to transmit to posterity all that has been achieved, and augment the
discoveries of the past by new researches. For knowledge is
inexhaustible. "Let us not be so simple as to believe that the
ancients have known and said everything and left nothing to their
successors. Or that nature gave them all her favours in order to
remain sterile ever after." Here Le Roy lays down Bodin's principle
which was to be asserted more urgently in the following century--the
permanence of natural forces. Nature is the same now as always, and
can produce as great intellects as ever. The elements have the same
power, the constellations keep their old order, men are made of the
same material. There is nothing to hinder the birth in this age of
men equal in brains to Plato, Aristotle, or Hippocrates.

Philosophically, Le Roy's conclusion is lame enough. We are asked to
set aside the data of experience and act on an off-chance. But the
determination of the optimist to escape from the logic of his own
argument is significant. He has no conception of an increasing
purpose or underlying unity in the history of man, but he thinks
that Providence--the old Providence of St. Augustine, who arranged
the events of Roman history with a view to the coming of Christ--
may, for some unknown reason, prolong indefinitely the modern age.
He is obeying the instinct of optimism and confidence which was
already beginning to create the appropriate atmosphere for the
intellectual revolution of the coming century.

His book was translated into English, but neither in France nor in
England had it the same influence as the speculations of Bodin. But
it insinuated, as the reader will have observed, the same three
views which Bodin taught, and must have helped to propagate them:
that the world has not degenerated; that the modern age is not