rom its first beginning, seems in the eyes of the philosopher
to be one vast whole, which, like each individual in it, has its infancy
and its growth.'

This was not a mere casual reflection in Turgot's mind, taking a
solitary and separate position among those various and unordered ideas,
which spring up and go on existing without visible fruit in every active
intelligence. It was one of the systematic conceptions which shape and
rule many groups of facts, fixing a new and high place of their own for
them among the great divisions of knowledge. In a word, it belonged to
the rare order of truly creative ideas, and was the root or germ of a
whole body of vigorous and connected thought. This quality marks the
distinction, in respect of the treatment of history, between Turgot, and
both Bossuet and the great writers of history in France and England in
the eighteenth century. Many of the sayings to which we are referred for
the origin of the modern idea of history, such as Pascal's for instance,
are the fortuitous glimpses of men of genius into a vast sea, whose
extent they have not been led to suspect, and which only make a passing
and momentary mark. Bossuet's talk of universal history, which has been
so constantly praised, was fundamentally, and in substance, no more than
a bit of theological commonplace splendidly decorated. He did indeed
speak of 'the concatenation of human affairs,' but only in the same
sentence with 'the sequence of the counsels of God.' The gorgeous
rhetorician of the Church was not likely to rise philosophically into
the larger air of universal history, properly so called. His famous
Discourse is a vindication of divine foresight, by means of an intensely
narrow survey of such sets of facts as might be thought not inconsistent
with the deity's fixed purpose to make one final and decisive revelation
to men. No one who looks upon the vast assemblage of stupendous human
circumstances, from the first origin of man upon the earth, as merely
the ordained antecedent of what, seen from the long procession of all
the ages, figures in so diminutive a consummation as the Catholic
Church, is likely to obtain a very effective hold of that broad sequence
and many-linked chain of events, to which Bossuet gave a right name, but
whose real meaning he never was even near seizing. His merit is that he
did in a small and rhetorical way what Montesquieu and Voltaire
afterwards did in a truly comprehensive and philosophic