by abstract expressions such as essences and
faculties." That is the metaphysical stage. "It was only at a later
period, that by observing the reciprocal mechanical action of bodies
hypotheses were formed which could be developed by mathematics and
verified by experience." There is the positive stage. The observation
assuredly does not possess the far-reaching importance which Comte
attached to it; but whatever value it has, Turgot deserves the credit of
having been the first to state it.

The notes which Turgot made for his plan permit us to conjecture that
his Universal History would have been a greater and more profound work
than the Essay of Voltaire. It would have embodied in a digested form
the ideas of Montesquieu to which Voltaire paid little attention, and
the author would have elaborated the intimate connection and mutual
interaction among all social phenomena--government and morals, religion,
science, and arts. While his general thesis coincided with that
of Voltaire--the gradual advance of humanity towards a state of
enlightenment and reasonableness,--he made the idea of Progress more
vital; for him it was an organising conception, just as the idea of
Providence was for St. Augustine and Bossuet an organising conception,
which gave history its unity and meaning. The view that man has
throughout been blindly moving in the right direction is the counterpart
of what Bossuet represented as a divine plan wrought out by the actions
of men who are ignorant of it, and is sharply opposed to the views, of
Voltaire and the other philosophers of the day who ascribed Progress
exclusively to human reason consciously striving against ignorance and
passion.

CHAPTER VIII. THE ENCYCLOPAEDISTS AND ECONOMISTS

1.

The intellectual movement which prepared French opinion for the
Revolution and supplied the principles for reconstituting society may
be described as humanistic in the sense that man was the centre of
speculative interest.

"One consideration especially that we ought never to lose from sight,"
says Diderot, "is that, if we ever banish a man, or the thinking and
contemplative being, from above the surface of the earth, this pathetic
and sublime spectacle of nature becomes no more than a scene of
melancholy and silence... It is the presence of man that gives its
interest to the existence of other beings... Why should we not make him
a common centre?... Man is the single term from which we ought to set
out."