principle was significant.  It is not to be confounded with the doctrine of the immutability of human things assumed by Machiavelli.  The human scene has vastly changed since the primitive age of man; “if that so-called golden age could be revoked and compared with our own, we should consider it iron.” [Footnote:  Methodus, cap.  VII. p. 353.] For history largely depends on the will of men, which is always changing; every day new laws, new customs, new institutions, both secular and religious, come into being, and new errors. [Footnote:  Ib. cap.  I. p. 12.]

But in this changing scene we can observe a certain regularity, a law of oscillation.  Rise is followed by fall, and fall by rise; it is a mistake to think that the human race is always deteriorating. [Footnote:  Ib. cap.  VII. p. 361:  “cum aeterna quadam lege naturae conversio rerum omnium velut in orbem redire videatur, ut aeque vitia virtutibus, ignoratio scientiae, turpe honesto consequens sit, atque tenebrae luci, fallunt qui genus hominum semper deterius seipso evadere putant.”] If that were so, we should long ago have reached the lowest stage of vice and iniquity.  On the contrary, there has been, through the series of oscillations, a gradual ascent.  In the ages which have been foolishly designated as gold and silver men lived like the wild beasts; and from that state they have slowly reached the humanity of manners and the social order which prevail to-day. [Footnote:  Ib. p. 356.]

Thus Bodin recognises a general progress in the past.  That is nothing new; it was the view, for instance, of the Epicureans.  But much had passed in the world since the philosophy of Epicurus was alive, and Bodin had to consider twelve hundred years of new vicissitudes.  Could the Epicurean theory be brought up to date?

2.

Bodin deals with the question almost entirely in respect to human knowledge.  In definitely denying the degeneration of man, Bodin was only expressing what many thinkers of the sixteenth century had been coming to feel, though timidly and obscurely.  The philosophers and men of science, who criticised the ancients in special departments, did not formulate any general view on the privileged position of antiquity.  Bodin was the first to do so.

Knowledge, letters, and arts have their vicissitudes, he says; they rise, increase, and nourish, and then languish and die.  After the decay of Rome there was a long fallow period; but this was followed by a splendid revival of knowledge and an intellectual productivity which no other age has exceeded.  The scientific discoveries of the ancients deserve high praise; but the moderns have not only thrown new light on phenomena which they had incompletely explained, they have made new discoveries of equal or indeed greater importance.  Take, for instance, the mariner’s compass which has made possible the circumnavigation of the earth and a universal commerce, whereby the world has been changed, as it were, into