two discourses at the
Sorbonne may be briefly described in this way. It recognises the idea of
ordered succession in connection with the facts of society. It considers
this succession as one, not of superficial events, but of working
forces. Thus Bolingbroke, writing fifteen years before, had said that
'as to events that stand recorded in history, we see them all, we see
them as they followed one another, or as they produced one another,
causes or effects, immediate or remote.'[43] But it is very evident from
his illustrations that by all this he understood no more than the
immediate connection between one transaction and another. He thought,
for example, of the Revolution of 1688 being a consequence of the bad
government of James the Second; of this bad government springing from
the king's attachment to popery; this in turn being caused by the exile
of the royal family; this exile having its source in Cromwell's
usurpation; and so forth, one may suppose, down to the Noachian flood,
or the era when the earth was formless and void. It is mere futility to
talk of cause and effect in connection with a string of arbitrarily
chosen incidents of this sort. Cause and effect, in Turgot's sense of
history, describe a relation between certain sets or groups of
circumstances, that are of a peculiarly decisive kind, because the
surface of events conforms itself to their inner working. His account of
these deciding circumstances was not what we should be likely to accept
now, because he limited them too closely to purely intellectual
acquisitions, as we have just seen, and because he failed to see the
necessity of tracing the root of the whole growth to certain principles
in the mental constitution of mankind. But, at all events, his
conception of history rose above merely individual concerns, embraced
the successive movements of societies and their relations to one
another, and sought the spring of revolutions in the affairs of a
community in long trains of preparing conditions, internal and external.
Above all, history was a whole. The fortunes and achievements of each
nation were scrutinised for their effect on the growth of all mankind.

[Footnote 43: _Study of History_, Letter ii.]

IV.

In the year 1761, Turgot, then in his thirty-fourth year, was appointed
to the office of Intendant in the Generality of Limoges. There were
three different divisions of France in the eighteenth century: first and
oldest, the diocese