have helped to propagate them: that the world
has not degenerated; that the modern