CHAPTER 15 On Universal History

Prefatory Note by du Pont

Turgot rendered to Bossuet the homage which the loftiness of his thought and the energy of his expression deserve. He admired the noble and rapid flow of his style, its wealth of expression, its grandeur, and its harmonious dignity. But after having paid this tribute to his excellence as a writer, he regretted that his Discourse on Universal History was not more rich in insights, in reason, and in true perceptions. It was with sorrow that he saw it as not living up to the high-minded design of the author, to the interesting position in which he found himself as the tutor of a king, and to the majestic talent which no other French orator has yet equaled.

Nevertheless it was not in M. Turgot’s nature to disparage a celebrated work and to slight a great man.

He preferred to rewrite the book, to give it the far-reaching scope which he would have wished it to have, and to embody in it principles which the illustrious Bishop of Meaux had passed over in silence, had not perhaps conceived, and would not perhaps have accepted.

Such a work could not be executed at one stroke. M. Turgot therefore judged it proper, before undertaking it, to sketch out a plan of it, not limiting himself to a bald and simple list of the subjects which he wanted to write about and develop, but delineating them with strokes of a brush as great artists do in their skilful outlines of a portrait.

This plan was not completed, but we have found the first sketch of it, which we are reproducing here.

The work is unfinished, but not one of its pages could have been written by a man who had not conceived it in its entirety, and who had not considered with deep attention and in all their aspects the multitude of subjects which it was to encompass.

PLAN OF THE DISCOURSES ON UNIVERSAL HISTORY

Idea of the Introduction

Set by his Creator in the midst of eternity and immensity, and occupying in them but one point, man necessarily enters into relations with a multitude of things and beings, while at the same time his ideas are concentrated in the indivisibility of his mind and of the present moment. He knows himself only through his sensations, which all have reference to external objects, and the present moment is a centre at which a host of interlinked ideas converge.

It is from this interlinking, and from the order of the laws which all these ideas follow in their continual variations, that man acquires the consciousness of reality. Through the relation of all his different sensations he becomes aware of the existence of external objects. A similar relation in the succession of his ideas reveals the past to him. The relations of beings with one another are by no means passive relations. All may act on one another according to their different laws, and also according to their distances from one another. This real world, of whose limits we are ignorant, has for us very narrow ones, which depend more or less on the perfection of our senses. We have knowledge of a small number of links in the chain, but the extremities in the great and the small equally escape us.

The laws governing bodies constitute physics: always constant, they are described, not recounted. The history of animals, and above all that of men, presents quite a different spectacle. Men, like animals, succeed to other men to whom they owe their existence, and they see, as animals do, their fellows spread out over the surface of the globe which they inhabit. But, being endowed with a more developed reason and more liberty of action, man’s relations with his fellows are much more numerous and varied. Possessor of the treasure-house of signs, which he has had the ability to multiply almost to infinity, he can assure himself of the possession of all his acquired ideas, communicate them to other men, and transmit them to his successors as a heritage which is always being augmented. A continual combination of this progress with the passions, and with the events they have caused, constitutes the history of the human race, in which each man is no more than one part of an immense whole which has, like him, its infancy and its advancement.

Thus Universal History encompasses a consideration of the successive advances of the human race, and the elaboration of the causes which have contributed to it; the early beginnings of mankind; the formation and intermingling of nations; the origin of governments and their revolutions; the progress of languages, of natural philosophy, of morals, of manners, of the arts and sciences; the revolutions which have brought about the succession of empire to empire, of nation to nation, and of religion to religion; the human race always remaining the same during these upheavals, like the water of the sea during storms, and always proceeding toward its perfection. To unveil the influence of general and necessary causes, that of particular causes and the free actions of great men, and the relation of all this to the very constitution of man; to reveal the springs and mechanisms of moral causes through their effects—that is what History is in the eyes of a philosopher. It is based upon geography and chronology, which measure the distances between times and places.

In presenting, according to this plan, a picture of the human race, following roughly the historical order of its progress and laying stress on the main epochs, I do not want to go into things deeply but only to give an outline, a mere sketch of a great study, and to afford a glimpse of a vast arena without traversing it; just as we see through a narrow window all the immensity of the heavens.

PLAN OF THE FIRST DISCOURSE

On the Formation of Governments and the Intermingling of Nations

The whole universe proclaims to us a supreme Being. Everywhere we see the print of the hand of a god.

If we want to arrive at a knowledge of something more precise, we are surrounded by mists.

Every day we see arts invented; in some parts of the world we see peoples who are civilized and enlightened, and in other parts nomadic peoples in the depths of the forests. In an eternity of time this inequality of progress would have been bound to disappear. Thus the world is not eternal; but we are bound at the same time to conclude that it is very old. Just how old? We do not know.

Historical times cannot be traced further back than the invention of writing; and, when it was invented, men could at first make use of it only to record vague traditions, or a few leading events to which no dates were ascribed, and which were mixed up with myths to such an extent as to render discrimination impossible.

The pride of nations has led them to shift their origins far back into the depths of antiquity. But in relation to time, men, before the invention of numbers, could scarcely have extended their ideas beyond the few generations with which they were acquainted, that is, three or four. It is only within a century or a century and a half that tradition, unaided by history, can indicate the period of a known event. Thus no history can be traced much further back than the invention of writing, unless it be by means of a mythical chronology, which men took the trouble to create only when nations, revealed to one another through their commerce, had converted their pride into jealousy.

In this silence of reason and history, a book has been given to us as a repository of revelation. It tells us that this world has existed for six thousand or eight thousand years (according to the different copies); that we all owe our origin to a single man and a single woman; that it was through the punishment of their disobedience that man, born for a happier state, was reduced to a degree of ignorance and poverty which he was able partly to dispel only by means of time and labor. It deftly sketches out for us the invention of the first arts, the fruit of men’s first needs, and the succession of generations, up to the point at which the human race, almost completely engulfed by a universal flood, was once again reduced to a single family, and thus obliged to start afresh.

This book, then, does not by any means stand between us and what we are looking for—the way in which men have come to be spread out over the earth, and political societies to be organized. It offers a new point of departure for these significant events, similar to that which would have been adopted even if the facts which it relates to us had not become an article of our faith.

Without provisions, and in the depths of forests, men could devote themselves to nothing but obtaining their subsistence. The fruits which the earth produces in the absence of cultivation are not enough: men had to resort to the hunting of animals, which, being limited in number and incapable in a given region of providing many men with food, have for this very reason accelerated the dispersion of peoples and their rapid diffusion.

Families or small nations widely separated from one another, because each required a very large area to obtain its food: that was the state of hunters. They have no fixed dwelling-place at all, and move extremely easily from one spot to another. Difficulty in getting a living, a quarrel, or the fear of an enemy are enough to separate families of hunters from the rest of their nation.

So they move aimlessly wherever the hunt leads them. And if another hunt leads them further in the same direction, their separation from one another increases. Thus peoples who speak the same language sometimes find themselves at distances of more than 600 leagues from one another, and surrounded by peoples who do not understand them. This is common among the savages of America, where we see, for the same reason, nations of fifteen or twenty men.

It is nevertheless not rare to find that wars and quarrels, motives for which barbarous peoples are only too clever at thinking up, have brought about interminglings which out of a large number of nations have sometimes formed one single nation through a general similarity of customs, and of languages which are distinguished from one another only by a large number of dialects.

The custom among the savages of America of adopting their prisoners of war in place of the men whom they lose in their expeditions must have made these interminglings very frequent. We see languages holding sway over vast stretches of country, such as that of the Hurons in the vicinity of the St. Lawrence river, that of the Algonkins extending down to the Mississippi, that of the Mexicans, that of the Incas, that of the Topinambours in Brazil, and that of the Guaranis in Paraguay. The boundaries between them are commonly great mountain ranges.

There are animals which allow themselves to be brought into subjection by men, such as oxen, sheep, and horses, and men find it more advantageous to gather them together into herds than to chase after wandering animals.

It did not take long for the pastoral way of life to be introduced in all places where these animals were met with: oxen and sheep in Europe, camels and goats in the east, horses in Tartary, and reindeer in the north.

The way of life of hunting peoples is maintained in the parts of America where these species are lacking. In Peru, where nature has placed a species of sheep called llamas, the people are shepherds, and this is obviously the reason why that part of America has been more easily civilized.

Pastoral peoples, whose subsistence is more abundant and more assured, were the most numerous. They began to grow richer, and to understand better the idea of property. Ambition, or rather greed, which is the ambition of barbarians, was able to inspire them with the inclination to plunder, and at the same time with the will and the courage to hold their own. Tending herds involved trouble from which hunters were free, and herds sustained more men than were required to look after them. Thus a disproportion was bound to arise between the quickness of movement of the disposable population and that of the nation. Thus a nation could not shun the fight against a horde of determined men, whether hunters or even members of other pastoral nations, who would remain masters of the herds if they became conquerors, but who were also sometimes repelled by the cavalry of the shepherds, if the herds of the latter consisted of horses or camels. And as the conquered could not flee without dying of hunger, they shared the fate of the beasts and became the slaves of the conquerors, whom they sustained by tending their herds. The masters, relieved of all these cares, for their part went on subjecting others in the same manner. Thus small nations were formed which in their turn formed large ones. So these peoples spread out over a whole continent, until they were stopped by what appeared to be impenetrable barriers.

The incursions of pastoral peoples leave more traces than those of hunters. Susceptible to a greater number of desires, as a result of the idleness which they enjoyed, they went rushing to wherever they hoped to find booty and seized hold of it. They remained wherever they found pasturage, and intermingled with the inhabitants of the country.

The example of the first encouraged others. The course of these torrents widened, with peoples and languages constantly intermingling.

But these conquerors soon disappeared. When there was nothing left to pillage, the various hordes had no further interest in remaining together, and, besides, the multiplication of herds forced them to separate. Each horde had its chief. But some principal chief, or one who was more warlike, would retain a certain superiority over the others throughout his nation, and would exact from them various gifts as tokens of homage.

At last false ideas of glory entered the picture. What had formerly been done for the purpose of pillage was now done in order to exercise domination, to raise their own nation above others; and, when trade between peoples had made them acquainted with the attributes of different foreign countries, to exchange a barren country for a fertile one.

Every prince who was in any way ambitious made raids on the lands of his neighbors, and extended his power until he encountered someone capable of resisting him; then there was a battle; and the conqueror added the power of the conquered to his own and made use of it for new conquests.

Hence all those inundations of barbarians which have so often ravaged the earth—those ebbs and flows which constitute their whole history.

Hence those different names which peoples of the same country have successively borne, the variety of which confounds the researches of scholars. The name of the dominant nation became the general name for all the others, which nevertheless kept their particular names. Such were the Medes, the Persians, the Celts, the Teutons, the Cimbri, the Suevians, the Germans, the Allemands, the Scythians, the Getae, the Huns, the Turks, the Tartars, the Mogols, the Manchurians, the Kalmucks, the Arabs, the Bedouins, the Berbers, etc.

All conquests were not equally extensive; barriers which would not have stopped a hundred thousand men would stop ten thousand; thus a much greater number of small conquests took place within countries which were cut off. Revolutions were bound to be much more frequent there, and more intermingling of nations was bound to occur. Rivers, and to an even greater extent mountain ranges and the sea, formed impenetrable barriers for a great number of these would-be Attilas. Thus, in between the mountain ranges, the rivers, and the seas, small scattered peoples were reunited, fused together by the multiplicity of revolutions. Their languages and their customs were intimately blended together to assume, as it were, a uniform color.

Beyond these first natural barriers, conquests were more extensive and interminglings less frequent.

Particular customs and dialects form different nations. All obstacles that diminish communication, and consequently distance, which is one of these obstacles, heighten the distinctions which separate nations; but in general the peoples of one continent are mingled together, at any rate indirectly: the Gauls with the Germans, the latter with the Sarmatians, and so on as far as it is possible to go so long as great seas do not separate them. Hence those customs and those words which are common to peoples very distant and very different from one another. Languages, customs, and even human forms seem to me like colored bands running across all the nations of a continent in all directions and forming a succession of perceptible gradations, each nation being tinged with a shade intermediate between those of the nations which neighbor it. Sometimes all the nations are blended together; sometimes one transmits to another what it has itself received. But almost all these revolutions are unknown to history; they leave no more traces than storms do on the sea. It is only when their course has encompassed civilized peoples that the memory of them is preserved.

Pastoral peoples in fertile countries were no doubt the first to move on to the state of agriculture. Hunting peoples, who are deprived of the assistance of animals to manure the soil and to facilitate labor, were unable to arrive so soon at agriculture. If they cultivate any land at all, it is only a small quantity; when it is exhausted they move their habitation elsewhere; and if they are able to abandon their nomadic life it is only by infinitely slow steps.

Husbandmen are not by nature conquerors; the cultivation of the land keeps them too busy. But, being more wealthy than the other peoples, they were obliged to defend themselves against violence. Besides, with them the land can sustain many more men than are necessary in order to cultivate it. Hence people who are unoccupied; hence towns, trade, and all the useful arts and accomplishments; hence more rapid progress in every sphere, for everything follows the general advancement of the mind; hence greater skill in war than in the case of barbarians; hence the division of occupations and the inequality of men; hence slavery in domestic form, and the subjection of the weaker sex (always bound up with barbarism), the hardship of which increases in proportion to the increase in wealth. But at the same time a more searching enquiry into government begins.

