Chapter 5

Montesquieu and Voltaire were both far enough removed from Bossuet's point of view, and the _Spirit of Laws_ of the one, and the _Essay on the Manners and Character of Nations_ of the other, mark a very different way of considering history from the lofty and confident method of the orthodox rhetorician. The _Spirit of Laws_ was published in 1748, that is to say a couple of years before Turgot's Discourse at the Sorbonne. Voltaire's _Essay on Manners_ did not come out until 1757, or seven years later than the Discourse; but Voltaire himself has told us that its composition dates from 1740, when he prepared this new presentation of European history for the service of Madame du Châtelet.[40] We may hence fairly consider the cardinal work of Montesquieu, and the cardinal historical work of Voltaire, as virtually belonging to the same time. And they possess a leading character in common, which separates them both from Turgot, and places them relatively to his idea in a secondary rank. In a word, Montesquieu and Voltaire, if we have to search their most distinctive quality, introduced into history systematically, and with full and decisive effect, a broad generality of treatment. They grouped the facts of history; and they did not group them locally or in accordance with mere geographical or chronological division, but collected the facts in social classes and orders from many countries and times. Their work was a work of classification. It showed the possibility of arranging the manifold and complex facts of society, and of the movements of communities, under heads and with reference to definite general conditions.

[Footnote 40: Preface to _Essai sur les Moeurs_, _OEuv._ xx.]

There is no need here to enter into any criticism of Montesquieu's great work, how far the merits of its execution equalled the merit of its design, how far his vicious confusion of the senses of the word 'law' impaired the worth of his book, as a contribution to inductive or comparative history. We have only to seek the difference between the philosophic conception of Montesquieu and the philosophic conception of Turgot. The latter may be considered a more liberal completion of the former. Turgot not only sees the operation of law in the movements and institutions of society, but he interprets this law in a positive and scientific sense, as an ascertainable succession of social states, each of them being the cause and effect of other social states. Turgot gives its deserved prominence to the fertile idea of there being an ordered movement of growth or advance among societies; in other words, of the civilisation of any given portion of mankind having fixed conditions analogous to those of a physical organism. Finally, he does not limit his thought by fixing it upon the laws and constitutions only of countries, but refers historical philosophy to its veritable and widest object and concern, the steps and conditions of the progression of the human mind.

How, he inquires, can we seize the thread of the progress of the human mind? How trace the road, now overgrown and half-hidden, along which the race has travelled? Two ideas suggest themselves, which lay foundations for this inquiry. For one thing, the resources of nature and the fruitful germ of all sorts of knowledge are to be found wherever men are to be found. 'The sublimest attainments are not, and cannot be, other than the first ideas of sense developed or combined, just as the edifice whose height most amazes the eye, of necessity reposes on the very earth that we tread; and the same senses, the same organs, the spectacle of the same universe, have everywhere given men the same ideas, as the same needs and the same dispositions have everywhere taught them the same arts.' Or it might be put in other words. There is identity in human nature, and repetition in surrounding circumstance means the reproduction of social consequences. For another thing, 'the actual state of the universe, by presenting at the same moment on the earth all the shades of barbarism and civilisation, discloses to us as in a single glance the monuments, the footprints of all the steps of the human mind, the measure of the whole track along which it has passed, the history of all the ages.'

The progress of the human mind means to Turgot the progress of knowledge. Its history is the history of the growth and spread of science and the arts. Its advance is increased enlightenment of the understanding. From Adam and Eve down to Lewis the Fourteenth, the record of progress is the chronicle of the ever-increasing additions to the sum of what men know, and the accuracy and fulness with which they know. The chief instrument in this enlightenment is the rising up from time to time of some lofty and superior intelligence; for though human character contains everywhere the same principle, yet certain minds are endowed with a peculiar abundance of talent that is refused to others. 'Circumstances develop these superior talents, or leave them buried in obscurity; and from the infinite variety of these circumstances springs the inequality among nations.' The agricultural stage goes immediately before a decisively polished state, because it is then first that there is that surplus of means of subsistence, which allows men of higher capacity the leisure for using it in the acquisition of knowledge, properly so called.

