Page:Supplement to the fourth, fifth, and sixth editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica - with preliminary dissertations on the history of the sciences - illustrated by engravings (IA gri 33125011196181).pdf/94

40 The annals of France, during this period, present very scanty materials for the History of Philosophy. The name of the Chancellor De l’Hopital, however, must not be passed over in silence. As an author, he does not rank high; nor does he seem to have:at all valued himself on the careless effusions of his literary hours; but, as an upright and virtuous magistrate, he has left behind him a reputation unrivalled to this day. His wise and indulgent principles on the subject of religious liberty, and the steadiness with which he adhered to them, under circumstances of extraordinary difficulty and danger, exhibit a splendid contrast to the cruel intolerance, which, a few years before, had disgraced the character of an illustrious Chancellor of England. The same philosophical and truly catholic spirit distinguished his friend, the President de Thou; and gives the principal charm to the justly admired preface prefixed to his history. In tracing the progress of the human mind during the sixteenth century, such insulated and anomalous examples of the triumph of reason over superstition and bigotry, deserve attention, net less than what is due, in a history of the experimental arts, to Friar Bacon’s early anticipation of gun-powder, and of the telescope.

Contemporary with these great men was Bodin (or Bodinus), an eminent French lawyer, who appears to have beer one of the first that united a philosophical turn of thinking with an extensive knowledge of jurisprudence and of history. His learning is often ill digested, and his conclusions still oftener rash and unsound: yet it is but justice to him to acknowledge, that, in his views of the philosophy of law, he has approached very nearly to some leading ideas of Lord Bacon; while, in his refined combinations of historical facts, he has more than once struck into a train of speculation, bearing a strong resemblance to that afterwards pursued by Montesquieu. Of this resemblance, so remarkable an instance oc-

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