g, than in collecting and comparing and
estimating what has been produced and discovered; which does not press
forward, but gazes backward along the road that has already been
traversed. The studies that require most genius, are not always those
which imply most progress in the mass of men. There are minds to which
nature has given a memory capable of comparing truths, of suggesting an
arrangement that places these truths in the fullest light; but to which,
at the same time, she has refused that ardour of genius which insists on
inventing and opening out for itself new lines of discovery. Made to
unite former discoveries under a single point of view, to surround them
with light, and to exhibit them in entire perfection, if they are not
luminaries that burn and sparkle of themselves, at least they are like
diamonds that reflect with dazzling brilliance a borrowed light.'

Thus Turgot's conception of progress regards it mainly, if not entirely,
as a gradual dawn and diffusion of light, the spreading abroad of the
rays of knowledge. He does not assert, as some moderns have crudely
asserted, that morality is of the nature of a fixed quantity; still he
hints something of the kind. 'Morality,' he says, speaking of Greece in
the time of its early physical speculation, 'though still imperfect,
still kept fewer relics of the infancy of reason. Those everspringing
necessities which so incessantly recall man to society, and force him to
bend to its laws, that instinct, that sentiment of what is good and
right, which Providence has engraved in all hearts, and which precedes
reason, all lead the thinkers of every time back to the same fundamental
principles of the science of morals.'

We meet with this limitation of the idea of progress in every member of
the school to which, more than to any other, Turgot belonged. Even in
the vindication of the claims of Christianity to the gratitude of
mankind, he had forborne from laying stress on any original
contribution, supposed to be made by that religion to the precious stock
of ethical ideas. He dwells upon the 'tender zeal for the progress of
truth that the Christian religion inspired,' and recounts the various
circumstances in which it spread and promoted the social and political
conditions most favourable to intellectual or scientific activity.
Whatever may be the truth or the value of Christianity as a dogmatic
system, there can be little doubt that its weight as a historic force is