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 evolution, the predominant
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"),[238] that social evolution is a
progressive change from militarism t