h the spirit of epochs is lost, and the direction, meaning, and
summary of the various courses of human history all disappear.
Voltaire's _Essai sur les Moeurs_ shows a perfectly true notion of what
kind of history is worth either writing or reading. Robertson's _View of
the Progress of Society in Europe from the Fall of the Roman Empire to
the Sixteenth Century_ is--with all its imperfections--admirably just,
sensible, and historic in its whole scope and treatment. Raynal himself,
though far below such writers as Voltaire and Robertson in judgment and
temper, yet is not without a luminous breadth of outlook, and does not
forget the superior importance of the effect of events on European
development, over any possible number of minute particularities in the
events themselves. He does not forget, for instance, in describing the
Portuguese conquests in the East Indies, to point out that the most
remarkable and momentous thing about them was the check that they
inflicted on the growth of the Ottoman Power, at a moment in European
history when the Christian states were least able to resist, and least
likely to combine against the designs of Solyman.[166] This is really
the observation best worth making about the Portuguese conquests, and it
illustrates Raynal's habit, and the habit of the good minds of that
century, of incessantly measuring events by their consequences to
western enlightenment and freedom, and of dropping out of sight all
irrelevancies of detail.

[165] Senac de Meilhan, 123.

[166] Book i. Sec. 7. Robertson works out this reflection in his
_Historical Disquisition concerning Ancient India_, iv. Sec. 8.

This signal merit need not blind us to Raynal's shortcomings in the
other direction. There are very few dates. The total absence of
references and authorities was condemned by Gibbon as "the unpardonable
blemish of what is otherwise a most entertaining book." There is no
criticism. As Raynal was a mere literary compiler, it was not to be
expected that he should rise above the common deficiencies in the
thought and methods of his time. It was not to be expected that he
should deal with the various groups of phenomena among primitive races,
in the scientific spirit of modern anthropology. It is true that he was
contemporary with De Brosses, who ranks among the founders of the study
of the origins of human culture. One sentence of De Brosses would have
warned Raynal against a vicious method, whic