the causes of a set of complex historical
events and institutions, as being both discoverable and intelligible.
This was a very marked advance upon both of the ideas, by one or other
of which men had previously been content to explain to themselves the
course of circumstances in the world; either the inscrutable decrees of
an inhuman providence, or the fortuitous vagaries of an eyeless destiny.

It was Turgot, however, who completed the historical conception of
Montesquieu, in a piece written in 1750, two years after the appearance
of the _Esprit des Lois_, and in one or two other fragmentary
compositions of about the same time, which are not the less remarkable
because the writer was only twenty-three years old when these advanced
ideas presented themselves to his intelligence. Vico in Italy had
insisted on the doctrine that the course of human affairs is in a cycle,
and that they move in a constant and self-repeating orbit.[49] Turgot,
on the contrary, with more wisdom, at the opening of his subject is
careful to distinguish the ever-varying spectacle of the succession of
men from generation to generation, from the circle of identical
revolutions in which the phenomena of nature are enclosed. In the one
case time only restores at each instant the image of what it has just
caused to disappear; in the other, the reason and the passions are ever
incessantly producing new events. 'All the ages are linked together by
a succession of causes and effects which bind the state of the world to
all the states that have gone before. The multiplied signs of speech and
writing, in supplying men with the means of an assured possession of
their thoughts and of communicating them to one another, have formed a
common treasure that one generation transmits to another, as an
inheritance constantly augmented by the discoveries of each generation;
and the human race, looked at from its origin, appears in the eyes of
the philosopher one immense whole, which, just as in the case of each
individual, has its infancy and its growth.'[50]

Pascal and others in ancient and modern times[51] had compared in casual
and unfruitful remarks the history of the race to the history of the
individual, but Turgot was able in some sort to see the full meaning and
extent of the analogy, as well as the limitations proper to it, and to
draw from it some of the larger principles which the idea involved. The
first proposition in the passage just quoted, that a ch