y other of the leading thinkers of the
Encyclopaedia epoch into optimistic dreams of the future which might
await mankind. They had a much clearer conception of obstacles than the
good Abbe de Saint-Pierre. Helvetius agrees with d'Holbach that progress
will be slow, and Diderot is wavering and sceptical of the question of
indefinite social improvement. [Footnote: De l'esprit, Disc. ii. cc. 24,
25.]

6.

The reformers of the Encyclopaedia group were not alone in disseminating
the idea of Progress. Another group of thinkers, who widely differed in
their principles, though some of them had contributed articles to
the Encyclopaedia, [Footnote: Quesnay and Turgot, who, though not
professedly a Physiocrat, held the same views as the sect.] also did
much to make it a power. The rise of the special study of Economics
was one of the most significant facts in the general trend of thought
towards the analysis of civilisation. Economical students found that in
seeking to discover a true theory of the production, distribution, and
employment of wealth, they could not avoid the consideration of the
constitution and purpose of society. The problems of production and
distribution could not be divorced from political theory: production
raises the question of the functions of government and the limits of its
intervention in trade and industry; distribution involve questions of
property, justice, and equality. The employment of riches leads into the
domain of morals.

The French Economists or "Physiocrats," as they were afterwards called,
who formed a definite school before 1760--Quesnay the master, Mirabeau,
Mercier de la Riviere, and the rest--envisaged their special subject
from a wide philosophical point of view; their general economic theory
was equivalent to a theory of human society. They laid down the doctrine
of a Natural Order in political communities, and from it they deduced
their economic teaching.

They assumed, like the Encyclopaedists, that the end of society is the
attainment of terrestrial happiness by its members, and that this is the
sole purpose of government. The object of a treatise by Mercier de la
Riviere [Footnote: L'ordre naturel et essentiel des societes politiqes,
1767.] (a convenient exposition of the views of the sect) is, in his own
words, to discover the natural order for the government of men living in
organised communities, which will assure to them temporal felicity: an
order in which everything is