favour of the unity of the sovereign authority, and against the system of counterbalancing forces in government. Almost immediately he passes on to the proper ground of political economy, and elaborates the conditions of material prosperity in an agricultural realm. With the correctness of the definitions and principles of economic science as laid down by these writers, we have here nothing to do. Their peculiar distinction in the present connection is the grasp which they had of the principle of there being a natural and therefore a scientific order in the conditions of a society; that order being natural in the sense they attached to the term, which from the circumstances of the case is most beneficial to the race. From this point of view they approach some of the problems of what is now classified as social statics; and they assume, without any consciousness of another aspect being possible, that the society which they are discussing is in a state of equilibrium.

It is evident that with this restriction of the speculative horizon, they were and must remain wholly unable to emerge into the full light of the completely constituted science of society, with laws of movement as well as laws of equilibrium, with definite methods of interpreting past and predicting future states. They could account for and describe the genesis of the social union, as Plato and Aristotle had in different ways been able to do many centuries before; and they could prescribe some of the conditions of its being maintained in vigour and compactness. Some of them could even see in a vague way the interdependence of peoples and the community of the real interests of different nations, each nation, as De la Rivière expressed it, being only a province of the vast kingdom of nature, a branch from the same trunk as the rest. What they could not see was the great fact of social evolution; that here too, in the succession of social states, there has been a natural and observable order. In a word, they tried to understand society without the aid of history. Consequently they laid down the truths which they discovered as absolute and fixed, when they were no more than conditional and relative.

Fortunately inquirers in another field had set a movement afoot which was destined to furnish the supplement of their own speculation. This was the remarkable development of the conception of history, which Montesquieu's two memorable books first made conspicuous. Bossuet's well-known discourse on universal history, teeming as it does with religious prejudice, just as Condorcet's sketch teems with prejudice against religion, and egregiously imperfect in execution as it must be pronounced, when judged from even the meanest historical standard, had perhaps partially introduced "the spirit of universality," as Comte says, into the study of history. But

(1) Ordre Nat. des Soc. Pol., p. 526.

it was impossible from the nature of the case for any theologian to know fully what this spirit means; and it was not until the very middle of the following century that any effective approach was made to that universality which Bossuet did little more than talk about, and then it came not from theology, but from the much more hopeful sources of a rational philosophy. Before Montesquieu no single stone of the foundation of scientific history can be said to have been laid. Of course, far earlier writers had sought after the circumstances which brought about a given transaction. Thucydides, for example, had attributed the cause of the Peloponnesian war to the alarm of the Lacedemonians at the greatness of the power of Athens;1 and it is this sense of the need of explanation, however rudimentary it may be, which distinguishes the great historian from the chronicler, even from a very superior chronicler like Livy, who in his account of even so great an event as the Second Punic War plunges straightway into narrative of what happened without concerning himself why it happened. Tacitus had begun his History with remarks upon the condition of Rome, the feeling of the various armies, the attitude of the provinces, so that, as he says, "non modo casus eventusque rerum, qui plerumque fortuiti sunt, sed ratio etiam caussæque noscantur."2 But these and the like instances in historical literature were only political explanations, more or less adequate, of particular transactions; they were no more than the sagacious remarks of men with statesmanlike minds upon the origin of some single set of circumstances.

The rise from this to the high degree of generality which marks the speculations of Montesquieu, empirical as they are, was as great as the rise from the mere maxims of worldly wisdom to the widest principles of ethical philosophy. It was he who first applied the comparative method to social institutions; who first considered physical conditions or climate, as we now call the sum of local circumstances, in connection with the laws of a country; who first perceived and illustrated how the Natural Order which the Physiocrats only considered in relation to the phenomena of wealth and its production, really extended over its political phenomena as well; who first set the example of viewing a great number of social facts all over the world in groups and classes; and who first definitely and systematically inquired into the causes of a set of complex historical events and institutions, as being both discoverable and intelligible. This was a very marked advance upon both of the ideas, by one or other of which men had previously been content to explain to themselves the course of circumstances in the world; either the inscrutable decrees of an inhuman providence, or the fortuitous vagaries of an eyeless destiny.

(1) Bk. i. 23.

(2) Hist., i. 4.

It was Turgot, however, who completed the historical conception of Montesquieu, in a piece written in 1750, two years after the appearance of the Esprit des Lois, and in one or two other fragmentary compositions of about the same time, which are not the less remarkable because the writer was only twenty-three years old when these advanced ideas presented themselves to his intelligence. Vico, in Italy, had insisted on the doctrine that the course of human affairs is in a cycle, and that they move in a constant and self-repeating orbit. Turgot, on the contrary, with more wisdom, at the opening of his subject is careful to distinguish the ever-varying spectacle of the succession of men from generation to generation, from the circle of identical revolutions in which the phenomena of nature are enclosed. In the one case time only restores at each instant the image of what it has just caused to disappear: in the other, the reason and the passions are ever incessantly producing new events. "All the ages are linked together by a succession of causes and effects which bind the state of the world to all the states that have gone before. The multiplied signs of speech and writing, in supplying men with the means of an assured possession of their thoughts and of communicating them to one another, have formed a common treasure that one generation transmits to another, as an inheritance constantly augmented by the discoveries of each generation; and the human race, looked at from its origin, appears in the eyes of the philosopher one immense whole, which, just as in the case of each individual, has its infancy and its growth."2