The inhabitants of the cities, who were cleverer than those of the countryside, brought the latter into subjection; or, rather, a village which by means of its situation had become a convenient centre where the neighboring population gathered for purposes of trade, and which had a larger number of people, became the dominant one, and, leaving in the other villages only those who were necessary for the cultivation of the land, drew to itself, either by means of slavery or through the attraction of government and commerce, the largest number of inhabitants. The blending together and union of the different departments of government became more intimate and more stable. And in the leisure of the cities, the passions were developed alongside genius.

Ambition gathered strength, politics lent it perspectives, and the progress of the mind enlarged them: hence a thousand different forms of government. The first were necessarily the product of war, and thus implied government by one man alone. We need not believe that men ever voluntarily gave themselves one master; but they have often agreed in recognizing one chief. And the ambitious themselves, in forming great nations, have contributed to the designs of Providence, to the progress of enlightenment, and thus to the increase in the happiness of the human race, with which they were not concerned at all. Their passions, even their fits of rage, have led them on their way without their being aware of where they were going. I seem to see a huge army, every movement of which is directed by some mighty genius. When the military signals are given, when the trumpets sound tumultuously and the drums beat, whole squadrons of cavalry move off, the very horses are filled with a passion which has no aim, and each part of the army makes its way through the obstacles without knowing what may result from it: the leader alone sees the combined effect of all these different movements. Thus the passions have led to the multiplication of ideas, the extension of knowledge, and the perfection of the mind, in the absence of that reason whose day had not yet come and which would have been less powerful if its reign had arrived earlier.

Reason, which is justice itself, would not have taken away from anyone what belonged to him, would have banished wars and usurpations for ever, and would have left men divided up into a host of nations separated from one another and speaking different languages. As a result the human race, limited in its ideas, incapable of that progress in all kinds of understanding, and in the sciences, arts, and government, which takes its rise from the collective genius of different regions, would have remained for ever in a state of mediocrity. Reason and justice, if they had been more attended to, would have immobilized everything, as has virtually happened in China. But what is never perfect ought never to be entirely immobilized. The passions, tumultuous and dangerous as they are, became a mainspring of action and consequently of progress; everything which draws men away from their present condition, and everything which puts varied scenes before their eyes, extends the scope of their ideas, enlightens them, stimulates them, and in the long run leads them to the good and the true, toward which they are drawn by their natural bent. It is like the wheat which is shaken over and over again in a winnowing-basket, and which under its own weight always falls more and more purified of the light chaff which was debasing it.

There are the gentle passions which are always necessary, and which are developed all the more as humanity is perfected; and there are the others, violent and terrible, such as hatred and vengeance, which are developed more in times of barbarism; they are also natural, and thus also necessary. Their explosion brings back the gentle passions to ameliorate them. In the same way, violent fermentation is indispensable in the making of good wine.

Men who are taught by experience become more and more humane; and it would appear that in recent times generosity, the virtues, and the tender affections, which are continually spreading, at any rate in Europe, are diminishing the dominion of vengeance and national hatreds. But before laws had formed manners, these odious passions were still necessary for the defense of individuals and peoples. They were, so to speak, the leading-strings with which nature and its Author guided the human race in its infancy.

Man is still barbarous in America; and in early times in the rest of the world he was almost always cruel to foreigners. This blind partiality toward his own country, which lasted until Christianity and afterward philosophy taught him to love all men, resembles the state of those animals which during the winter are covered with thick and hideous coats of fur which they will shed in the spring; or, if you like, his early passions resemble the first leaves which sheathe and hide the new stem of a plant, later withering with the emergence of other sheaths until as a result of these successive growths the stem is revealed and becomes crowned with flowers and fruits. This theory is not at all derogatory of Providence. The crimes which were committed were the crimes of men. Those who indulged in them were not happy; for no happiness can lie in the guilty passions. Those who drew on courage and virtue to resist them had their first reward in the consciousness of this courageous virtue. The struggle of one against the other increased the knowledge and the talents of all, and gave to the perception of the good a character of certainty which from day to day appeals more strongly to man’s conscience, and a charm which will end by governing the hearts of all. If we look at the world from a broad point of view, then, and see it in the context of the whole concatenation of events which has characterized its progress, it becomes the most glorious witness to the wisdom which presides over it.

It is only through upheavals and ravages that nations have been extended, and that order and government have in the long run been perfected; just as in those forests of America, as old as the world, where from century to century oaks have succeeded to oaks, where from century to century, falling into the dust, they have enriched the soil with all the fruitful juices which the air and the rain have helped to provide, where their remains, furnishing a new source of fecundity to the earth which had given them birth, have served to produce new shoots, still hardier and more vigorous. Thus, over the whole surface of the earth governments have succeeded to governments, empires have been raised up on the ruins of empires, and their scattered remains have been gathered together again; the progress of reason under the early governments, freed from the constraint of the imperfect laws imposed by absolute power, has played a greater part in the constitution of later governments. Repeated conquests extended states; the impotence of barbarian laws and the limitations of civil authority forced them to divide. In some places, peoples weary of anarchy threw themselves into the arms of despotism; in others, tyranny carried to excess gave rise to liberty. No change took place without bringing about some gain; for none took place without adding to experience, and without extending or improving, or paving the way for, man’s education. It was only after centuries, and by means of bloody revolutions, that despotism at last learned to moderate itself, and liberty to regulate itself; that the situation of states at last became less fluctuating and more stable. In this way, then, through alternate periods of rest and unrest, of weal and woe, the human race as a whole has advanced ceaselessly toward its perfection.

When quarrels first took place in nations, a man who was superior in strength, in valor, or in prudence persuaded and then forced the very people whom he was defending to obey him.

This superiority alone suffices to give a chief to men who have gathered together. It is not exactly true that ambition is the sole source of authority. People are induced to choose a chief; but they have always wished him to be reasonable and just, not foolish and arbitrary.

In nations of a small size it is impossible for despotic authority to become consolidated; the dominion of a chief can in such a nation rest on nothing but the consent of the people, or on a veneration either for a person or for a family. Veneration for a person disappears when power is abused; and when the veneration is for a family, this abuse provides a motive for palace revolutions for the benefit of another member of the family who seeks to gratify public opinion to a greater extent.

In small nations, the whole state is under the eyes of each individual. Each shares directly in the advantages of the society, and could not find any greater benefit in oppressing it on account of another. There is not enough wealth which could be used arbitrarily to bribe dishonest people. There is no populace: a kind of equality prevails. The kings could not live in isolation from their subjects; their people necessarily constitute their only guards and their only court. They love them better, and, when they are wise, they are better loved by them. If they are not wise, protests are soon made to them, and these could be followed by resistance. It is easy to assemble together. The means and the art of forcing the greater number, in spite of their size, to obey the smaller number cannot exist. Five hundred thousand men can keep in subjection fifty million, but two hundred men can never keep in subjection twenty thousand, although this is the same proportion. This explains why despotism has never held sway among peoples who are separated into small nations, Savages, Tartars, Celts, Arabs, etc., at any rate when some superstitious belief has not blinded men’s eyes, as in the case of the subjects of the Old Man of the Mountain. This also explains why monarchy itself, which was everywhere the first form of government—since it is easier to control men than to get them to agree, and because military authority, always concentrated as it is in one hand, must have rendered a similar concentration of civil power natural and often necessary—was after a certain period replaced by republics in almost all those cities which were reduced to their adjoining territories or to distant colonies. Here the spirit of equality cannot be banished, because the spirit of commerce rules: the collective industry of men never fails to make it dominate in cities, when their ways of life are not corrupted and swallowed up by the general impulsive force of a huge state which encompasses them all: whether by the spirit of despotism, as in the case of the Asiatics; or whether, as in the case of the ancient Franks, by the military spirit of a nobility which resided in the countryside, and which had derived its original modes of behavior in nomadic nations which could have no commerce. Also the spirit of commerce presupposes a property in goods which is independent of every power other than that of the laws: it cannot become inured to oriental avania.

In states which were confined to a single city, it was impossible that the monarchy could be long maintained. There its least transgressions are and are seen to be more tyrannical; there tyranny has less power and faces more energetic resistance. There, too, monarchy more easily degenerates. The passions of the man are more confounded with those of the prince. He or those in his circle may be tempted by some individual’s fortune, or by his wife. Less elevated above his subjects, he is more sensitive to their affronts, and more susceptible to anger. In the infancy of human reason, it is easy for a prince to grow angry at the obstacles which the laws put in the way of his passions, and for him not to appreciate that these barriers between him and his people do not defend him less against his subjects than they do his subjects against him. But since in a small state he is never the strongest, the abuse of power, which is bound to be more frequent there, is also less easily defended against the revolt which is its consequence. Thus republics arise, at first aristocratic and more tyrannical than monarchy, because nothing is so horrible as obedience to a multitude which always knows how to exalt its passions into virtues; but at the same time more lasting, because the people are more debased. The powerful and the weak unite against a tyrant; but an aristocratic senate, above all if it is hereditary, has only the populace to combat. In spite of this, republics confined to one city tend naturally toward democracy, which also has its serious drawbacks.

The domain of a city could be extended only by colonies and conquests. Colonies could be established in the vicinity of a city only in the earliest times. Soon the territory which surrounded the city became occupied; colonies were then removed to a distance, and consequently remained linked to the metropolis only in so far as they were not firmly enough established to be able to do without it, like those layers which remain attached to the trunk until they have grown strong enough, and which are then detached from it by the slightest accident; or like the fruit which clings to the tree until its maturity causes it to fall to the ground, germinate, and produce new trees. Nevertheless, by the use of a metaphor which was natural enough, the relations between the metropolis and the colonies were expressed by the words mother and daughter; men, who at all times have been bound by their own language, inferred analogous duties from these expressions, and the exercise of these duties was for a long time maintained solely by the force of custom, which always finds defenders among the men whom it subjugates, just as laws do among the authorities who maintain them.

It is rare for cities to make conquests. They go in for them only when, so to speak, they have nothing better to do. Moreover, there is commonly found among them a kind of equilibrium and a degree of jealousy sufficient to result in the formation of leagues against any city which exalts itself too much.

Love of country, above all in republics, makes it almost impossible for the sovereignty of a city to be destroyed by forces which are the equal of its own.

Thus a city is rarely a conqueror, barring some unusual combination of internal constitution and external circumstances which was never found, I believe, except in the case of the Roman people.

But when cities were still under the sway of kings, it was easier to make conquests. A warlike king gave a considerable superiority to his city; he could make a number of conquests and bring several cities under his domination; and the more his city was extended the stronger became his authority, and the more possible it became for him to crush one party through the instrumentality of the others. The authority of the prince became the sole centre of power, and whatever interest individuals might have or appear to have in throwing off the yoke, it was impossible for them to be brought together except through a long series of secret intrigues; but the king was usually powerful enough for fear or hope of reward to induce some accomplice to betray such a secret.

Unreasoning ambition often drove the first conquerors to spread out far and wide, and when it proved impossible, either for want of troops or because the distances were too great, to maintain their conquests, they contented themselves with exacting tribute, which was only paid so long as the people concerned were weaker.

Hence a perpetual succession of wars, and a continual alternation of victories and defeats, of nations in turn dominating one another, according as chance gave them kings who were conquerors.

In the case of those princes ruling over agricultural peoples who were up to a point civilized, their states were bound, because of the inequality in the progress of their neighbors, to find themselves surrounded by barbarous peoples. When they were in their vigorous stage, they extended their power by making conquests, by turning the neighboring territories into colonies and gradually civilizing them. But when such states relapsed into weakness, the barbarians attacked them in their turn and had the best of it; the desire to dominate a rich country pricked the ambition of the chiefs and the greed of a fierce people.

These inundations, these migrations of peoples which among barbarians succeed one another without leaving any trace, sometimes encompassed in their course peoples who were already civilized, and it is only in this way that the memory of them has been able to come down to us today. In such cases the barbarian people adopted the civilization of the conquered, as a result of the influence which knowledge and reason are always certain to exercise over force when conquest does not involve extermination. The barbarians, having become civilized, themselves civilized their first place of abode. The two peoples were formed into a single people; it became a more extensive empire under one chief.

Civilized peoples, who are more wealthy, more peaceful, and more accustomed to a soft or at any rate sedentary life, above all in the fertile regions which were the first to be cultivated, soon lose that vigor which made them into conquerors when a learned discipline puts no obstacle at all in the way of softness. The conquerors then give way to new barbarians; empires are extended, going through their ages of vigor and decline; but their very downfall helps to perfect the arts and improve the laws. Thus the Chaldeans, the Assyrians, the Medes, and the Persians succeeded one another, the domination of the latter being the most far-reaching.

It was in this way that the kingdom of Lydia, when it had acquired a degree of superiority, swallowed up all the little kingdoms of Asia Minor, which had been softened by the Greek way of life. Later, like those rivers which, swollen by the contributions of a thousand others, eventually lose themselves in the sea, Lydia was in its turn invaded by Cyrus, who appeared with a new nation. This nation, at first barbarous, retained under the conqueror’s successors nothing but pride and ambition. The softness of the vanquished was soon transmitted to the victors. That discipline which alone can offset force, and by means of which the reason of enlightened peoples makes up for the violence of barbarians, was known only by the Greeks. The whole of the great Persian power broke down against Greece, which had taken shape and developed in the midst of civil wars.

