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.

Still more the authority of the Greeks and Romans, which had been set up by the revival of learning, was, without their realising it, heavy even upon thinkers like Bodin, who did not scruple freely to criticise ancient authors.

And so, in his thoughtful attempt to find a clew to universal history, he was hampered by theological and cosmic theories, the legacy of the past.