seventh book, which is on the Roman laws of succession, is historical, but probably not very important.

The twenty-eighth book, which is on the origin and revolutions. of the civil laws among the French, and the two books on the feudal system with which the work closes, are at once intrinsically valuable and not less interesting to the student of the philosophy of history than of law. Although numerous errors of fact and theory have been detected in them, they display a kind of learning which was very rare and difficult to acquire in the age of Montesquieu, and an originality and power of historical combination rare in any age. They have undoubtedly had great influence in evoking and directing later research into the origin, formation, and constitution of the feudal system and of French medieval society.

Montesquieu had no intention of founding the philosophy of history; and to pronounce him its founder, as Alison has done, is extravagant laudation. It appears to me to be even eulogy in excess of the truth to represent him, as Comte, Maine, and Leslie Stephen have done, as the founder of the historical method. But he did more than any one else to facilitate and ensure its foundation. He showed on a grand scale and in the most effective way, that laws, customs, and institutions can only be judged of intelligently when studied as what they really are, historical phenomena; and that, like all things properly historical, they must be estimated not according to an abstract or absolute standard, but as concrete realities related to given times and places, to their determining causes and condition, and to the whole social organism to which they belong, and the whole social medium in which they subsist. Plato and Aristotle, Machiavelli and Bodin, had already, indeed, inculcated this historical and political relativism; but it was Montesquieu who gained educated Europe over to the acceptance of it. His success was, no doubt, largely due to the ripeness of the time, but it was also in a measure due to his own genius and skill. And once historical relativism was acknowledged, the rise of the historical school, the development of the historical method, and the rapid advance of historical science, naturally followed.

III.

The 'Spirit of Laws' was only completed when its author was nearly sixty years of age, and after he had spent on it twenty years of toil. The work next to be noticed consists simply of two Academic discourses delivered at the Sorbonne in 1750 by a young man of twenty-three, and some sketches or conspectuses written by him, either when a student or shortly after. That young man was, however, Anne Robert James Turgot, one of the wisest and best men of the eighteenth century.1 He was pure and noble in his private life, a zealous philanthropist, an enlightened philosopher, a humane and able governor, a sagacious statesman. He was the friend of all true progress, but he avoided and reproved the excesses which were advocated in its name. He saw and abhorred the sins of the Church, but they did not hide from him the beauty of religion. He discriminated, as perhaps no other of his contemporaries did, not even Montesquieu, between the good and evil in social institutions, and between the essential and accidental in all things.

The theme of the first of his discourses at the Sorbonne was "The Benefits which the establishment of Christianity has procured to mankind." Briefly but eloquently he contrasts Christian and heathen civilisation, so as to indicate the superiority of the former over the latter, and the unreasonableness of the exaggerated admiration of antiquity, and the contemptuous estimate of Christianity which had begun to prevail. By means of a rapid survey of the general and outstanding facts of history, he seeks to show that the Christian religion had diffused truth,

1 The following are among the best works on Turgot: (1) Mastier (A.), ‘Turgot, sa vie et sa doctrine'; (2) Batbie (A.), ‘Turgot: philosophe, économiste, et administrateur' (1861); (3) Foncin (P.), 'Essai sur le ministère de Turgot' (1877); and (4) Neymark (A.), 'Turgot et ses doctrines,' 2 vols. (1885). The 'Éloge de Turgot' of Baudrillart; the two lectures on 'Turgot: his Life, Times, and Opinions,' by Hodgson; the essay on Turgot by Morley in his 'Critical Miscellanies'; and the monograph on Turgot by L. Say,—deserve to be specially mentioned. The Correspondance Inédite de Condorcet et de Turgot' (17701779), published in 1883, under the supervision of M. Henry, is of some interest to a student of their theories of history. Renouvier has made a careful study of Turgot's theory of progress in the 'Critique Philosophique,' année ix., tom. ii. 385-396, 400-407, année x., tom. i. 17-27.

·

destroyed errors, promoted intellectual progress, evoked and enlarged human sympathies, improved morals, strengthened what was good, and weakened what was evil in personal and social, private and public life, and, in particular, afforded the needed counterpoise to the universal selfishness from which proceeds universal injustice. The chief reason why Turgot's view of the course of history was so much more comprehensive, and so much more consistent both with facts and in itself, than that of Condorcet and other atheists of the eighteenth century, was that he was able, and they were not, to appreciate in a fair and sympathetic spirit the services which Christianity had rendered to mankind. It would be easy to overestimate, however, the intrinsic worth of the first discourse. For while it is high-toned in thought and eloquent in expression, it has no claim to originality, ingenuity, or thoroughness. Its purpose and limits did not allow, indeed, of the display of these qualities.