3

Pascal and others in ancient and modern times had compared in casual and unfruitful remarks the history of the race to the history of the individual, but Turgot was able in some sort to see the full meaning and extent of the analogy, as well as the limitations proper to it, and to draw from it some of the larger principles which the idea involved. The first proposition in the passage just quoted, that a chain of causes and effects unites cach age with every other age that has gone before, is one of the most memorable sentences in the history of thought. And Turgot not only saw that there is a relation of cause and effect between successive states of society; he had glimpses into some of the conditions of that relation. To a generation that stands on loftier heights his attempts seem rudimentary and strangely simple, but it was these attempts which cut the steps for our ascent. How is it, he asked, for instance, that the succession of social states is not uniform; that they follow with unequal step along the track marked out for them? He found the answer in the inequality of

(1) The well-known words of Thucydides may contain the germ of the same idea, when he speaks of the future as being likely to represent again, after the fashion of human things, "if not the very image, yet the near resemblance of the past," i. 22. 4. (2) Discours en Sorbonne. Euvres de Turgot, ii. 597. (Edition of 1844.) (3) Cf. Sir G. C. Lewis's Methods of Observation in Politics, ii. 439, note.

natural advantages, and he was able to discern the necessity of including in these advantages the presence, apparently accidental, in some communities and not in others of men of especial genius or capacity in some important direction.1 Again he saw that just as in one way natural advantages accelerate the progress of a society, in another natural obstacles also accelerate it, by stimulating men to the efforts necessary to overcome them: Le besoin perfectionne l'instrument. The importance of following the march of the human mind over all the grooves along which it travels to further knowledge was fully present to him, and he dwells repeatedly on the constant play going on between discoveries in one science and those in another. In no writer is there a fuller and more distinct sense of the essential unity and integrity of the history of mankind, nor of the multitude of the mansions in which this vast house is divided and the many keys which he must possess that would open and enter in.

Even in empirical explanations he shows a breadth and accuracy of vision truly striking, considering his own youth and what we may venture to call the youth of his subject. The reader will be able to appreciate this, and to discern at the same time the arbitrary nature of Montesquieu's method, if he will contrast, for example, the remarks of this writer upon Polygamy with the far wider and more sagacious explanation of the circumstances of such an institution given by Turgot.3 Unfortunately, he has left us only short and fragmentary pieces, but they suggest more than many large and complete works. That they had a very powerful and direct influence upon Condorcet there is no doubt, as well from the similarity of general conception between him and Turgot, as from the nearly perfect identity of many passages in their writings. Let us add that in Turgot's fragments we have what is unhappily not a characteristic of Condorcet, the peculiar satisfaction and delight in scientific history of a style which states a fact in such phrases as serve also to reveal its origin, bearings, significance; in which every successive piece of description is so worded as to be self-evidently a link in the chain of explanation, an ordered term in a series of social conditions.

Before returning to Condorcet, we ought to glance at the remarkable piece, written in 1784, in which Kant propounded his idea of a universal or cosmo-political history, that contemplating the agency of the human will upon a large scale should unfold to our view a regular stream of tendency in the great succession of events.

(1) Euvres de Turgot, ii. 599, 645, &c.

(2) ii. 601.

The

(3) Esprit des Lois, xvi. cc. 2—4. And Discours sur l'Histoire Universelle, in Turgot's Works, ii. 640-641.

(4) Idea of a Universal History on a Cosmo-Political Plan. It was translated by De Quincey, and is to be found in vol. xiii. of his collected works, pp. 133–152.

will metaphysically considered, Kant said, is free, but its manifestations, that is to say, human actions, " are as much under the control of universal laws of nature as any other physical phenomena."

The very same course of incidents, which taken separately and individually would have seemed perplexed and incoherent, "yet viewed in their connection and as the action of the human species and not of independent beings, never fail to observe a steady and continuous though slow development of certain great predispositions in our nature." As it is impossible to presume in the human race any rational purpose of its own, we must seek to observe some natural purpose in the current of human actions. Thus a history of creatures with no plan of their own may yet admit a systematic form as a history of creatures blindly pursuing a plan of nature. Now we know that all predispositions are destined to develop themselves according to their final purpose. Man's rational predispositions are destined to develop themselves in the species and not in the individual. History then is the progress of the development of all the tendencies laid in man by nature. The method of development is the antagonism of these tendencies in the social state, and its source the unsocial sociality of man-a tendency to enter the social state, combined with a perpetual resistance to that tendency, which is ever threatening to dissolve it. The play of these two tendencies unfolds talents of every kind, and by gradual increase of light a preparation is made for such a mode of thinking as is capable of "exalting a social concert that had been pathologically extorted from the mere necessities of situation, into a moral union founded on the reasonable choice." Hence the highest problem for man is the establishment of a universal civil society, founded on the empire of political justice; and "the history of the human species as a whole may be regarded as the unravelling of a hidden plan of nature for accomplishing a perfect state of civil constitution for society in its internal relations (and, as the condition of that, in its external relations also), as the sole state of society in which the tendencies of human nature can be all and fully developed." Nor is this all. We shall not only be able to unravel the intricate web of past affairs, but shall also find a clue for the guidance of future statesmen in the art of political prediction. Nay more, this clue "will open a consolatory prospect into futurity, in which at a remote distance we shall observe the human species seated upon an eminence won by infinite toil, where all the germs are unfolded which nature has implanted, and its destination on this earth accomplished."

That this conception involves an assumption about tendencies and final purposes which reverses the true method of history, and moreover reduces what ought to be a scientific inquiry to be a foregone justification of Nature or Providence, should not prevent us from