om Turgot, and places them
relatively to his idea in a secondary rank. In a word, Montesquieu and
Voltaire, if we have to search their most distinctive quality,
introduced into history systematically, and with full and decisive
effect, a broad generality of treatment. They grouped the facts of
history; and they did not group them locally or in accordance with mere
geographical or chronological division, but collected the facts in
social classes and orders from many countries and times. Their work was
a work of classification. It showed the possibility of arranging the
manifold and complex facts of society, and of the movements of
communities, under heads and with reference to definite general
conditions.

[Footnote 40: Preface to _Essai sur les Moeurs_, _OEuv._ xx.]

There is no need here to enter into any criticism of Montesquieu's great
work, how far the merits of its execution equalled the merit of its
design, how far his vicious confusion of the senses of the word 'law'
impaired the worth of his book, as a contribution to inductive or
comparative history. We have only to seek the difference between the
philosophic conception of Montesquieu and the philosophic conception of
Turgot. The latter may be considered a more liberal completion of the
former. Turgot not only sees the operation of law in the movements and
institutions of society, but he interprets this law in a positive and
scientific sense, as an ascertainable succession of social states, each
of them being the cause and effect of other social states. Turgot gives
its deserved prominence to the fertile idea of there being an ordered
movement of growth or advance among societies; in other words, of the
civilisation of any given portion of mankind having fixed conditions
analogous to those of a physical organism. Finally, he does not limit
his thought by fixing it upon the laws and constitutions only of
countries, but refers historical philosophy to its veritable and widest
object and concern, the steps and conditions of the progression of the
human mind.

How, he inquires, can we seize the thread of the progress of the human
mind? How trace the road, now overgrown and half-hidden, along which the
race has travelled? Two ideas suggest themselves, which lay foundations
for this inquiry. For one thing, the resources of nature and the
fruitful germ of all sorts of knowledge are to be found wherever men are
to be found. 'The sublimest attainments are not, and ca