The second discourse, which had for its subject "The successive Advances of the human mind," was much more important. Here, for the first time, the idea of progress was made, as M. Caro has said, "the organic principle of history." In contrast to the movement of the physical phenomena of nature, and of the vegetable and animal species, through constantly recurring cycles of change, history is represented as the life of humanity, ever progressing towards perfection, from generation to generation, from stage to stage, from nation to nation, and by alternations of rest and agitation, success and failure, decay and revival. None before Turgot, and few after him, have described so well how age is bound to age, how generation transmits to generation what it has inherited from the past and won by its own exertions. The notion of progress is apprehended by him with a fulness as well as clearness which will be sought in vain in Bodin, Bacon, Pascal, or any other predecessor. In him what we find is no longer a simple affirmation or general view, the identification of progress with the advance of knowledge, or with anything which can be predicated merely of specially favoured nations or privileged classes, but it is a something which embraces all space and time, which includes all the elements of life, and in which the race as such is

meant to participate. The progress of humanity means, according to Turgot, the gradual evolution and elevation of man's nature as a whole, the enlightenment of his intelligence, the expansion and purification of his feelings, the amelioration of his worldly lot, and, in a word, the spread of truth, virtue, liberty, and comfort, more and more among all classes of men. He seeks to prove from the whole history of the past, that there has been such progress; and he professes his belief that there will be such progress in the future, on the ground that mankind seems to him like an immense army directed in all its movements by a vast genius, who alone sees the end towards which these movements advance and converge. As

a picture of universal history taken from this high and hopeful point of view, his second discourse is so admirable that it is not likely to be surpassed by any composition on the same scale.

Turgot formed the design of giving full expression to his thought by writing an elaborate work on universal history, or, if time should be wanting for that, on the progress and vicissitudes of the arts and sciences. His duties, first, as administrator of a province, and afterwards as finance minister of the nation, prevented the realisation of this intention; but the sketches and notes committed by him to paper in 1750, are sufficient to show us how he meant to carry it out. There can be no reasonable doubt that, even if the smaller, but especially if the larger scheme had been accomplished, the result would have been one of the grandest literary and philosophical productions of the eighteenth century,—a work nobly planned and richly stored with facts and truths. the philosophy of history be merely a scientific representation of universal history as a process of progressive development, Turgot has probably a better claim than any one else to be called its founder. Perhaps this was all that Cousin meant when he so designated him.

If

This, then, was the great service of Turgot to the philosophy of history, that he definitively showed history to be no mere aggregate of names, dates, and deeds, brought together and determined either accidentally or externally, but an organic whole with an internal plan progressively realised by internal forces. He so apprehended and proved this truth that it may

fairly be called, so far at least as French authors are concerned, his conquest, his contribution to historical science.

The mere conception of progress was, when Turgot wrote, no longer novel. Yet it had become dim and inoperative in the minds even of the leading teachers of France; had been extruded by the inrush of the new ideas of liberty, fraternity, justice, and equality, and the expulsive power of the new affections to which these ideas gave rise. Hence in the writings of Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot, it was conspicuous only by its absence, and in those of Rousseau was vehemently assailed. Turgot, however, not only restored it to honour, but so deepened, enlarged, and developed it, that it acquired with him a profundity, a comprehensiveness, and a consistency quite novel.

His view of social progress, I say, was profound. It was a deep glance into its nature as a process of self-development; as a process the successive phases of which were what they were, because man was so and so made and situated. He not merely saw the fact of progress, that physical and political causes greatly affected it, and that like every other process it might be referred to the will of the great First Cause; but he saw likewise how it was connected with the essential faculties of man, and the constitutive principles of society. No one before him had perceived with anything like the same clearness how the mental or spiritual movement in history underlies, originates, and pervades the outwardly visible movement. M. Martin, whose account of Turgot is in general excellent, errs greatly when he blames him "for regarding progress too much as the result of external phenomena, and not sufficiently as the manifestation of the internal energies of man." This charge is altogether inapplicable, as any one may easily convince himself by reading, for instance, the first portion of the Ébauche du Second Discours.'

As regards comprehensiveness, Turgot's view embraced all the elements of social life. Science, art, government, manners, morality, religion, were all held by him to be the subjects of historical progress, and consequently of historical philosophy. At the same time he was quite aware that none of these things are developed isolatedly, but that, on the contrary, the position of any one of them at any given time is closely related to that