The territory of Greece, broken up by islands and mountains, could not be subject to the same vicissitudes. It was difficult in early times for great empires to be formed there. A host of small states, almost always at war, kept up the military spirit, and made advances in tactical skills, the perfection of arms, and boldness in battle. Civilization was also extended by means of commerce. In general it is peoples from the mountains and from cold or infertile countries who have conquered the plains, and who have either formed empires or held out against them. They are poorer, more hardy, and more inaccessible; they can choose their time when they are attacking and their positions when they are defending themselves. And when they are desirous of becoming conquerors, they have more to gain from it, and a greater aptitude for it.

The great empires, formed as we have just said by barbarians, were despotic. Despotism is easy. To do what you want to do, is a rule which a king learns very quickly; art is necessary to persuade people, but none is necessary to give them orders. If despotism did not revolt those who are its victims, it would never be banished from the earth. A father wishes to be a despot over his children, and a master over his servants. Honesty does not safeguard a prince against this poison; he wishes for the good, and makes a virtue of wishing everyone to obey him. The larger the state the easier despotism is, and the greater would be the difficulty involved in establishing a moderate government. For that, it would be necessary for there to be an established order in all parts of the state; one would have to determine the position of each province and of each city, and to allow its municipal administration all the liberty which it would not be possible for it to abuse. How many different departments would have to be combined and equilibrated, and what difficulties would face him who had no idea that this was necessary! A conquest carried out by barbarians, which is the product of force and accompanied by devastation, puts a state into such disorder that to mend matters would require the greatest genius, the most dexterous hand, the most moderate and active virtue, and the purest and noblest heart.

Since it was impossible to answer for everything, one could devise nothing better than to install governors who were as despotic to the people as they were servile to the prince. It was easier to look to them to levy taxes and keep the people down than to arrange the details of this oneself.

The prince forgot the people. The best governor was the one who gave him the most money and who knew best how to obtain the menials and flatterers who frequented the palace. The governors had underlings who acted in the same way. Despotic authority made the governors dangerous; the court treated them with the utmost severity, and their position depended upon its slightest caprice. Pretexts were sought to deprive them of the treasure they had plundered; and the people gained no relief at all, for greed is a natural characteristic of barbarian kings.

Originally taxes were never conceived as subventions to meet the needs of the state; but the prince demanded money, and people were forced to give it to him. Throughout the east presents are made to them; the kings there are simply individuals who are powerful and greedy.

All power was thus concentrated in a single person, who was not even shrewd enough to divide up that part of it which he was unable to exercise. Princes, governors, and underlings were alike subordinate tyrants who exerted pressure on one another only in order to crush the people with all their united strength.

Despotic princes, never having come across laws, scarcely dreamed of making any. They were their own judges: in general, when the power which makes the laws and that which applies them are one and the same, the laws are useless. Punishments remain arbitrary; they are usually cruel when they are imposed by the prince, and pecuniary in character when they are imposed by underlings who draw profit from them. So far as the civil disposition of inheritances is concerned, custom or the will of the father decides it.

It can also be seen from this that a despotic government which comes on the scene after laws and customs have been established does not involve the same disadvantages as these early conquests made by barbarians did.

The Neros and the Caligulas, if I may venture to say so, had in them more wickedness than the evil they actually committed. As a result of the rules of conduct accepted in the state under the first Caesars, the people were not at all oppressed; the provinces enjoyed a high degree of tranquility; and distributive justice was equitably enough carried out. The governors did not dare to give way to their greed: they would have been punished by the emperors. The court held, between the people and the great, that balance which it ought to hold in a well-directed government.

In general, the most moderate of the great states are those which are formed by the union of several small ones, above all when this union is brought about slowly.

At bottom, the monarch has no interest at all in involving himself with the details of municipal government in places where he is never present: he is led to leave it as it is. Princes can be partial to despotism only when it is around them, because their passions (or those at least which are most subject to caprice) are relative only to what is in their neighborhood: like the rest, they are not more than human. That is why the despotism of the Roman emperors did less harm than that of the Turks.

With the Turks, despotism enters into the constitution of their government. It infects all parts of the state; it fetters all its departments. Each pasha exercises over the people who are subject to him the same authority which the Grand Seigneur has over him. He is alone entrusted with and responsible for all the tribute. He has no other revenue than that which he extracts from the people over and above what he is obliged to furnish to the sultan; and he is forced to redouble his harassments in order to provide for the countless presents which are necessary to keep him in his office. There is no law in the empire to regulate the raising of money, and no formal procedure in the administration of justice. Everything is done in military fashion. The people have no one at all at court to protect them against the abuse of power by the great, in the fruits of which the court itself shares.

When it is the conqueror who has himself installed governors in the provinces, his ignorance is bound to lead him to take his own government as a model, and thus to establish an administrative despotism, which then becomes as it were a great tree whose branches spread out far and wide over the whole empire, and which smother all the produce of the land which they cover with their shadow.

When a military government is the only thing which keeps the state together, forming a nation only by making it the slave of a prince, this government is despotic in principle, and if manners do not moderate it, it will also be so in practice. Military discipline necessarily presupposes despotism and rigor. But we must not confuse nations ruled by a military government with nations wholly composed of warriors, such as the barbarians, Germans and others. Far from it: their government gives birth to liberty. There war is by no means an exclusive occupation which has to be specially studied, and which gives those who carry it on a superiority of force over the rest of society. Such a nation maintains its rights. A prince can enslave his people by means of soldiers, because the people are weaker. But how can he enslave a people of soldiers? It is not courage, nor the military spirit, which extinguish liberty, but the very reverse.

The kingdoms of Europe conquered by the northern barbarians, therefore, were saved from despotism, because these barbarians were free before the conquest, which was carried out in the name of the people and not in that of the king. The Roman way of life which was established, and the religion which the barbarians embraced, also contributed to protect them from despotism.

Private individuals were spread throughout the country; they shared territorial power and the gains of victory with the prince.

It was not the same in Asia, where the conquered peoples were already accustomed to despotism, because the first conquests, which had taken place before the period when manners could have been formed, had been very extensive and rapid.

Despotism gives birth to revolutions; but all that these bring about is the exchange of one tyrant for another, because in great despotic states the power of the kings is established only by means of their troops, and their security by means of their guards. The people are never strong or united enough to check such a military power, which substitutes one king for another, assured of being the instrument of the tyranny of the successor as it had been of that of his predecessor.

One suspects that the total effects of these causes must have been infinitely various, depending upon the way in which they were intermixed with the ideas of the received religion, and, as we have already noted, with veneration for a particular family, because in the absence of any other power men are ruled by habit. It would have been just as easy for the janissaries, if they had wanted to, to choose a sultan from among the populace as from the Ottoman family; but such was the respect for that family which was instilled into them from infancy that they would not have wanted this.

This power of education is one of the main sources of the capacity of governments to endure, to the point of maintaining them when the whole driving force of the empire is weakened, and of concealing its decline: in such a way that at the slightest disturbance one is astonished to see the state fall to the ground, like those trees which look healthy, because their bark is undamaged, whereas all the wood inside it is reduced to powder, and no longer offers any resistance to the wind. In despotic states, education is wholly employed to break down people’s courage. Fear and deference seize hold of the imagination. The sovereign, wrapped in formidable obscurity, seems to govern from the depths of a storm cloud, from which come thunder and lightning to inspire terror and dazzle.

It may be added that in these vast despotic states there is also introduced a despotism which extends over social manners, which dulls men’s minds even more; which deprives society of the greater part of its resources, its delights, and the co-operation of women in the running of the family; which by forbidding the social intercourse of the two sexes reduces everything to uniformity, and induces in members of the state a tired lethargy which is opposed to all change and therefore to all progress.

When everything is conducted by force (as it necessarily has to be in a society where a host of slaves and women—in each wealthy house as in the state itself—are sacrificed to a single master), the fire of the intellect is extinguished; it is locked in the shackles of barbarian laws. Despotism perpetuates ignorance, and ignorance perpetuates despotism. What is more, this despotic authority becomes common practice, and common practice confirms the abuses. Despotism is like an enormous weight which, pressing down on wooden pillars, weakens their resistance and causes them from day to day to sink and subside.

I shall therefore say something about slavery, polygamy, and the softness which is their consequence; and under this head I shall deal with the causes of differences in manners among men.

The enslavement of women to men is based over the whole world on the inequality of their physical powers. But as rather more men are born than women, wherever equality has reigned monogamy has been natural. It is so, therefore, among all small peoples, shepherds, hunters, and husbandmen; it is so among peoples divided up into small societies where the states are confined within the walls of cities as in Greece, and above all in the democratic republics; it is so among poor peoples, and among all the less wealthy individuals in the very countries where polygamy is most in vogue; it is the same in the empires whose customs date from the time when the people were still under republican governments, like the Roman empire and that of Alexander’s successors, which although despotic never knew polygamy.

Nevertheless the barbarians, who show little refinement in matters of love, were all inclined toward plurality of wives. Tacitus reports that the chiefs of the Germans sometimes had three or four wives; but among a people which was nomadic and poor the evil could not have been contagious. Thus it was with the growth in the wealth and the size of empires that polygamy was established; and with slavery its extent was increased.

The first men were cruel in their wars; it was only after a long time that they learned moderation. Hunting peoples massacre their prisoners; or, when they do not kill them, they incorporate them in their own nation. A mother who has lost her son chooses a prisoner to serve as a son to her; she loves him because he is useful to her. The ancients, among whom children were a form of wealth, and who received services from them, were inclined toward the adoption of children. Thus there were few slaves, or none at all, among hunting or primitive peoples.

Pastoral peoples began to be familiar with slavery. Those who captured herds were obliged, in order to be able to devote themselves to new expeditions, to maintain those who tended them.

Agricultural peoples carried slavery further. They had more varied services and more tiring work for slaves to perform, and in proportion to the extent to which the manners of the masters became more civilized, slavery became harsher and more degrading, because the inequality was greater. The wealthy ceased to work; slaves became a luxury and a commodity; parents even sold their children. But the slaves who were captured in war, or who were born of parents who were themselves slaves, always made up the greatest number.

In the house, they were used for all the lowest duties. They had neither goods nor honor of their own; they were stripped of the elementary rights of humanity. The laws gave limitless authority over them, and this was quite easy, because it was their masters who made the laws; and these masters thought to assure oppression by means of oppression. In despotic states the princes had a host of slaves, as did the governors and even wealthy individuals. The vast size of the states brought the inequality of fortunes to the highest pitch. The capitals became like chasms, where the wealthy from all parts of the empire gathered together, along with their hosts of slaves.

The female slaves formed part of the master’s pleasures. This can be seen in the manners of the ancient patriarchs, for the crime of adultery (and this was still the case in the statute law of antiquity) was never a reciprocal one as it is with us. It was only the husband who was regarded as being injured by it. This was a consequence of the great inequality between the two sexes which barbarism brought about. Among the ancient peoples women never had any rights in the marriage relation. It was only poverty which prevented polygamy from being established everywhere.

When in later times the manners and laws of a nation became settled, the intermingling of families restored to women those rights which they had not enjoyed since the earliest times, because, above all in republics, they used the power of their brothers against the tyranny of their husbands.

In these republics, where everyone was equal, the parents of a girl would never have agreed to let her go out of their sight for ever. Polygamy and the cloistering of women could never become established there. But in the first empires of which we are speaking, peopled as they were by a host of slaves, where women had no rights, and men had rights over their slaves, the plurality of wives became a practice which was as common as the limits of individual fortunes allowed. Jealousy is a necessary consequence of love: it inspires husband and wife with a wise sense of mutual propriety which assures the future of their children. This sensible attitude, and still more the presumption of dishonor which was associated with a wife’s infidelity, increased along with polygamy.

The impossibility of subjecting women to this law of fidelity, when neither their hearts nor their senses could be satisfied, led to the practice of shutting them up. Princes, and later those individuals who were wealthy enough, established seraglios for themselves.

Jealousy brought it about that men were mutilated in order to guard the women. Thence a softness entered into manners which did not mollify them but on the contrary rendered them more cruel.

The princes shut themselves up with their wives and their slaves; and their subjects, whom they never saw, were scarcely regarded by them as human beings. Their political government was always that of barbarians. It was crude, because they were ignorant and lazy; it was cruel, because less time is required to cut down a tree than to gather in its fruits, and because the art of making men happy is of all arts the most difficult, the one in which the most elements have to be combined.

The same softness spread through the whole state. Thence that sudden weakening of the monarchies of the east. Those of the Chaldeans, the Assyrians, the Medes, and the Persians scarcely survived the first conquerors who had founded them. It was as if they had remained in being for some time only while waiting for an enemy to come and destroy them. If these monarchies, by the weight of their armies, sometimes overwhelmed weak nations, they broke down in the face of any courageous resistance; and as soon as Greece had been united, it overthrew this immense colossus with hardly any effort.

There is only one means available to counter this general degeneracy of a nation, and that is a militia which is kept under martial discipline, like the Turkish janissaries or the Egyptian mamelukes; but such a militia often becomes an object of terror to its masters.