One of the greatest steps was the precious invention of writing, and one of the most rapid was the constitution of mathematical knowledge. The sciences that came next matured more slowly, because in mathematics the explorer has only to compare ideas among one another, while in the others he has to test the conformity of ideas to objective facts. Mathematical truths, becoming more numerous every day, and increasingly fruitful in proportion, lead to the development of hypotheses at once more extensive and more exact, and point to new experiments, which in their turn furnish new problems to solve. 'So necessity perfects the instrument; so mathematics finds support in physics, to which it lends its lamp; so all knowledge is bound together; so, notwithstanding the diversity of their advance, all the sciences lend one another mutual aid; and so, by force of feeling a way, of multiplying systems, of exhausting errors, so to speak, the world at length arrives at the knowledge of a vast number of truths.' It might seem as if a prodigious confusion, as of tongues, would arise from so enormous an advance along so many lines. 'The different sciences, originally confined within a few simple notions common to all, can now, after their advance into more extensive and difficult ideas, only be surveyed apart. But an advance, greater still, brings them together again, because that mutual dependence of all truths is discovered, which, while it links them one to another, throws light on one by another.'

Alas, the history of opinion is, in one of its most extensive branches, the history of error. The senses are the single source of our ideas, and furnish its models to the imagination. Hence that nearly incorrigible disposition to judge what we are ignorant of by what we know; hence those deceptive analogies to which the primitive rudeness of men surrenders itself. '_As they watched nature, as their eyes wandered to the surface of a profound ocean, instead of the far-off bed hidden under the waters, they saw nothing but their own likeness._ Every object in nature had its god, and this god formed after the pattern of men, had men's attributes and men's vices.'[41] Here, in anthropomorphism, or the transfer of human quality to things not human, and the invention of spiritual existences to be the recipients of this quality, Turgot justly touched the root of most of the wrong thinking that has been as a manacle to science.

[Footnote 41: P. 601.]

His admiration for those epochs in which new truths were most successfully discovered, and old fallacies most signally routed, did not prevent Turgot from appreciating the ages of criticism and their services to knowledge. He does full justice to Alexandria, not only for its astronomy and geometry, but for that peculiar studiousness 'which exercises itself less on things than on books; whose strength lies less in producing and discovering, than in collecting and comparing and estimating what has been produced and discovered; which does not press forward, but gazes backward along the road that has already been traversed. The studies that require most genius, are not always those which imply most progress in the mass of men. There are minds to which nature has given a memory capable of comparing truths, of suggesting an arrangement that places these truths in the fullest light; but to which, at the same time, she has refused that ardour of genius which insists on inventing and opening out for itself new lines of discovery. Made to unite former discoveries under a single point of view, to surround them with light, and to exhibit them in entire perfection, if they are not luminaries that burn and sparkle of themselves, at least they are like diamonds that reflect with dazzling brilliance a borrowed light.'

Thus Turgot's conception of progress regards it mainly, if not entirely, as a gradual dawn and diffusion of light, the spreading abroad of the rays of knowledge. He does not assert, as some moderns have crudely asserted, that morality is of the nature of a fixed quantity; still he hints something of the kind. 'Morality,' he says, speaking of Greece in the time of its early physical speculation, 'though still imperfect, still kept fewer relics of the infancy of reason. Those everspringing necessities which so incessantly recall man to society, and force him to bend to its laws, that instinct, that sentiment of what is good and right, which Providence has engraved in all hearts, and which precedes reason, all lead the thinkers of every time back to the same fundamental principles of the science of morals.'

