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/98

44 rity, the popular fables about the sexual and prolific intercourse of Satan with the human race, but seems to have seriously believed that he had himself frequently seen the archenemy face to face, and held arguments with him on points of theology. Nor was the study of the severer sciences, on all occasions, an effectual remedy against such illusions of the imagination. The sagacious Kepler was an astrologer and a visionary; and his friend Tycho Brahe, the Prince of Astronomers, kept an idiot in his service, to whose prophecies he listened as revelations from above. During the long night of Gothic barbarism, the intellectual world had again become, like the primitive earth, “without form and void;” the light had already appeared; “and God had seen the light that it was good;” but the time was not yet come to “divide it from the darkness.” I have allotted to Bodin a larger space than may seem due to his literary importance; but the truth is, I know of no political writer, of the same date, whose extensive and various and discriminating reading appears to me to have contributed more to facilitate and to guide the researches of his successors; or whose references to ancient learning have been more frequently transcribed without acknowledgment. Of Iate, his works have fallen into very general neglect; otherwise it is impossible that so many gross mistakes should be current about the scope and spirit of his principles. By many he has been mentioned as a zealot for republican forms of Government (probably for no better reason than that he chose to call his book a Treatise De Republica): whereas, in point of fact, he is uniformly a warm and able advocate for monarchy; and, although no friend to tyranny, has, on more than one occasion, carried his monarchical principles to a very blameable excess. (See, in particular, chapter fourth and fifth of the Sixth Book.) On the other hand, Grouvelle, a writer of some note, has classed Bodin with Aristotle, as an advocate for domestic slavery. “The reasonings of both,” he says, “are refuted by Montesquieu.” (De l’autorité de Montesquieu dans la Révolution présente. Paris, 1789.) Whoever has the curiosity to compare Bodin and Montesquieu together, will be satisfied, that, on this point, their sentiments were exactly the same; and that, so far from refuting Bodin, Montesquieu has borrowed from him more than one argument in support of his general conclusion.

The merits of Bodin have been, on the whole, very fairly estimated by Boyle, who pronounces him “one of the ablest men that appeared in France during the sixteenth century.” “Si nous voulons disputer à Jean Bodin la qualité d’écrivain éxact et judicieux, laissons lui sans controverse, un grand génie, un vaste savoir, une mémoire et une lecture prodigieuses.”

In the midst of the disorders, both political and moral, of that unfortunate age, it is pleasing to observe the anticipations of brighter prospects, in the speculations of a few individuals. Bodinus himself is one of the number; and to his name may be added that of his country-