been brought about. "All the world is full of savants, learned
teachers, large libraries; and I am of opinion that neither in the
time of Plato nor of Cicero nor of Papinian were there such
facilities for study as one sees now." It is indeed the study of the
ancient languages and literatures that Gargantua considers in a
liberal education, but the satisfaction at the present diffusion of
learning, with the suggestion that here at least contemporaries have
an advantage over the ancients, is the significant point. [Footnote:
Rabelais, Book ii. chap. 8.] This satisfaction shines through the
observation of Ramus that "in one century we have seen a greater
progress in men and works of learning than our ancestors had seen in
the whole course of the previous fourteen centuries." [Footnote:
Praefat. Scholarum Mathematicarum, maiorem doctorum hominum et
operum proventum seculo uno vidimus quam totis antea 14 seculis
maiores nostri viderent. (Ed. Basel, 1569.)] [Footnote 1. Guillaume
Postel observed in his De magistratibus Atheniensium liber (1541)
that the ages are always progressing (secula semper proficere), and
every day additions are made to human knowledge, and that this
process would only cease if Providence by war, or plague, or some
catastrophe were to destroy all the accumulated stores of knowledge
which have been transmitted from antiquity in books (Praef., B
verso). What is known of the life of this almost forgotten scholar
has been collected by G. Weill (De Gulielmi Postelli vita et indole,
1892). He visited the East, brought back oriental MSS., and was more
than once imprisoned on charges of heresy. He dreamed of converting
the Mohammedans, and of uniting the whole world under the empire of
France.]

In this last stage of the Renaissance, which includes the first
quarter of the seventeenth century, soil was being prepared in which