evolution, the
pre-dominant importance of the masses was the assumption which made
it possible to apply evolutional principles to history. And it enabled
Condorcet himself to maintain that the history of civilisation, a
progress still far from being complete, was a development conditioned by
general laws.

6. The assimilation of society to an organism, which was a governing
notion in the school of Savigny, and the conception of progress,
combined to produce the idea of an organic development, in which the
historian has to determine the central principle or leading character.
This is illustrated by the apotheosis of democracy in Tocqueville's
"Democratie en Amerique", where the theory is maintained that "the
gradual and progressive development of equality is at once the past and
the future of the history of men." The same two principles are combined
in the doctrine of Spencer (who held that society is an organism,
though he also contemplated its being what he calls a "super-organic
aggregate") (A society presents suggestive analogies with an organism,
but it certainly is not an organism, and sociologists who draw
inferences from the assumption of its organic nature must fall into
error. A vital organism and a society are radically distinguished by the
fact that the individual components of the former, namely the cells,
are morphologically as well as functionally differentiated, whereas the
individuals which compose a society are morphologically homogeneous and
only functionally differentiated. The resemblances and the differences
are worked out in E. de Majewski's striking book "La Science de la
Civilisation", Paris, 1908.), that social evolution is a progressive
change from militarism to industrialism.

7. the idea of development assumed another form in the speculations of
German idealism. Hegel conceived the successive periods of history as
corresponding to the ascending phases or ideas in the self-evolution
of his Absolute Being. His "Lectures on the Philosophy of History" were
published in 1837 after his death. His philosophy had a considerable
effect, direct and indirect, on the treatment of history by historians,
and although he was superficial and unscientific himself in dealing with
historical phenomena, he contributed much towards making the idea of
historical development familiar. Ranke was influenced, if not by Hegel
himself, at least by the Idealistic philosophies of which Hegel's was
the greatest. He was