One thing that should be pointed out is that these harmful effects of despotism and the plurality of wives have never been extended so far as under Mohammedanism. This religion, which does not allow any laws other than those of the religion itself, opposes the wall of superstition to the natural march of improvement. It has consolidated barbarism by consecrating that which existed when it appeared, and which it adopted through national prejudice. Neither in the history of the ancient monarchies, nor in the manners of China and Japan, can one find such an excess of abasement as that of the Mohammedan peoples.

Despotism, and the uniformity and thus the imperfection of manners, laws, and government, were maintained in Asia and wherever great empires were formed at an early stage; and I have no doubt that the existence of the vast plains of Mesopotamia contributed to this. When despotism was later extended along with Mohammedanism, this was to some extent only as a result of the transmission of manners from one country to another.

The peoples who were preserved from despotism were those who remained shepherds or hunters; those who formed small societies; and the republics. It was among such peoples that revolutions were useful; that nations participated in them and thus drew gain from them; that tyranny was unable to consolidate itself sufficiently to enslave men’s minds; that the profusion of particular bodies of law and of revolutions which pointed out the errors of the founders of the state, and the fall of an old and rise of a new sovereign authority which brought about a re-examination of the laws, in the long run perfected the laws and government. It was among such peoples that equality was maintained, that intellect and courage showed great activity, and that the human mind made rapid progress. It was among them that manners and laws in the course of time learned how to direct themselves toward the greatest happiness of the people.

After this glance at the progress of governments and their morality, it will be useful to trace the progress of the human mind in all its revolutions.

SKETCH OF THE SECOND DISCOURSE

Of Which the Subject will be
the Progress of the Human Mind

Let us start from that state of confusion in which the mind knows nothing but sensations, in which sounds, more or less loud and more or less shrill, the temperature and resistance of surrounding objects, and pictures of bizarre, differently colored forms, come to assail the mind on every hand, and throw it into a kind of intoxication which is nevertheless the germ of reason.

The manner in which ideas begin to become a little distinct in our minds, and to exercise an influence on our will, depends on a kind of spiritual mechanism common to all men. It may be the work of a few moments; at any rate this would seem to be proved by the example of animals which know how to find their food, and, what would appear more difficult, which know how to go and look for it shortly after their birth.

Although pertaining to the history of nature rather than to that of facts, this period must be studied with care, since in every sphere the first steps determine the direction of the journey.

It was movement which cleared up this state of confusion, and which gave men the ideas of distinction and unity. Without it, they would never have thought of reflecting on the difference between colors; they would have been content merely to experience it. But the arrangement of the parts of this picture which is presented to the mind often changes the picture itself. The mind learns to observe the course of these variations. During the first experience of these changes, no distinction at all was yet made between the parts which maintained the same position relative to one another, whether the whole appeared to be in motion, as in the case of animals, or whether it appeared to be fixed in one spot, as in that of a tree. Thus, however much the images presented to our senses were only the result of all the individual colored or resistant points of which they were composed, the mind conceived them, so to speak, only in bulk.

The first individual ideas were thus necessarily collective in relation to the parts of which they are composed; at no time was it possible, nor will it ever be possible, for the analysis of the works of men to be carried to the highest degree. Properly speaking, there are no such things as simple ideas; they all resolve themselves into the results of sensations, the elements and different causes of which can be analyzed up to a point whose limit is unknown to us.

But the analysis of the first men was not carried very far. The stock of ideas was divided up only to the extent of the experience afforded by the diversity of phenomena and above all of needs. Men’s needs are relative only to this stock; it is unnecessary to anatomize fruits in order to feed on them, and even less necessary to analyze the ideas which inform us of their presence. Ideas are a language and true indicators by means of which we recognize the existence of external objects. It is never by means of reasoning that we perceive their relations with ourselves. Providence, by inspiring us with desires, has wisely spared us so long a journey. As a result of this, men have necessarily related their sensations to the external objects which they assume to exist. Where would we be if, before going in search of their food, men had been obliged, from their own sensations regarded solely as affections of their minds, to infer the existence of objects outside themselves?

Thus men began by giving names which were relative to the existing stock of ideas. Ideas, being the indicators of the existence of external objects, do not represent them at all exactly; from a distance an oak looks like an elm, and thus arises the idea of a tree—not because I have the idea of a tree which is neither an oak nor an elm, but because I have an idea which informs me of the existence of a tree without telling me whether it is the one or the other. This is the origin of abstraction. The idea is simple, no doubt, if one considers it in itself, independent of its relations—i.e., if we take it as always representing a certain form and a certain color; but experience teaches us that this form and this color are equally an indicator of the existence of an oak or of an elm.

It is the same with the signs of language. The first time they were used they designated only some definite object; but as they were applied to several objects they became general. Little by little different circumstances were distinguished, and in order to import more clarity into language, names were given to modes or manners of being, which in relation to our ideas are only relations of distance, or rather relations to the different sensations which are excited in us by the different languages which the objects speak to us, if I may put it that way.

Thus the ideas of modes were given names after those of substances, which were regarded as the principal ideas, although the senses acquire them for us at one and the same time. Thus it was by extracting the signs of language from their undue generality that the mind familiarized itself little by little with more abstract ideas. One suspects that ideas were multiplied in proportion as languages were perfected. The words which expressed affirmation, negation, the act of judging, existence, and possession became the bond of all our reasoning. Habit caused these same ideas to be applied in similar cases to all the roots of languages.

Little by little, by giving names in this way to the different relations which objects have with one another or with ourselves, the possession of all these ideas was assured, and as a result the operations of the mind acquired a considerable facility. But at the same time the labyrinth of ideas became more and more encumbered; it was natural to believe that to each word there corresponded one idea, and yet the same words are rarely synonymous with one another; they have different meanings according to the way in which they are applied. In conversation we guess more than we actually hear.

The mind, by an almost mechanical operation which owes its origin to the linking together of ideas, seizes quite quickly the meaning of words determined by the circumstances. Having believed that words corresponded exactly to ideas, men were quite astonished to see that their precise determination could not be agreed upon; it was a long time before they began to suspect that this arose from the fact that ideas were different according as one wanted to extract the general idea from different particular cases; people lost their way among misleading definitions which took in only one part of the object, and everyone gave a different definition of the same idea.

The complex notions of substance, which, because they relate to real objects, necessarily include a greater or lesser number of parts, according as the object is more or less understood, were regarded as pictures of the objects themselves. Instead of asking by what stages a certain number of different kinds of things had been gathered together under a general name, an effect of which the cause would have been found in their general resemblance, men sought for that common essence which the names expressed; they invented genera, species, individuals, and those metaphysical degrees whose nature has caused so many disputes, as cruel sometimes in their effects as they were frivolous in their object.

Instead of regarding these names as signs which are relative to the manner in which we perceive the range of existing things which we extend according to the resemblances we discover, and which we cannot extend too far without running the risk of confusing one with another, men invented abstract and incommunicable essences. Latterly they have gone so far as to apply this also to concepts relating to products of the human mind, such as comedy and tragedy. People have seriously argued about whether a poem belongs to this or that genus, and only rarely has it been realized that the argument is merely about words.

The error was still greater with regard to the signs which were used to express the relations between things. Such are all the moral ideas which have been reasoned about as if they were objects existing independently of the things which have these relations with one another.

Man receives his various ideas in his infancy, or, rather, the words are engraved on his mind. They are linked up at first with particular ideas; and little by little there is formed that confused assemblage of ideas and expressions whose use is learned through imitation. Time, by means of the progress of languages, has multiplied ideas to infinity; and when man seeks to retire within himself, he finds himself in a labyrinth which he has entered with blindfolded eyes. He can no longer find the marks of his footsteps; nevertheless his eyes open, and he sees on all sides paths of whose interconnection he is unaware. He clings to a few truths which he is unable to doubt; but whence does this certainty come to him? He knows nothing except through his ideas, and he is thus bound to believe that his ideas bring certainty with them; for whence could he derive it before having analyzed the manner in which these ideas are formed in his mind? This is an immense task, which requires several generations.

Without understanding very well what it is to have an idea of a thing, he lays down as a principle that everything which his ideas tell him about an object is true. This is a delusive principle, because in reality it is an art to draw from notions once they have been determined, even arbitrarily, inferences which are incapable of taking one in. Success, in this case, becomes another source of error. People have more confidence in the principle, and misuse of it does not arouse any aversion to it at all. For the same reason that everyone is convinced that he has the true idea of an object, one is never tempted to challenge a court, to which no one has recourse without believing that he will hear it pronounce in his favor. From this in all ages there has arisen the obscurity of logic and metaphysics; from this have arisen arbitrary definitions and divisions.

This darkness could only be dissipated little by little; the dawn of reason could only rise by imperceptible degrees, to the extent that men analyzed their ideas more and more; not that they at first recognized the necessity of distinguishing between all the parts of their ideas: but their very disputes led them toward this, because truth seems to fly away and escape from our investigations until we have arrived at the primary elements of ideas; because while advancing little by little we are always aware of a gap; and finally because curiosity always makes us act until it has exhausted the subject of its investigations, and because no question can be exhausted except by means of the truth.

Progress was more or less rapid, depending on circumstances and aptitudes.

A fortunate arrangement of the fibers of the brain, a greater or lesser degree of power or refinement in the organs of sense and memory, a certain degree of quickness in the blood—these are probably the only differences which nature herself creates as between one man and another. Their minds, or the power and character of their minds, have a real inequality, the causes of which will always remain unknown to us and which could never be the subject of our reasoning. All the rest is the effect of education; and this education is the result of all the sensations we have experienced, and of all the ideas which we have been able to acquire from infancy. All the objects with which we are surrounded contribute to this; and the instruction of our parents and our masters makes up only the smallest part of it.

The original aptitudes are distributed equally among barbarous peoples and among civilized peoples; they are probably the same in all places and at all times. Genius is spread through the human race very much as gold is in a mine. The more ore you take, the more metal you will get. The more men there are, the more great men you will have, or the more men capable of becoming great. The chances of education and of events either develop them, or leave them buried in obscurity, or sacrifice them before their time, like fruits blown down by the wind. One is compelled to admit that if Corneille, brought up in a village, had followed the plough all his life, that if Racine had been born in Canada among the Hurons, or in Europe in the eleventh century, they would never have unfolded their genius. If Columbus and Newton had died at sixteen, America would perhaps not have been discovered until two centuries later, and we would still perhaps be ignorant of the true system of the world. And if Virgil had perished in infancy we would have had no Virgil, for there have not been two of them.

Progress, although inevitable, is intermingled with frequent periods of decline as a result of the occurrences and revolutions which come to interrupt it. Thus progress has been very different among different peoples.

Men who are separated from one another and who have no commerce have moved forward at much the same rate. We have found small nations which live by hunting at the same point of development, with the same arts, the same arms, and the same manners. Genius was of little benefit with respect to unrefined needs; but as soon as the human race succeeded in escaping from the narrow sphere of these elementary needs, the circumstances which put this genius in a position to develop, combined with those which presented it with facts and experiences which a thousand others would have seen without taking advantage of them, soon introduced one or another kind of inequality.

Among barbarous peoples, where education is more or less the same for everyone, this inequality could not be very great. When labor was divided according to men’s aptitudes, which is in itself very advantageous since everything is then done better and more quickly, the unequal distribution of goods and social responsibilities meant that the majority of men who were employed in rough and lowly work were unable to make the same progress as the other men, to whom this distribution gave leisure and the means of advancing themselves.

Education brought about an even greater difference between the various parts of one and the same nation than did wealth, and as between different nations it was the same.

The people which were the first to acquire a little more knowledge quickly became superior to its neighbors; and each step in its progress made the next one easier. Thus the development of one nation accelerated from day to day, while others stayed in their state of mediocrity, immobilized by particular circumstances, and others remained in a state of barbarism. A glance over the earth puts before our eyes, even today, the whole history of the human race, showing us traces of all the steps and monuments of all the stages through which it has passed from the barbarism, still in existence, of the American peoples to the civilization of the most enlightened nations of Europe. Alas! our ancestors and the Pelasgians who preceded the Greeks were like the savages of America!

A reason for these differences which are found between nations has been sought in differences of climate. This view, modified a little and rightly restricted only to those climatic influences which are always the same, has recently been adopted by one of the greatest geniuses of our century. But the conclusions which are drawn from it are hasty, to say the least, and are extremely exaggerated. They are belied by experience, since under the same climates peoples are different; since under climates which resemble one another very little we very often find peoples with the same character and the same turn of mind; since the fervor and despotism of the Orientals can arise from barbarism alone when it is combined with certain circumstances; and since that metaphorical language which is presented to us as an effect of the greater proximity of the sun was that of the ancient Gauls and Germans, according to the accounts given by Tacitus and Diodorus Siculus, and is still that of the Iroquois in the icy regions of Canada. It is in fact that of all peoples whose language is very limited, and who, lacking the appropriate words, multiply comparisons, metaphors, and allusions in order to make themselves understood, and who manage this sometimes forcefully but always with little exactitude and clarity.

Since physical causes act only upon the hidden principles which contribute to the formation of our mind and our character, and not upon the results, which are all that we see, we are right to evaluate their influence only after having exhaustively examined that of the moral causes and assured ourselves that the facts are absolutely inexplicable by the latter, of whose principle we are conscious, and whose operation we can follow in the depths of our hearts.

