a single state. [Footnote:  Cardan had already signalised the compass, printing, and gunpowder as three modern inventions, to which “the whole of antiquity has nothing equal to show.”  He adds, “I pass over the other inventions of this age which, though wonderful, form rather a development of ancient arts than surpass the intellects of our ancestors.”  De subtilitate, lib. 3 ad init. (Opera, iii. p. 609).] Take the advances we have made in geography and astronomy; the invention of gunpowder; the development of the woollen and other industries.  The invention of printing alone can be set against anything that the ancients achieved. [Footnote:  Methodus, cap.  VII., pp. 359-61.  Bodin also points out that there was an improvement, in some respects, in manners and morals since the early Roman Empire; for instance, in the abolition of gladiatorial spectacles (p. 359).]

An inference from all this, obvious to a modern reader, would be that in the future there will be similar oscillations, and new inventions and discoveries as remarkable as any that have been made in the past.  But Bodin does not draw this inference.  He confines himself to the past and present, and has no word to say about the vicissitudes of the future.  But he is not haunted by any vision of the end of the world, or the coming of Antichrist; three centuries of humanism lay between him and Roger Bacon.

3.

And yet the influence of medievalism, which it had been the work of those three centuries to overcome, was still pervasively there.  Still more the authority of the Greeks and Romans, which had been set up by the revival of learning, was, without their realising it, heavy even upon thinkers like Bodin, who did not scruple freely to criticise ancient authors.  And so, in his thoughtful attempt to find a clew to universal history, he was hampered by theological and cosmic theories, the legacy of the past.  It is significant of the trend of his mind that when he is discussing the periodic decline of science and letters, he suggests that it may be due to the direct action of God, punishing those who misapplied useful sciences to the destruction of men.

But his speculations were particularly compromised by his belief in astrology, which, notwithstanding the efforts of humanists like Petrarch, Aeneas Sylvius, and Pico to discredit it, retained its hold over the minds of many eminent, otherwise emancipated, thinkers throughout the period of the Renaissance. [Footnote:  Bodin was also a firm believer in sorcery.  His La Demonomanie (1578) is a monument of superstition.] Here Bodin is in the company of Machiavelli and Lord Bacon.  But not content with the doctrine of astral influence on human events, he sought another key to historical changes in the influence of numbers, reviving the ideas of Pythagoras and Plato, but working them out in a way of his own.  He enumerates the durations of the lives of many famous men, to show that they can be expressed by powers of 7 and 9, or the product