We meet with this limitation of the idea of progress in every member of the school to which, more than to any other, Turgot belonged. Even in the vindication of the claims of Christianity to the gratitude of mankind, he had forborne from laying stress on any original contribution, supposed to be made by that religion to the precious stock of ethical ideas. He dwells upon the 'tender zeal for the progress of truth that the Christian religion inspired,' and recounts the various circumstances in which it spread and promoted the social and political conditions most favourable to intellectual or scientific activity. Whatever may be the truth or the value of Christianity as a dogmatic system, there can be little doubt that its weight as a historic force is to be looked for, not so much in the encouragement it gave to science and learning, in respect of which Western Europe probably owes more to Mahometanism, as in the high and generous types of character which it inspired. A man of rare moral depth, warmth, or delicacy, may be a more important element in the advance of civilisation, than the newest and truest deduction from what Turgot calls 'the fundamental principles of the science of morals.' The leading of souls to do what is right and humane, is always more urgent than mere instruction of the intelligence as to what exactly is the right and the humane. The saint after all has a place in positive history; but the men of the eighteenth century passionately threw him out from their calendar, as the mere wooden idol of superstition. They eagerly recognised the genius of scientific discovery; but they had no eyes for the genius of moral holiness. Turgot, far as he was from many of the narrownesses of his time, yet did not entirely transcend this, the worst of them all. And because he could not perceive there to be any new growths in moral science, he left out from a front place among the forces that have given strength and ripeness to the human mind, the superior capacity of some men for kindling, by word and example, the glowing love and devout practice of morality in the breasts of many generations of their fellows.

The mechanical arts, Turgot says, were preserved in the dark ages by the necessities of existence, and because 'it is impossible but that out of the crowd of artisans practising them, there should arise from time to time one of those men of genius who are found mingled with other men, as gold is found mingled with the earth of a mine.' Surely in the same way holy men arose, with keener feeling for the spiritual necessities of the time, and finer knowledge to train and fit the capacities of human nature to meet these needs, and make their satisfaction the basis for yet loftier standards and holier aspirations and nobler and more careful practice. The work of all such men deserved a place in an outline of the progressive forces of the human mind, as much as the work of those who invented bills of exchange, the art of musical notation, windmills, clocks, gunpowder, and all the other material instruments for multiplying the powers of man and the conveniences of life.

Even if we give Turgot the benefit of the doubt whether he intended to describe more than the progress of the human intelligence, or the knowing part of the mind, the omission of the whole moral side is still a defect. For as he interprets knowledge to be the conformity of our ideas to facts, has there not been a clearly recognisable progress in the improved conformity of our ideas to the most momentous facts of all, the various circumstances of human action, its motives and consequences? No factor among the constituents of a progressive civilisation deserves more carefully to be taken into account, than the degree in which the current opinion and usage of a society recognise the comprehensiveness of moral obligation. More than upon anything else, does progress depend on the kinds of conduct which a community classifies as moral or immoral, and upon the wider or narrower inclusiveness within rigid ethical boundaries of what ought or ought not to be left open and indifferent. The conditions which create and modify these ethical regulations,--their law in a word,--form a department of the history of the human mind, which can be almost less readily dispensed with than any other. What sort of a history of Europe would that be, which should omit, for example, to consider the influence of the moral rigour of Calvinism upon the growth of the nations affected by it?

Moreover, Turgot expressly admits the ever-present wants of society to be the stimulating agents, as well as the guides, of scientific energy. He expressly admits, too, that they are constantly plucking men by the skirt, and forcing them back to social rules of conduct. It is certain, therefore, that as the necessities of society increase in number and complexity, morality will be developed to correspond with them, and the way in which new applications of ethical sentiments to the demands of the common weal are made, is as interesting and as deserving of a place in any scientific inquiry into social progress, as the new applications of physical truths to satisfy material needs and to further material convenience. Turgot justly points to the perfecting of language as one of the most important of the many processes that go to the general advancement of the race.[42] Not less, but more, important is the analogous work of perfecting our ideas of virtue and duty. Surely this chamber, too, in the great laboratory deserves that the historian should unseal its door and explore its recesses.

[Footnote 42: P. 603.]