The ideas of the first men were limited to objects perceptible by the senses, and thus their languages were confined to designating them. The formation of a host of abstract and general ideas, still unknown to a large number of peoples, was the work of time, and consequently it was only after a long period that men arrived at an understanding of the art of reasoning.

The class of objects which were the first to be designated in languages was the same everywhere, just as were the first metaphors and the first abstract ideas which govern conjugations, declensions, and analogy in the most barbarous languages (none of which we know in its original state); for whatever the way in which barbarism arrests the progress of a body of men, it is only by depriving them of opportunities to perfect themselves. In the course of time genius never fails to appear. Thus in the constant use of languages it is impossible that the variety of combinations of ideas which present themselves for expression should not indicate the need for new signs, in order to denote new connections or new shades of meaning between the ideas. And this need, which is a consciousness of our poverty, in revealing the latter to us teaches us how to remedy it, and becomes the source of our wealth.

Thus the languages of the most barbarous peoples are today very far removed from their first attempts. It is the same with all progress, which is always real but sometimes very slow; there are few arts and sciences whose origin cannot be traced back to these first epochs; all the arts are based on homely ideas, on experiences which are common to and within the reach of all men.

We see the immense progress which the sciences have made, and we have lost sight of the imperceptible chain by which they are linked to the first ideas. In the beginning, men observed the heavenly bodies with the naked eye; the horizon was the first instrument, and the 360 days of the lunisolar year are the model for the division of the circle into 360 degrees. The stars, from the first to the fourth magnitude, are visible to all men. The alternation of days and nights, and the changes in the phases of the moon, were natural measures of time; the alternation of heat and cold, and the needs of tillage, led to a comparison of the path of the sun with that of the moon. Thence the year, the months, and the names of the principal constellations.

Then navigation made it necessary to perfect astronomy, and showed how to relate it to geography.

Music, dance, and poetry, again, have their source in the nature of man. Created to live in society, his joy manifests itself externally: he leaps and shouts. A common joy expressed itself in swaying movements, in leaps, and in simultaneous and confused shouts. Little by little people became accustomed to leap in a similar manner; the steps were marked by sounds; and the latter were separated by regular intervals. The ear, with very little experience, and by following nature alone, learned to appreciate the primary relations between sounds. When it was desired to communicate the reason for one’s joy in words, these were arranged according to the beat of the sounds. This was the origin of dance, of music, and of poetry, which was at first written in order to be sung. It was only with time that people began to get satisfaction simply from the harmony which was characteristic of it, and which they became familiar with only after it had been sufficiently perfected to give pleasure by itself alone. To the extent that the arts are perfected, they are separated from one another because they need particular talents. Pauses were indicated by similar sounds, and the ear thus learned to take account of the number of syllables. The necessity of conforming in this way to the beat must have contributed to the progress and softening of languages; versification daily became less free; the ear, by dint of experience, subjected itself to stricter rules; and if the burden of these became heavier, this was fortunately compensated for by the fact that the perfection of languages and the proliferation of new turns of phrase and felicitous boldnesses of style also lent greater strength to bear it.

Among uncultivated peoples, the capacity to remember verses, together with national vanity, induced them to set down in songs their most memorable actions. Such are the songs of the savages of our own day, those of the ancient bards, the runic rhymes of the inhabitants of Scandinavia, some ancient canticles included in the historical books of the Hebrews; the chou-king of the Chinese, and the ballads of the modern peoples of Europe. These were the only histories which existed before the invention of writing—histories without chronology, and, as we might expect, often full of untrue circumstances.

The poverty of languages, and the necessity for metaphors which resulted from this poverty, led to the employment of allegories and fables to explain physical phenomena. They are the first steps of philosophy, as can still be seen in India.

The fables of all peoples resemble one another, because the effects to be explained, and the patterns of the causes which have been invented in order to explain them, resemble one another. There are some differences, because although there is only one truth, and although imagination takes only one course which is very much the same everywhere, the individual steps do not all correspond with one another. Moreover, the mythological beings who were supposed to exist were brought into histories of the facts, which thus came to vary greatly. The sex of the gods, often depending as it did on the gender of a word in a language, was also bound to bring about variations in the fables of different peoples. Very many circumstances in these fables were peculiar to them, without destroying their general interrelationship. The intermingling of nations, and trade between them, gave birth to new fables through ambiguities of expression; and poorly understood words increased the number of the old fables.

Regarding imaginary beings as real, men sometimes multiplied the number of gods by including those which different nations had invented to explain the same effects, and at other times they took those which had similar attributes to be the same. Thence the confusion in the history of these gods. Thence too the multiplicity of their actions, above all when two peoples with the same mythologies were mixed together, as in the case of the Indians. Natural philosophy changed, but people did not stop believing in fables, because of their twofold love of antiquity and the marvelous, and also because the fables were transmitted from century to century by education.

The first histories were also fables, invented in the same way to make up for ignorance of the origin of empires, arts, and customs; it is very easy indeed to recognize their falsity. Everything which men invent is linked only to what seems to be the truth, that is, to the opinions of the century in which the fact concerned is invented. But what men recount is linked to the truth itself, and can never be contradicted by subsequent observations. Moreover, before the invention of writing, men had no records other than songs and a few stones beside which the songs were repeated. It is clear that men were more concerned to seek amusement and glory in these songs than they were to avoid exaggeration in them. Even Herodotus was still a poet. It was only after him that it was felt necessary that history should tell the truth.

Herodotus wrote four centuries after Homer, and yet what does Herodotus amount to? What then did those four centuries amount to? What were the times of Homer like? Why had poetry risen so high while history remained so low? Herodotus is vastly inferior in his field to Homer in his; and one of the great defects of Herodotus is that he is too like Homer, seeking all the time to decorate his account with the ornaments of fable. To know that men are greedy for the marvelous, to have enough genius to use it with vigor and grace, and to give general pleasure—that was Homer. More reflection was necessary, and a slower rate of progress, before it was understood that there were occasions when these marvels could not give as much pleasure as the unvarnished truth; that men’s curiosity could find in the certainty of things a pleasure and a tranquility which more than compensated for the number, variety, and singularity of the adventures; and finally that a means of giving pleasure which had been tried a thousand times could not be assured of success for ever.

This reflection and this progress were reserved for times after Homer’s, and more than four centuries after. When Herodotus wrote, these times had not yet arrived. Often a thing which demands less genius than another requires more progress among mankind as a whole.

The arts of design, sculpture, and painting have many connections with poetry in the feelings which the artist experiences, and in those which he strives to communicate. They had a natural origin in the desire to preserve historical or mythological records; and genius in this sphere was heightened by that patriotic or religious zeal which sought to express with feeling, depth, and force the ideas and memories which these records were bound to recall.

All these arts depend a great deal on the different states of mankind—whether they are hunters, shepherds, or husbandmen. The latter, being the only ones who could have a large population, and needing as they did a greater amount of positive knowledge in order to direct their labor, would necessarily make much greater progress.

Men’s knowledge, all of which is contained within actual sensation, is of different kinds. One kind consists in pure combinations of ideas, such as abstract mathematics. Another is concerned with external objects, but takes in, so to speak, only their surface and the effects they have on us: such are poetry and the arts of taste. Another, finally, has for its object the very existence of things. It goes back from effects to causes, from the senses to the body, from the present to the past, from visible bodies to invisible ones, from the world to the Divinity. The belief in the existence of bodies, and that of past objects which are recalled by the memory, came before reasoning. No one ever had any doubts about the immediate cause of our sensations: the causes of the movements of bodies constituted physics; and at first the action of bodies upon one another was often confused with that of the Divinity.

Aristotle, in a work which, although scoffed at today, is none the less one of the finest endeavors of the human spirit, was able to carry analysis to its perfection by examining the manner in which our minds pass from a known truth to an unknown one; he was able to derive from this the rules of the art of reasoning, and by demonstrating the effects of a certain combination of ideas he showed how we could make certain that one proposition was legitimately deduced from another. It must be admitted that in the rest of his philosophy he was unable to make any analysis as perfect as this, because the enumeration of the ideas was not nearly as easy. But however useful one takes his work to be so far as consequences are concerned, it could not serve to ascertain causes. Although Aristotle had put forward the notion that all ideas came from the senses, it was a very long time before anyone began looking for causes other than the so-called abstract ideas and going back to their origin. Bacon was the first to feel the necessity for submitting all these notions to examination again. It was a great deal at that time to encourage scholars to do this. We must forgive him for having himself proceeded only in a timid fashion. He was like a man who walks trembling along a road filled with ruins, doubting and feeling his way. After him, Galileo and Kepler, as a result of their observations, laid the true foundations of philosophy. But it was Descartes who, bolder than they, meditated and made a revolution. The system of occasional causes, the idea of reducing everything to matter and movement, constituted the essence of this lively philosopher, and presuppose an analysis of ideas of which the Ancients had provided no example at all.

In shaking off the yoke of their authority, he still did not challenge sufficiently the knowledge which he had first received from them. It is astonishing that a man who ventured to question everything he had learned did not seek to follow the progress of his new knowledge from his first sensations. One might say that he was frightened by the solitude in which he had put himself, and that he was unable to endure it. All at once he throws himself back into the very ideas of which he had been able to divest himself. He conjures up, as did the Ancients, pure abstractions; he regards his ideas as realities. He invents for them causes which are proportionate to their scope. He is seduced by these ancient preconceptions even while he is combating them. If I were not held back by the respect and gratitude due to such a great man, I would compare him to Samson, who, in pulling down the temple of Dagon, was crushed beneath the ruins.

The members of his sect attributed our errors to illusions of the senses, and the exaggerated zeal with which they attacked the senses had a good effect. In trying to work out the way in which our senses deceive us, men learned to analyze the way in which they give us an account of external objects. Locke succeeded in carrying this analysis much further, and Berkeley and Condillac followed him. They are all the children of Descartes.

When Descartes looked at nature, it was as if he cast a piercing glance at it, encompassed it completely, and took as it were a bird’s-eye view of it.

Newton examined it in more detail. He described the country which the other had discovered.

Some people have made it their business to sacrifice the reputation of Descartes to that of Newton. They have imitated those Romans who, when one emperor succeeded another, simply knocked off the head of the first and substituted for it that of the second. But in the Temple of Glory there is room for all great geniuses. A statue can be erected for everyone who is worthy of it.

In between these two mighty geniuses, there happened what always happens in every field. A great man opens up new paths for the human mind. For a certain period all men are still only his pupils. Little by little, however, they level the paths which he has mapped out; they unite all the parts of his discoveries; they bring together and catalogue their valuable and authoritative features, until a new great man rises up, who soars as high above the point to which his predecessor had led the human race as that predecessor did above the point from which he set out.

Newton, without the experiments of Richer, would perhaps not have dreamed that his principles would lead him to give the world the shape of a spheroid. The greatest genius is never tempted to go deeply into theory unless he is stimulated by the facts. It is rare for men to give themselves up to reasoning. There are people who have the need to feel, but a more pressing need is required before they venture to make a leap forward.

It is said that M. Frenicle suspected that gravity, which made bodies fall to the ground, also kept the planets in their orbits. But from such a vague and uncertain idea to that piercing perspective, that vision of genius of Newton, which penetrated the immensity of the combinations and relationships of all the heavenly bodies, to that unyielding boldness which feared neither the profundity of calculation nor the beauty and difficulty of the problems, and which rose so far as to put into its balance the sun, the stars, and all the forces of nature—that is the distance from Frenicle to Newton.

Descartes discovered the art of putting curves into equations. Huigens, and above all Newton, suddenly carried the torch of reason into the abyss of the infinite.

Leibnitz, mighty genius and conciliator, wanted his works to become a kind of centre where all human knowledge would be united. He wanted to gather together into one bundle all sciences and all opinions. He wanted to resuscitate the systems of all the ancient philosophers, like a man trying to build a proper palace from the ruins of all the buildings of ancient Rome. He wanted to make of his Theodicy what Peter made of St. Petersburg.

We owe to these great men the pattern and the laws of analysis, the lack of which had for such a long time retarded the progress of metaphysics, and even that of physics.

It could be said that there is one general respect in which these two sciences both differ from those which are called mathematical. All sciences, no doubt, have their origin in the senses. But mathematics has this advantage, that it is an application of the senses which is not susceptible to error.

The necessity of measuring fields, aided by the property which space has of being itself measured in relation to the room it occupies, gave rise to the first elements of mathematics. Ideas of numbers are neither less simple, nor less familiar; it was from these few simple ideas, which are easily combined together, that the mathematical sciences were formed. Everything which is capable of being considered as a quantity may be their subject. They are only the consequences of abstract definitions which include such a small number of ideas that it is easy to encompass all of them. A chain of truths, all depending upon one another, is formed: a chain in which men have only to recognize all the steps they have taken in order to accumulate truth upon truth. These truths become more and more fruitful; the more we advance in speculation, the more we discover of those general formulae of calculation from which we can descend to particular truths by particularizing the hypotheses. The truths, when they are combined, are increased in number and combined again; and from this springs a new increase, because each becomes the source of a host of truths which are no less fruitful than the first.

To the extent that the number of these known truths increased, to the extent that the properties of a greater number of shapes were investigated, their common properties were expressed in formulae and general principles which contained everything that was known. Thus even in mathematics men began by investigating a few familiar figures, a small number of properties of lines; the general principles were the work of time.

