ition of
the Esprit des lois, Voltaire was writing his Age of Louis XIV. and his
Essay on the Manners and Mind of Nations, and on the Principal Facts of
History from Charlemagne to the Death of Louis XIII. The former work,
which everybody reads still, appeared in 1751. Parts of the Essay, which
has long since fallen into neglect, were published in the Mercure de
France between 1745 and 1751; it was issued complete in 1756, along with
the Age of Louis XIV., which was its continuation. If we add the Precis
of the Reign of Louis XV. (1769), and observe that the Introduction and
first fourteen chapters of the Essay sketch the history of the world
before Charlemagne, and that China, India, and America are included
in the survey, Voltaire's work amounts to a complete survey of the
civilisation of the world from the earliest times to his own. If
Montesquieu founded social science, Voltaire created the history of
civilisation, and the Essay, for all its limitations, stands out as one
of the considerable books of the century.

In his Age of Louis XIV. he announced that his object was "to paint not
the actions of a single man, but the mind of men (l'esprit des hommes)
in the most enlightened age that had ever been," and that "the progress
of the arts and sciences" was an essential part of his subject. In
the same way he proposed in the Essay to trace "l'histoire de l'esprit
humain," not the details of facts, and to show by what steps man
advanced "from the barbarous rusticity" of the times of Charlemagne and
his successors "to the politeness of our own." To do this, he said, was
really to write the history of opinion, for all the great successive
social and political changes which have transformed the world were due
to changes of opinion. Prejudice succeeded prejudice, error followed
error; "at last, with time men came to correct their ideas and learn to
think."

The motif of the book is, briefly, that wars and religions have been
the great obstacles to the progress of humanity, and that if they were
abolished, with the prejudices which engender them, the world would
rapidly improve.

"We may believe," he says, "that reason and industry will always
progress more and more; that the useful arts will be improved; that
of the evils which have afflicted men, prejudices, which are not their
least scourge, will gradually disappear among all those who govern
nations, and that philosophy, universally diffused, will give some
consolati