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.]

These ideas were in the air. Another Frenchman, the classical
scholar, Louis Le Roy, translator of Plato and Aristotle, put
forward similar views in a work of less celebrity, On the
Vicissitude or Variety of the Things in the Universe. [Footnote: De
la vicissitude ou variete des choses en l'univers, 1577, 2nd ed.
(which I have used), 1584.] It contains a survey of great periods in
which particular peoples attained an exceptional state of dominion
and prosperity, and it anticipates later histories of civilisation
by dwelling but slightly on political events and bringing into
prominence human achievements in science, philosophy, and the arts.
Beginning with the advance of man from primitive rudeness to ordered
society--a sketch based on the conjectures of Plato in the
Protagoras--Le Roy reviews the history, and estimates the merits, of