Thus, since it was believed that the best order was that in which a multiplicity of consequences was derived from one principle alone, men were obliged, in order to incorporate it in mathematical works, to recast from century to century the whole method of instruction. It was not realized that this allegedly natural order was in fact arbitrary; that in geometry, where the general relationships of figures are set out, these relationships are reciprocal; that one may equally infer the principle from the consequence, or the consequence from the principle; the equation of the ellipse can be deduced from its construction, as its construction can be deduced from its equation.

Thus, if any method is to be preferred, it is that of tracing the steps of the human mind in its discoveries, of bringing home the general axioms which spring from all the particular truths, and at the same time making known the manner in which all the preceding truths are bound up in them. Thus the picture of the progress of mathematics is like the Olympus of the poets, which was pointed toward the earth, and which, to the extent that it moved away from the earth, expanded until it touched the sky. Thus geometry has expanded up to the infinite. Particular truths lead to more and more general formulae; and even in mathematics it is from the particular to the general that one must advance.

But when the general principles are found, what rapid progress they bring about in these sciences! Algebra, the reduction of curves to equations, the analysis of the infinite! Here there is a sequence of hypothetical truths, certain for that very reason, and at the same time verified by nature, because the first hypotheses were by no means arbitrary, but based on the ideas of extent which our senses present to us, and which they present to us only because things possessing extent really exist in nature.

Mathematics sets out from a small number of ideas, and combines their relationships ad infinitum. It is quite the contrary in the physical sciences, where it is a question not of a sequence of ideas and relationships, but of facts and ideas which concern an object actually existing either in the past or the present (the future can only be mathematical), and the truth of which consists in the conformity of our opinions with this object.

Under the heading of physical sciences I include logic, which is the body of knowledge concerning the operations of our minds and the generation of our ideas; metaphysics, which deals with the nature and origin of things which exist; and finally physics properly so-called, which examines the mutual action of bodies upon one another, and the causes and interconnections of sensible phenomena. One could also add history, the certainty of which can never be as great, because the concatenation of events can never be as close, and because events which took place a long time ago can only with difficulty be submitted to a new examination. Nature being always consistent with itself, we may, by means of experiments, bring before our eyes once again the same phenomena, or produce new phenomena; but if the first witnesses of an event are not very trustworthy, the event must always remain surrounded by uncertainty, and its precise effects can never be known to us.

I am not speaking here of sciences like morals and politics which depend on self-love regulated by justice, which is itself only a very enlightened form of self-love. What I have said in a general way about the differences between sciences of combination and sciences of observation may be applied to them. In the latter, man cannot confine his attention to a small number of principles. He is assailed simultaneously by a whole mass of ideas, and is forced to gather them together in large numbers, because all things which exist are bound up with one another by their mutual interaction; and he is obliged at the same time to analyze these ideas carefully until he arrives at their most simple elements.

Logic is based on the analysis of language and the reduction of the images of objects to the simple sensations of which they are composed. Metaphysics was bound to feel the effects of the small amount of progress made in this analysis. Before we had analyzed our sensations and understood their causes, the real uniformity of material substances was not apparent to us. A body which is blue and a body which is red are bound to appear different, and we would scarcely have been able to contemplate the conformity which they possess if the senses had not revealed bodies considered in themselves as existing outside ourselves, capable of assuming various colors and manifesting themselves with different sensible qualities. Thence the distinction between substance and mode; but this did not at first prevent men from conceiving the modes as so many things existing outside ourselves, even though they could not in fact exist without a subject. Thence the errors of the majority of philosophers.

There is nothing so confused among the Ancients as all these ideas of substance, essence, and matter, which were due to the absence of proper knowledge about the way in which they originated from the first sensible ideas. They were nevertheless employed in all their ambiguity. In order to explain them, how much progress had to be made in physics itself, whose errors were holding back development!—for metaphysics and physics have a mutual need of one another. How much time was necessary to discover that all sensible phenomena could be explained by shape and movement! Descartes was the first to see this truth clearly. Before him, for want of this degree of analysis, physics remained more or less confounded with metaphysics.

The errors of metaphysics relate to the manner in which we receive, through our sensations, the idea of things existing outside ourselves. It is only by relating colored points that we create for ourselves the idea of visible extent; it is by the gathering together of a number of sensations, which produce in us the resistance of external bodies to our own, that we create for ourselves the idea of tangible extent. It is only by reasoning that we assure ourselves of the existence of the bodies which constitute the bond and common cause of the sensations associated with them; but instinct, or, if you like, the combining together of ideas derived from experience, came before reasoning, and men confused the bodies themselves with their sensible qualities. This idea was bound to lead to that obscurity in the whole of metaphysics of which I am speaking, and which is easy to understand if we consider that the judgment we pass on the existence of external objects is only the result of their relations with us, of their effects on us, of our fears, of our desires, and of the use which we make of them. Our senses being given to us only for the preservation of our lives and our welfare, sensations are simply the true signs of our ideas about these external things, which are sufficient to make us seek or avoid them without understanding their nature. Our judgments are simply the abbreviated expression of all the movements which these bodies excite in us, an expression which guarantees for us the reality of these bodies by the reality of their effect itself. Thus our judgment on external objects does not in any way presuppose the analysis of such ideas; we judge in bulk.

On the other hand it must be observed that language, in relation to metaphysics, resembles the application which is made of geometry to physics. But apart from the fact that in language, the use of which is habitual and easy, we do not always bother not to allow ourselves any contradiction, we would be able to succeed in this only by first defining all our ideas, as a result of which we would tire ourselves out in the formulation of a series of truths which had little applicability to the usage of society, which is after all the chief aim of language.

Complete meticulousness would lead to there being no contradictions in terms, and to the formulation of a chain of hypothetical truths; but that is not enough in sciences which have to be compared with real objects. Often the problems of physics (because all the elements which concur in producing the effect have not been clearly seen) lead to a result which is absolutely contrary to experience, even though there are no mathematical errors involved. Words recall rather than express ideas. Given correct logic, we can deduce consequences very effectively; but who will vouch for the causes? And if they happen to be false, how far would the very truth of the consequences become removed from reality, if men, driven by their needs to their senses and to society, were not often forced to be inconsistent? Two contradictory ideas do not look like the object; but why do they not look like it? Usually it is because they are abstract ideas whose objects have no existence at all.

In general, the principles of the sciences in which we do not wish to stray from reality can be nothing other than facts. In metaphysics, facts can be known only through the analysis of our sensations, which in relation to external causes are only the effects which indicate them. In physics, they can be known only through a profound examination of all the circumstances, which, when it is found to be impossible, comes to constitute the necessary limit of our researches. He who is familiar with only one of the coasts of a country is uncertain whether it is an island or the mainland. That is the position we are in so far as all the objects of our ideas are concerned when we begin to reflect, and it is still the position so far as a great number of them are concerned after a great deal of reflection.

This twofold confusion of language and ideas has undoubtedly had a considerable influence on physics. Men, when they began to reason about the phenomena which confronted them, at first sought for the cause itself before they had properly understood the phenomena; and since the true causes could be discovered only in the course of time, they invented false ones. Whenever it is a question of finding the cause of an effect, it is only by way of hypothesis that we can succeed, when the effect is all that is known.

We go back, as best we can, from the effect to the cause, in our endeavors to decide what is outside ourselves. Now in order to divine the cause of an effect when our ideas do not present it to us, it is necessary to invent one: we must verify a number of hypotheses and try them out. But how can we verify them? By working out the consequences of each hypothesis and comparing them with the facts. If all the facts which are predicted on the basis of the hypothesis are found in nature precisely as the hypothesis would lead us to expect, this conformity, which cannot be the effect of chance, becomes its verification, in the same way that one identifies the seal which has made an impression when one sees that all the characteristics of the latter are included in those of the seal.

Such was the course of the progress of physics. Facts which were poorly understood, poorly analyzed, and few in number were bound to lead to the invention of totally false hypotheses; the necessity of making a host of suppositions, before finding the true one, was bound to produce many. Further, the difficulty of deducing the consequences of these hypotheses and comparing them with the facts was in the beginning very great. It was only by the application of mathematics to physics that men were able from those hypotheses, which are only combinations of what necessarily happens when certain bodies are moved according to certain laws, to infer the effects which necessarily followed from them; and thereafter research was bound to increase with time. The art of making experiments, too, was perfected only in the course of time; fortunate accidents, which nevertheless happen only to those who often have these objects before their eyes and who understand them; and, much more commonly, a multiplicity of refined theories and little systems relating to details, often aided once again by mathematics—apprised men of the facts, or indicated to them the experiments which ought to be carried out together with the way to make them successful. Thus we see how the progress of mathematics supported that of physics, how everything is bound up together, and at the same time how the need to examine all the hypotheses necessitated a host of mathematical investigations which, by multiplying truths, increased the generality of the principles, thereby leading to the development of a considerable facility in calculation and the perfection of this art.

From all this it may be concluded that men were bound to pass through a thousand errors before arriving at the truth. Hence that host of systems, each one less sound than the other, which nevertheless represent real progress, real gropings toward the truth; systems, moreover, which give rise to research and are for this reason useful in their effects. Hypotheses are not harmful: all those which are false destroy themselves. The so-called systematic classifications which are really only arbitrary dictionaries would seem on the whole to check the advance of natural history, by treating it as if it were complete, whereas it can never in fact be so; and nevertheless these systems themselves represent progress. Pliny is no more scholarly a naturalist than Linnaeus; on the contrary, he falls far short of him. But Pliny was familiar with fewer objects, and fewer relations between these objects. Linnaeus is more aware of the extent to which his account is overburdened with detailed lists of objects, and of the fact that in order to identify them one must understand their relationships. He often looks for arbitrary ones—well, they will give way to the knowledge of the imperceptible gradations which unite the species. The first step is to find a system; the second is to become disgusted with it.

Let us go back to our physical hypotheses, whose diversity, as we see, is necessary, and whose uncertainty does not prevent us from being able in the end to find the true ones, at any rate when the details of the facts can be sufficiently ascertained. But besides the difficulty of analyzing the facts and developing the hypotheses, there is in the manner in which they have been formed another source of error which is still more considerable. This is the only too tempting taste for analogy; ignorance sees resemblances everywhere, and unfortunately it is ignorance which passes judgment.

Before men were conversant with the mutual interconnection of physical effects, nothing was more natural than to suppose that these were produced by intelligent beings, invisible and resembling ourselves; for what else would they have resembled? Everything that happened, without men having a hand in it, had its god, in respect of whom fear or expectation soon led to the establishment of a cult; and this cult was once again devised on the model of the respect which people might have for powerful men. For the gods were only more powerful men, more or less perfect according to whether they were the product of a century which was more or less enlightened about the true perfection of humanity.

When the philosophers had recognized the absurdity of these fables, without yet having acquired any real understanding of natural history, the idea struck them to explain the causes of phenomena by way of abstract expressions like essences and faculties: expressions which in fact explained nothing, and about which men reasoned as if they were beings, new gods substituted for the old ones. Following these analogies, faculties were proliferated in order to provide a cause for each effect.

It was only much later, through observation of the mechanical action which bodies have upon one another, that men derived from this mechanics other hypotheses which mathematics was able to develop and experiment to verify. That is why physics did not cease degenerating into bad metaphysics until a long period of progress in the arts and in chemistry had multiplied the combinations of bodies, and until, with the development of closer communications between societies, geographical knowledge had become more extensive, the facts had become more certain, and the practice of the arts had itself been brought to the attention of the philosophers. Printing, literary and scientific journals, and the transactions of Academies increased the degree of certainty until today it is only the details which remain in doubt.

There is another kind of progress of the human mind, less recognized and acknowledged, but nevertheless real—that which is relative to the arts of taste, to painting, poetry, and music. Whatever the admirers of antiquity say about this, we have become more knowledgeable about these arts, without having surpassed or even attained in the arts of design that sublime beauty of which Greece (over a very short period) provided the models.

Since it is nevertheless very difficult to apprehend true taste without being arbitrary, and since its nature can be easily dulled by all kinds of habits, it has been subject to a large number of revolutions. Painting depends upon imitation; architecture was at first subject only to the method of building which convenience dictated. The techniques of these two arts were perfected, but eccentric fashions brought about variations in taste. That delicacy of feeling upon which the perfection of taste depends is not associated with either barbarism or laxity. It depends upon an elegance of manners, upon a temperate luxury which does not hinder the spread of enlightenment, but which is sufficient to ensure a market for pleasing objects and the employment of second-rate artists, among whom the great artists who shine out from them are formed. No art can continue to exist unless it succeeds in employing a number of men sufficient to carry it on as a simple craft.¹ Extravagant luxury, where vanity causes ornaments to be accumulated because it regards them less as ornaments than as symbols of affluence, smothers taste. Men no longer seek for the pleasure which things afford to the senses and the mind; they no longer search their own hearts. They no longer listen to anything but fashion. The sure way to judge badly in any sphere is not to judge with one’s eyes. When each individual judges, the multitude judges well, because its judgment is that of a large number of people; but when no one does anything but listen, the multitude judges badly. Another cause of bad taste was often the progress of technique in the arts. Men are always liable to mistake the difficult for the beautiful. Arts, virtues—everything is infected by this error; hence the false virtues of many philosophers.

