of these numbers.  Other numbers which have special virtues are the powers of 12, the perfect number [Footnote:  I.e. a number equal to the sum of all its factors.] 496, and various others.  He gives many examples to prove that these mystic numbers determine the durations of empires and underlie historical chronology.  For instance, the duration of the oriental monarchies from Ninus to the Conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great was 1728 (= 12 cubed) years.  He gives the Roman republic from the foundation of Rome to the battle of Actium 729 (=9 cubed) years. [Footnote:  Methodus, cap. v. pp. 265 sqq.]

4.

From a believer in such a theory, which illustrates the limitations of men’s outlook on the world in the Renaissance period, we could perhaps hardly expect a vision of Progress.  The best 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 to establish the view that the whole world is built on a divine plan by which all the parts are intimately interrelated. [Footnote:  Cp.  Baudrillart, J. Bodin et son temps, 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.]