The characteristic merits of the second of the two discourses at the Sorbonne may be briefly described in this way. It recognises the idea of ordered succession in connection with the facts of society. It considers this succession as one, not of superficial events, but of working forces. Thus Bolingbroke, writing fifteen years before, had said that 'as to events that stand recorded in history, we see them all, we see them as they followed one another, or as they produced one another, causes or effects, immediate or remote.'[43] But it is very evident from his illustrations that by all this he understood no more than the immediate connection between one transaction and another. He thought, for example, of the Revolution of 1688 being a consequence of the bad government of James the Second; of this bad government springing from the king's attachment to popery; this in turn being caused by the exile of the royal family; this exile having its source in Cromwell's usurpation; and so forth, one may suppose, down to the Noachian flood, or the era when the earth was formless and void. It is mere futility to talk of cause and effect in connection with a string of arbitrarily chosen incidents of this sort. Cause and effect, in Turgot's sense of history, describe a relation between certain sets or groups of circumstances, that are of a peculiarly decisive kind, because the surface of events conforms itself to their inner working. His account of these deciding circumstances was not what we should be likely to accept now, because he limited them too closely to purely intellectual acquisitions, as we have just seen, and because he failed to see the necessity of tracing the root of the whole growth to certain principles in the mental constitution of mankind. But, at all events, his conception of history rose above merely individual concerns, embraced the successive movements of societies and their relations to one another, and sought the spring of revolutions in the affairs of a community in long trains of preparing conditions, internal and external. Above all, history was a whole. The fortunes and achievements of each nation were scrutinised for their effect on the growth of all mankind.

[Footnote 43: _Study of History_, Letter ii.]

IV.

In the year 1761, Turgot, then in his thirty-fourth year, was appointed to the office of Intendant in the Generality of Limoges. There were three different divisions of France in the eighteenth century: first and oldest, the diocese or ecclesiastical circumscription; second, the province or military government; and third, the Generality, or a district defined for fiscal and administrative purposes. The Intendant in the government of the last century was very much what the Prefect is in the government of our own time. Perhaps, however, we understand Turgot's position in Limousin best, by comparing it to that of the Chief Commissioner of some great district in our Indian Empire. For example, the first task which Turgot had to perform was to execute a new land-assessment for purposes of imperial revenue. He had to construct roads, to build barracks, to administer justice, to deal with a famine, just as the English civilian has to do in Orissa or Behar. Much of his time was taken up in elaborate memorials to the central government, and the desk of the controller-general at Versailles was loaded with minutes and reports exactly like the voluminous papers which fill the mahogany boxes of the Members of Council and the Home Secretary at Calcutta. The fundamental conditions of the two systems of government were much alike; absolute political authority, and an elaborately centralised civil administration for keeping order and raising a revenue. The direct authority of an Intendant was not considerable. His chief functions were the settlement of detail in executing the general orders that he received from the minister; a provisional decision on certain kinds of minor affairs; and a power of judging some civil suits, subject to appeal to the Council. But though the Intendant was so strictly a subordinate, yet he was the man of the government, and thoroughly in its confidence. The government only saw with his eyes, and only acted on the faith of his reports, memorials, and requisitions; and this in a country where the government united in itself all forms of power, and was obliged to be incessantly active and to make itself felt at every point.

Of all the thirty-two great districts in which the authority of the Intendant stood between the common people and the authority of the minister at Versailles, the Generality of Limoges was the poorest, the rudest, the most backward, and the most miserable. To the eye of the traveller with a mind for the picturesque, there were parts of this central region of France whose smiling undulations, delicious water-scenes, deep glens extending into amphitheatres, and slopes hung with woods of chestnut, all seemed to make a lovelier picture than the cheerful beauty of prosperous Normandy, or the olive-groves and orange-gardens of Provence. Arthur Young thought the Limousin the most beautiful part of France. Unhappily for the cultivator, these gracious conformations belonged to a harsh and churlish soil. For him the roll of the chalk and the massing of the granite would have been well exchanged for the fat loams of level Picardy. The soil of the Limousin was declared by its inhabitants to be the most ungrateful in the whole kingdom, returning no more than four net for one of seed sown, while there was land in the vale of the Garonne that returned thirty-fold. The two conditions for raising tolerable crops were abundance of labour and abundance of manure. But misery drove the men away, and the stock were sold to pay the taxes. So the land lacked both the arms of the tiller, and the dressing whose generous chemistry would have transmuted the dull earth into fruitfulness and plenty. The extent of the district was estimated at a million and a half of hectares, equivalent to nearly four millions of English acres: yet the population of this vast tract was only five hundred thousand souls. Even to-day it is not more than eight hundred thousand.