Only after a very long time did it become known that virtue among men, as well as beauty in the arts, depended on certain relationships between objects and our organs. The intellect naturally delights in apprehending these relationships, and the arts are perfected when they have reached this point. Artistic techniques, when they are perfected, appear as merits in the worker who thinks of demonstrating his dexterity, and who does not think at all about the manner in which objects ought to please, which is difficult to elucidate when one does not apprehend it with a kind of instinct. Hence Gothic architecture, which is abandoned only when antiquity is taken as a model, that is, the period when men had felt this inspiration.

Greece, too, had lost good taste, which shows that it is not barbarism alone that smothers it; but it was less conscious that it had lost it, because it had not had to endure that period of palpable barbarism which warned Europe to look for models in happier times.

With regard to painting and sculpture, since these two arts are very difficult, they were bound to fall into a decline as soon as the protection of enlightened princes came to be lacking. Not even sales in the churches, nor individual luxury, could keep them going, for individuals were impoverished: and because of the paucity of trade in all parts of Europe there was little choice. The taste which is formed through the repeated comparison of beautiful things is lost when trade between nations does not put them before one’s eyes. The dauber on the corner is enough for those who enjoy only an unrefined luxury. Moreover, painting is an art which is undertaken for money and which requires genius, and the forms of government in Europe, degrading as they did everyone who was not a gentleman, reduced it to pure technique. As for Greece, it was too broken and too ravaged, both by the instability of its monarchy and by the invasions of the Saracens and the Bulgarians, to be able to cultivate the agreeable arts with success. However, it contributed to the revival of Rome in the fourteenth century through the enthusiasm which it inspired for antiquity.

There were parts of the arts of taste which could be perfected with time, for example perspective, which depends on optics. But local color, the imitation of nature, and the expression of the passions itself are of all times. Thus those great men who at all times have pushed art forward to a certain point, acquire, in relation to the following centuries, a certain equality, and as a result they are in a way more fortunate than philosophers, who necessarily became out of date and useless through the progress of their successors.

Great men in the fields of eloquence and poetry have the same immortality, and in a way a still more lasting one, because their works are perpetuated and multiplied by means of copies. Their progress depends on languages, on circumstances, on manners, and on the chance which causes several great geniuses to arise in a nation.

One point about eloquence should be noted—that when we speak of its progress and its decline, we are thinking only of studied eloquence, of set speeches; for at all times and among all peoples, the passions and public affairs have produced men who were truly eloquent.

The histories are full of examples of powerful and persuasive eloquence in the depths of barbarism. Cardinal de Retz was more eloquent in Parliament than in the pulpit. See also Segesta, Arminius, and Vibulinus in Tacitus.

I am not at all surprised at the fall of eloquence in Greece and Rome. After the division of Alexander’s empire, the kingdoms which were established on its ruins eclipsed all the small republics in which eloquence had shone with such brilliance. Alexandria and Antioch became the centers of commerce and the arts. Athens was no longer anything but a town in Greece without any authority, where young men were still sent to study, but where talent did not lead to a large fortune. Ambitious people were found at the Court of Kings, where what was necessary was not eloquence but intrigue. What took place in the public square in Athens no longer gave an impetus to the whole of Greece.

When one reads the speeches of Demosthenes, one finds that there were scarcely any which he was able to deliver in that debased and degenerate Athens. Clever teachers, whatever talents and whatever taste one may suppose them to have possessed, were thus unable to preserve true eloquence there.

They brought it about that young people, as still happens in our colleges, were presented with amplifications on all kinds of subjects. Nothing is more liable to distort the mind and even to destroy sincerity of character; an honest heart is not warmed by cold. Eloquence is a serious art, which persons of real worth will never play at. A man of genius will never make a parade of eloquence and waste his time in inveighing against Tarquin or Sylla, or in trying to persuade Alexander to live in peace. Thus we see that after the fall of the republics there were declaimers but no longer orators. In Rome, where the same causes had led to the same effects, several emperors, who were in love with eloquence and who condescended to engage in the composition of a number of discourses, failed to produce any Ciceros because they failed to reproduce the circumstances which had given birth to them. Men are never eloquent when they have nothing to say. They must have someone who is to be moved or convinced.

Our bar does not lend itself, or seldom lends itself, to bursts of eloquence. Cicero, accusing or defending a citizen before a popular assembly or a Roman senate invested with legislative power, could give himself up to his genius. But when it is a question of examining in a tribunal whether, according to the law, a certain inheritance should belong to Peter or to James, all that is required is a quite simple didactic tone. All that is required is to establish the truth; and any discourse which does nothing but establish the truth is not capable of giving pleasure when one has no personal concern with the subject.

As soon as political matters no longer came within the province of orators, the ancients did not know where to find a place for eloquence. They did not have the resource which we find in a great number of philosophical and moral problems which with us have given birth to a kind of eloquence which we call academic, and which, in order to achieve the success of which it is capable, still requires that those who engage in it should never indulge in amplifications.

The pulpit, which has carried eloquence to the highest point, has been known only to the moderns. The grandeur of God, the majestic obscurity of the mysteries, the pomp of religion, and the powerful interest of the life to come, have opened up a huge field for the sublime and moving genius of the Bossuets and the Saurins. The grandeur of the subject has even in a way given shape to another kind of florid eloquence employed by Fléchier and Massillon, who are certainly much more eloquent than Lysias and Isocrates, without attaining to the great bursts of eloquence of Bossuet.

It is perhaps surprising that the ancient fathers did not in the same way seize this opportunity to bring about a revival of eloquence among the Greeks and the Romans. It is true that we find in some of them, and above all in the Greeks, some admirable traits. Salvianus, speaking to the inhabitants of Treves who after their city’s revolution were demanding gladiatorial games, is not far below the level of Demosthenes who similarly reproached the Athenians for their love of entertainments. But in general these traits of the fathers were rooted out by the power of their subject. Their discourses, which they put in the form of homilies, always had something didactic about them which was more fitted to instruct than to move. Often a love of simplicity led them to pay no heed to nobility of imagery and the other ornaments of discourse. It would appear that St. Augustine often sought to be eloquent. Sometimes he succeeded in this: but his beauties of style were swamped beneath a deluge of witticisms and frivolous conceits into which he was drawn by the bad taste of his century, and which he had picked up in his profession as a teacher of rhetoric.

What is called bombast is, so to speak, nothing but a counterfeit of the sublime. True eloquence employs the boldest and most lively figures; but these must be produced as the result of real enthusiasm. One never moves without being moved; and the language of enthusiasm has this in common with that of all the passions, that it is ridiculous when it is only imitated, because it is always only imperfectly imitated.

An arrow which is correctly shot ascends to the target and sticks to it; if it is aimed higher it falls to the ground—an illustration of a natural figure and an extravagant one.

The intermingling of languages puts them into a state of continuous movement until their analogy is determined; and during the very time when they are changing they are softened, until great writers become the models to judge of their purity. Before this coming together, languages are never in a settled state. It is obvious that when two languages whose constructions are different come to intermingle, time will be necessary before a uniform whole results. Further, bookmen wish to retain the old language, and speak it badly because they speak it only from books; the people without books speak an unrefined language, devoid of rules and harmony; there is no more poetry in either the one language or the other; or, if a few verses are made, since it is unrefined men who make them, the verses are barbarous. It should be noted that among peoples who through time have advanced in the arts and made a certain amount of progress in ideas, the common people are more ignorant than the leading citizens even of a still-barbarous nation. Further, the mechanical arts and the subjection of the people cause minds to deteriorate. Men’s first ideas have a certain analogy with the imagination and the senses, which abstract ideas, together with the progress of philosophy, cause them to lose. No doubt these new ideas are capable of being reconciled with the imagination, but new progress is required to bring this about.

Good poets do not emerge, and taste and elegance do not begin to be formed, until languages have acquired a certain richness, and above all until their analogy becomes stable. Nearly all languages are a mixture of several languages. In so far as they are intermingled, the result will consist partly of one and partly of the other. During this time of fermentation, conjugations, declensions, and the ways in which words are formed have nothing settled about them. Constructions are encumbered, and thought is obscured as a result of this encumbrance. Further, the half-formed technical languages frequently change. Poetic terms cease to be in use shortly after their invention, so that poetic language cannot grow richer. Once the language has been formed, there begin to be poets who use it. But it becomes stabilized only when it has been used in the writings of a number of great geniuses, because only then is there a point of comparison from which to judge of its purity. It is perhaps a misfortune for languages to be stabilized too soon, for so long as they are changing, they are all the time being softened and perfected.

The only cause of change in languages which are not being mixed at all with others is the establishment of metaphors, which become familiar and allow their metaphorical sense to be forgotten when they are used frequently and over a long period by writers. We know that the majority of the words which express objects which do not come directly within the purview of our senses are really metaphors derived from sensible things: for example, penser, délibérer, contrition, etc. Yet these words, when we hear them spoken today, no longer constitute metaphors. They appear to us only as the direct signs of some of our abstract ideas. Several of them have lost all the connections which they originally had with objects of the senses.

It is certain that those who heard a similar expression from the lips of its inventor were necessarily aware of the metaphor which it involved. Their minds, accustomed as they were to link expressions to ideas of sensible objects, must have needed to make a certain effort in order to give it a new meaning. But through its being repeated in the new sense which had been given to it, this sense became as it were appropriate to it; in order to understand it in its new meaning there was no longer any need to recall its old one. The use of the memory became all that was necessary in order to understand it; weak imaginations, which always constitute the majority, saw in it only the sign of a purely abstract idea, and passed it on to their successors on that footing.

I admit that this could lead us to fear that all those beautiful expressions which we admire in our poets may thus come to lose their charm, and that the flowers gathered by men of genius, as a result of passing through so many common hands, may one day wither. Then those who were born with the same talents would be obliged, in order to present their ideas with the same vigor, to invent new turns of phrase and new expressions, which would soon be subject to the same process of decline; and in the course of these revolutions the language of Corneille and that of Racine would become out of date, and people would no longer appreciate the charm of their poetry.

In spite of this reasoning, I think that the example of the Greek language ought to reassure us. From Homer to the fall of the Empire of Constantinople, during more than two thousand years, it did not appreciably change. Men have always been alive to the beauties of Homer and Demosthenes: the few Latin words which crept into the Greek language were far from altering it fundamentally. The critics, it is true, can tell roughly the century in which the works were written. But this is more or less solely by referring to this small number of foreign words, and still more often to the nature of the things concerned or the allusions made by the authors to different events.

I would say the same thing about Latin, in spite of the very common presumption that it was altered by the intermingling of the language of the Romans with those of the conquered nations. This is in fact so far from being true, that in the Latin authors who wrote while the Empire was in existence one can hardly find more than a few turns of phrase and a few words borrowed from barbarous languages; moreover, nearly all these words are terms relating to the arts, or names of dignities or new arms which never constitute the basic elements of a language. It all too often happens that the genius of a language is confused with the taste of those who speak it.

Claudian no doubt had very different tastes from Virgil, but their language was the same.

We are told that after the century of Leo X the Cavalier Marin substituted a puerile affectedness for the elegance of the Italian language. It is true that this is the character of his works, but it is quite false to say that he made it peculiar to his language; and I am sure that the Metastasios and Maffios, and so very many others who brought back good taste and the love of simplicity to Italy, found no obstacle in the genius of their language.

In general, a difference in style between authors who are separated from one another by several centuries no more proves that there is a difference in their languages than does the difference which is found between authors of the same period, and which is often just as great. It is not at all the difference in words and turns of phrase, but that in genius, which makes the writers of the dark ages so inferior.

The reasoning which gives rise to these reflections is valid only in the passing of the words of one language into another, and in the different revolutions undergone by a language which is a long way from being stabilized. It is then that the expressions which pass from mouth to mouth have for those who receive them only the sense given to them by those who transmit them, without their original and proper sense being preserved. But it is not the same when a language is stabilized. The books which have stabilized it always remain in existence, and, since the proper sense of the word is not lost, the metaphor is never deprived of its true meaning. Then it is not simply the ideas of the people of one generation which are passed to the following generation; the works of good authors are a storehouse in which they are preserved for ever, and to which all generations go in order to borrow them.

Languages may be stabilized so far as their analogy is concerned, and have great writers, a long time before they are enriched; for it is only the intermingling of languages which prevents them from being stabilized, and good writers resist this effect of the intermingling of languages, as happened in Greece in relation to Latin, and in relation to the oriental languages. The period of the stabilization of languages at a point more or less near to their perfection has a great influence on the genius of nations in relation to poetry and eloquence. All the peoples whose languages are poor, the ancient Germans, the Iroquois, and the Hebrews (proof that this is not the result of climate) express themselves in metaphors. In the absence of a fixed sign for an idea, people made use of the name of the idea which was nearest akin to it, in order to make what they wanted to say understandable. The imagination struggled to find resemblances between objects, guided by the clue of a more or less exact analogy. One finds in the most civilized languages traces of these unrefined metaphors which necessity, more ingenious than fastidious, introduced into them. When the mind becomes familiar with the new idea, the word loses its metaphorical sense. I have no doubt that we could find many metaphors in the oriental languages of which those who speak them are quite unaware, and that this would be reciprocal. It must be acknowledged that the ancient languages admit metaphors which are bolder, that is, in which the analogy is less perfect, at first through necessity and later through habit. Moreover, metaphors sown in a smaller field strike us more. We have as lively an imagination as the orientals; or at any rate it would not be disputed that the Greeks and the Romans had as lively a one as the ancient peoples of the north; but since the minds of the Greeks and the Romans, and our own, are filled with a host of abstract ideas, the languages of the Greeks and the Romans, and our own, are less burdened with figures.

