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 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.