belonged to an older
generation--but his principles were the same.

The Abbe de Saint-Pierre thus represents the transition from the earlier
Cartesianism, which was occupied with purely intellectual problems, to
the later thought of the eighteenth century, which concentrated itself
on social problems. He anticipated the "humanistic" spirit of the
Encyclopaedists, who were to make man, in a new sense, the centre of
the world. He originated, or at least was the first to proclaim, the new
creed of man's destinies, indefinite social progress.

CHAPTER VII. NEW CONCEPTIONS OF HISTORY: MONTESQUIEU, VOLTAIRE, TURGOT

The theory of human Progress could not be durably established by
abstract arguments, or on the slender foundations laid by the Abbe de
Saint-Pierre. It must ultimately be judged by the evidence afforded
by history, and it is not accidental that, contemporaneously with the
advent of this idea, the study of history underwent a revolution. If
Progress was to be more than the sanguine dream of an optimist it must
be shown that man's career on earth had not been a chapter of accidents
which might lead anywhere or nowhere, but is subject to discoverable
laws which have determined its general route, and will secure his
arrival at the desirable place. Hitherto a certain order and unity had
been found in history by the Christian theory of providential design and
final causes. New principles of order and unity were needed to replace
the principles which rationalism had discredited. Just as the advance of
science depended on the postulate that physical phenomena are subject
to invariable laws, so if any conclusions were to be drawn from history
some similar postulate as to social phenomena was required.

It was thus in harmony with the general movement of thought that about
the middle of the eighteenth century new lines of investigation were
opened leading to sociology, the history of civilisation, and the
philosophy of history. Montesquieu's De l'esprit des lois, which may
claim to be the parent work of modern social science, Voltaire's Essai
sur les moeurs, and Turgot's plan of a Histoire universelle begin a new
era in man's vision of the past.

1.

Montesquieu was not among the apostles of the idea of Progress. It
never secured any hold upon his mind. But he had grown up in the same
intellectual climate in which that idea was produced; he had been
nurtured both on the dissolving, dialectic of Bayle, and on the