of them could even see in a vague way the
interdependence of peoples and the community of the real interests of
different nations, each nation, as De la Riviere expressed it, being
only a province of the vast kingdom of nature, a branch from the same
trunk as the rest.[45] What they could not see was the great fact of
social evolution; and here too, in the succession of social states,
there has been a natural and observable order. In a word, they tried to
understand society without the aid of history. Consequently they laid
down the truths which they discovered as absolute and fixed, when they
were no more than conditional and relative.

Fortunately inquirers in another field had set a movement afoot, which
was destined to furnish the supplement of their own speculation. This
was the remarkable development of the conception of history, which
Montesquieu's two memorable books first made conspicuous. Bossuet's
well-known discourse on universal history, teeming as it does with
religious prejudice, just as Condorcet's sketch teems with prejudice
against religion, and egregiously imperfect in execution as it must be
pronounced when judged from even the meanest historical standard, had
perhaps partially introduced the spirit of Universality, as Comte says,
into the study of history. But it was impossible from the nature of the
case for any theologian to know fully what this spirit means; and it was
not until the very middle of the following century that any effective
approach was made to that universality which Bossuet did little more
than talk about. Then it came not from theology, but from the much more
hopeful sources of a rational philosophy. Before Montesquieu no single
stone of the foundation of scientific history can be said to have been
laid. Of course, far earlier writers had sought after the circumstances
which brought about a given transaction. Thucydides, for example, had
attributed the cause of the Peloponnesian war to the alarm of the
Lacedaemonians at the greatness of the power of Athens.[46] It is this
sense of the need of explanation, however rudimentary it may be, which
distinguishes the great historian from the chronicler, even from a very
superior chronicler like Livy, who in his account of even so great an
event as the Second Punic War plunges straightway into narrative of what
happened, without concerning himself why it happened. Tacitus had begun
his _Histories_ with remarks upon the condition of Rome, t