It cannot be said that he has added anything valuable to what may be found in Bodin and Bacon on the development of civilisation.

The general synthesis of history which he attempts is equivalent to theirs.

He describes the history of knowledge and arts, and all things besides, as exhibiting "a kind of circular progress," by which he means that they have a birth, growth, nourishing, failing and fading, and then within a while after a resurrection and reflourishing.
[Footnote: Book iii.chap.6, Section i, p.

259.] In this method of progress the lamp of learning passed from one people to another.

It passed from the Orientals (Chaldeans and Egyptians) to the Greeks; when it was nearly extinguished in Greece it began to shine afresh among the Romans; and having been put out by the barbarians for the space of a thousand years it was relit by Petrarch and his contemporaries.