y of bees cannot become scientific so long as the student's
interest in them is only to procure honey or to derive moral lessons
from the labours of "the little busy bee," so the history of human
societies cannot become the object of pure scientific investigation so
long as man estimates its value in pragmatical scales. Nor can it become
a science until it is conceived as lying entirely within a sphere
in which the law of cause and effect has unreserved and unrestricted
dominion. On the other hand, once history is envisaged as a causal
process, which contains within itself the explanation of the development
of man from his primitive state to the point which he has reached, such
a process necessarily becomes the object of scientific investigation and
the interest in it is scientific curiosity.

At the same time, the instruments were sharpened and refined. Here Wolf,
a philologist with historical instinct, was a pioneer. His "Prolegomena"
to Homer (1795) announced new modes of attack. Historical investigation
was soon transformed by the elaboration of new methods.

5. "Progress" involves a judgment of value, which is not involved in the
conception of history as a genetic process. It is also an idea distinct
from that of evolution. Nevertheless it is closely related to the ideas
which revolutionised history at the beginning of the last century;
it swam into men's ken simultaneously; and it helped effectively to
establish the notion of history as a continuous process and to emphasise
the significance of time. Passing over earlier anticipations, I may
point to a "Discours" of Turgot (1750), where history is presented as a
process in which "the total mass of the human race" "marches continually
though sometimes slowly to an ever increasing perfection." That is
a clear statement of the conception which Turgot's friend Condorcet
elaborated in the famous work, published in 1795, "Esquisse d'un tableau
historique des progres de l'esprit humain". This work first treated with
explicit fulness the idea to which a leading role was to fall in the
ideology of the nineteenth century. Condorcet's book reflects the
triumphs of the Tiers etat, whose growing importance had also inspired
Turgot; it was the political changes in the eighteenth century which led
to the doctrine, emphatically formulated by Condorcet, that the masses
are the most important element in the historical process. I dwell
on this because, though Condorcet had no idea of