to do justice to
the great army of the precursors.

Two movements of thought went on in France during the middle of the
eighteenth century, which have been comparatively little dwelt upon by
historians; their main anxiety has been to justify the foregone
conclusion, so gratifying alike to the partisans of the social reaction
and to the disciples of modern transcendentalism in its many disguises,
that the eighteenth century was almost exclusively negative, critical,
and destructive. Each of these two currents was positive in the highest
degree, and their influence undeniably constructive, if we consider that
it was from their union into a common channel, a work fully accomplished
first in the mind of Condorcet, that the notion of the scientific
treatment of history and society took its earliest start.

The first of the two movements, and that which has been most
unaccountably neglected, consisted in the remarkable attempts of Quesnay
and his immediate followers to withdraw the organisation of society from
the sphere of empiricism, and to substitute for the vulgar conception
of arbitrary and artificial institutions as the sole foundation of this
organisation, the idea that there is a certain Natural Order, conformity
to which in all social arrangements is the essential condition of their
being advantageous to the members of the social union. Natural Order in
the minds of this school was no metaphysical figment evolved from
uninstructed consciousness, but a set of circumstances to be discovered
by continuous and methodical observation. It consisted of physical law
and moral law. Physical law is the regulated course of every physical
circumstance in the order evidently most advantageous to the human race.
Moral law is the rule of every human action in the moral order,
conformed to the physical order evidently most advantageous to the human
race. This order is the base of the most perfect government, and the
fundamental rule of all positive laws; for positive laws are only such
laws as are required to keep up and maintain the natural order that is
evidently most advantageous to the race.[42]

Towards the close of the reign of Lewis XIV. the frightful
impoverishment of the realm attracted the attention of one or two
enlightened observers, and among them of Boisguillebert and Vauban. They
had exposed, the former of them with especial force and amplitude, the
absurdity of the general system of administration, which seemed to