It follows that these languages are also more fitted to express with greater exactitude a much greater number of truths. If a language which is stabilized too soon may retard the progress of the people which speaks it, a nation which attains stability too quickly may for a similar reason find that the progress of its sciences is arrested. The Chinese were stabilized too soon. They became like those trees whose trunk has been lopped and whose branches grow close to the ground; they never escape from mediocrity. There was so much respect among them for their barely sketched-out sciences, and they retained so much for the ancestors who had caused these first steps to be taken, that it was believed that nothing remained to be added, and that it was no longer a question of anything but preventing this wonderful knowledge from being lost. But to limit oneself to preserving the sciences in their existing state is equivalent to deciding to perpetuate all the errors they contain.

The manifold investigations of men of letters which the Chinese administration is pleased to undertake necessarily restrict their minds to the matters which are their object. No longer is anything learned; no longer is anything invented. To venture in this way to mark out the roads which genius must follow, it would have been necessary to know its course; and this is something which one can never ascertain exactly, since one knows only what has been discovered, and not what remains to be discovered. The protection given to the sciences in the kingdoms of the Orient is what has caused their ruin: by burdening them with rites and transforming them into dogmas, it has restricted their progress and even caused them to move backwards. Greece so greatly surpassed the Orientals in the sciences which it obtained from them only because it was not subject to a single despotic authority. If it had been constituted, like Egypt, as a single state body, a man like Lycurgus, in order to protect the sciences, would have claimed to regulate research by administrative means. The sectarian spirit, which was quite natural for the first philosophers, would have become the spirit of the nation. If the legislator had been a disciple of Pythagoras, the sciences of Greece would have been confined for ever to the knowledge of the dogmas of that philosopher, which would have been erected into articles of faith. He would have been what the celebrated Confucius was in China. Fortunately the situation in which Greece found itself, divided up as it was into an infinity of small republics, allowed genius all the freedom and all the competition of which it has need in its endeavors. The perspectives of men are always very narrow in comparison with those of nature. It is much better to be guided by the latter than by imperfect laws. If the sciences have made such great progress in Italy, and consequently in the rest of Europe, they undoubtedly owe this to the situation in which Italy found itself in the fourteenth century, which was rather similar to that of ancient Greece.

The sciences were always regarded as mysterious among the Asiatics; and wherever sciences are mysteries it is rare for them not to degenerate into superstitions. Genius is never attached exclusively to certain families, or to certain places; to concentrate the sciences there is to alienate them from almost all those who are capable of perfecting them. Moreover, it is very difficult for men, the majority of whom are second-rate, once they have received the truth or the sciences as an inheritance, not to regard them as if they were an estate, a capital from which they ought to draw interest. In their hands they become the object of a shameful traffic and a vile monopoly, a kind of commodity which they further corrupt by the absurd intermixture of the most ridiculous opinions. This was the fate of the early discoveries made in the Orient, which were put in the custody of the priests. There they were debased to the point where they were no longer anything but a monstrous collection of fables, of magic, and of the most extravagant superstitions.

All these absurdities, incorporated under Alexander’s successors into the ancient philosophy of the Greeks, produced the modern Pythagorism of Iamblichus, Plotinus, and Porphyrius.

We see from this that a precocious maturity, whether in the sciences or in languages, is not an advantage to be envied. Europe, slower in its progress, has borne more nourishing and more fertile fruit. The instrument which the Greek and Latin languages, and our modern languages, have offered to it, and offer to us, is more difficult to handle. But it is capable of being applied to a much greater number of uses and tasks. The multiplicity of abstract ideas which our languages express, and which enter into our analogies, demand great dexterity in their employment. That is the disadvantage of perfected languages. There are more words which are not the bearers of images at all. Thus it needs more skill and talent to paint portraits in these languages, which have become so suitable for defining and demonstrating. But for the great geniuses this very difficulty, which exercises their talent and obliges them to put forth their strength, leads them to successes of which the infancy of languages and nations was not capable. The first painters in Greece used only three colors: their pictures were able to show feeling. But Raphael could draw as well as they could, and Guido Reni, Titian, and Rubens, with the thousand colors with which they loaded their palettes, achieved a fidelity to nature of which the Ancients could have no idea. In the same way Greek and Latin, by giving sonorous terminations to the old, hard roots of the Asiatic languages, and our modern languages by giving them to those of the peoples of the north, have promoted harmony; and the multiplicity of analogies has given birth to happy turns of phrase which have afforded number and variety to style.

From this arises the beauty especially of Greek and Latin poetry, which were able, owing to the particular constitution of their analogy, to look after inversions and to make use of the quantity of syllables in order to create their rhythm, while almost all other nations were reduced, in order to mark out the meter perceptibly, to have recourse to rhyme. Poetry, once brought to perfection in these languages, became truly a kind of painting, although one would have believed at first sight that the metaphorical languages of the Orient would have painted with more brilliance and force. Nothing of the kind: these languages paint readily, but crudely and badly, without propriety and without taste.

The sciences, which are based on the combination or the knowledge of objects, are as boundless as nature. The arts, which are only relations to ourselves, are as limited as we are; in general all those which are carried on to give pleasure to the senses have a point which they are unable to pass, determined by the limited sensibility of our organs. They are a long time in reaching this point. For example, it is only lately that music has reached its perfection, and, indeed, perhaps it has not yet done so. Moreover, it is wrong to criticize those who want to advance further: if they go beyond the mark, our senses are bound to give us warning of this. Poetry, indeed, in so far as it harmoniously renders images which are full of elegance, will go no further than Virgil. But although perfect in this respect and in relation to style, it is capable of continuous progress in many other respects. The passions will not be painted more effectively, but variations in circumstances will mean that their activity has new effects. The art of combining all the circumstances and directing them to our interest, the verisimilitude and choice of characters, and everything which pertains to the composition of the works, will be capable of being perfected. Ever more dexterity will be acquired as the result of experience. By means of a great amount of subtle reflection, men will learn the way in which one should go about giving pleasure. They will know how to make pleasing garlands from those flowers which nature gave to all the Ancients and which she has not denied to us. In the long run the unceasing imitation of the great models, even their faults, will often preserve their successors from the lapses which sometimes mar the most sublime writings. The progress of philosophy, of all branches of physical knowledge, and of history, which at every moment brings new events on to the world scene, will provide writers with those new subjects which are the food of genius.

There is another cause of variations in taste: manners have a powerful influence on the choice of ideas, and it would consequently appear that the peoples whose society was in the most flourishing condition must have had a more exquisite taste. Taste consists in properly expressing graceful or powerful ideas. Everything which is neither fact, nor feeling, nor image, languishes. Hence in part the disadvantage of languages which are advanced and rich in abstract ideas; it is easier to chatter in them, if I may put it like that, and less easy to paint in them. Reflection is the remedy for this defect, for whatever our pedants say about it, we have become more simple in our century. Transportation is now despised: a strange difference between our progress and that of the Ancients! The leading men among them were too unrefined; among us they are too subtle. This arises from the fact that their taste was formed at the same time as their ideas, but we had ideas before we had any taste.

In general, taste may be bad either as a result of the choice of vile, base, and tedious ideas—and wealthy peoples, to the extent that their society is more cultivated, learn to avoid these; or else as a result of images which are not sensible enough. Let me explain. In the pleasure which comparisons give us there are two pleasures: one is that of the mind which connects two ideas; the other, and unquestionably the greater, is that which arises from the very agreeableness of the images which are presented to it. All the images of things which speak to the imagination and the heart, and which give pleasure to the senses, beautify style and imbue it with that charm with which nature has endowed the things which surround us and which constitute the source of our wellbeing; the sensitive soul is moved by them. But mathematical images, those figures which are indeed in nature, but do not form part of that living nature which alone is connected with us through the bond of pleasure—these images do not bear anything with them except barrenness. The relations may be just as true, but they are more difficult to grasp and say nothing to the heart. This is one of the great differences between intellect and genius. The latter, based as it is on sensibility, is able to choose images capable of putting the soul into that state of happy perturbation which affords visions of the beauties of nature. That is why so many new combinations of matter which our modern discoveries have put before our eyes have so little enriched our poetry: it is because all these ideas, although sensible, give no pleasure to our senses, or at any rate there are very few which have this advantage. Thus it is an effect of the progress of philosophy to put more intellect into style and to render it colder. One must also avoid pushing even the most graceful ideas of nature to the point of anatomical detail where their pleasure is lost; it is in this way alone that intellect can displease. I believe that the language of a people, once it has been formed and stabilized by great writers, no longer changes. Thus I think that the decline of letters in Italy and in Greece came only after a period much longer than we are told, and that poetry then fell into the same state of decline as all other studies, this being the result of the very decline of manners in the Empire. So far as eloquence is concerned, I have given the reason elsewhere.

The Ancients, because they were ancients, were sheltered from pedantry. We know how harmful to taste the vain display of erudition has at all times been.

To want to preserve admiration for the great models by establishing a taste which excludes new forms—that is to behave like the Turks, who did not know how to preserve the virtue of their women except by keeping them in prison. Must one always admire, without producing anything? Pedantry of this kind destroyed Greek literature under the Roman Empire.

There are minds which nature has endowed with a memory capable of assembling together a large number of pieces of knowledge, and a power of exact reasoning capable of comparing them and arranging them in a manner which puts them in their full light; but to whom at the same time she has denied that fire of genius which invents and which opens up new paths for itself. Created to unite the discoveries of others under a point of view fitted to clarify and perfect them, if they are never torches which shine with their own light, they are diamonds which brilliantly reflect a borrowed light, but which in total darkness would be confounded with the meanest stones. These minds are necessarily the last to arrive.

It is not necessary to believe that in times of weakness and decline, or even in those of barbarism and darkness which sometimes succeeded centuries of the greatest brilliance, the human mind made no progress. The mechanical arts, commerce, and the usages of civil life gave birth to a host of reflections which were diffused among men, which were mingled with education, and which constantly grew in quantity as they passed from generation to generation. They pave the way slowly, but profitably and surely, for happier times: like those rivers which are hidden beneath the ground during a part of their course, but which reappear further down, swollen by large quantities of water which have seeped through all those parts of the soil which the current, as determined by the natural gradient, has passed through without showing itself.

The mechanical arts have never suffered the same eclipse as letters and the speculative sciences. An art, once it has been invented, becomes an object of commerce which is self-sustained. There is no need to fear that the art of making velvet will be lost so long as there are people to buy it. The mechanical arts thus continue to exist when letters and taste have fallen, and if they continue to exist, they are perfected. No art whatever can be cultivated during a long succession of centuries without passing through the hands of several inventive minds. We also see that in spite of the ignorance which prevailed in Europe and in the Greek empire after the fifth century, the arts were enriched by a thousand new discoveries without any of the slightest importance being lost.

The art of navigation was perfected, and also the art of commerce. To these centuries we owe the habitual use of bills of exchange, the science of keeping commercial books which is the most perfect form of accounting, the cotton paper invented in Constantinople and the rag paper invented in the west, window glass, plate glass and the art of making mirrors, spectacles, the compass, gunpowder, windmills and water-mills, clocks, and an infinite number of other arts unknown to antiquity.

Architecture offers us an example of the reciprocal independence of taste and mechanical operations in the arts. There are no buildings at all which are in worse taste than Gothic structures; and there are none at all which are more durable, or whose construction demanded more vigor and more practical knowledge of the methods of carrying it out, although these methods could only be the result of a multitude of tentative attempts, since the mathematical sciences were then in their infancy, and the thrust of the arches and roofs could not be calculated with precision.

It was necessary that these arts should be cultivated and perfected in order that real physics and the higher philosophy could be born. They brought the carrying out of exact and conclusive experiments within reach. Without the invention of the telescope, we would never have been able to work out the causes of the movements of the heavenly bodies. Without that of the suction-pump, we would never have been able to discover the heaviness of air.

Let us be careful, therefore, not to confuse success in the mechanical arts with artistic taste, or even with the speculative sciences.

Artistic taste can be lost as the result of a multitude of purely moral causes. The diffusion of a spirit of apathy and softness in a nation, pedantry, contempt for men of letters, eccentricity in the taste of princes, tyranny, and anarchy can corrupt it.

It is not the same with the speculative sciences. So long as the language in which books are written continues to exist, and so long as a certain number of men of letters still remain, nothing that is known is forgotten. It is true that the sciences are then not perfected, because there are few men and consequently few geniuses who apply themselves to them; but they are not completely lost.² Also, the Greek teachers of rhetoric who went to Italy after the taking of Constantinople knew everything which had been known in ancient Greece. All that they lacked was taste and the critical faculty. They were simply scholars.

The inundations of the barbarians in the east had a more fatal effect. By destroying the Latin language, they caused the knowledge of the books written in that language to be lost. We would no longer have them, if the monks had not preserved a part of them.

The arts continued to exist in spite of this general calamity. Blows more violent than this are needed in order to overthrow them. It was only the Turks who, in the ferocity of their conquests, were able to cause them to retreat. This must be attributed less to their religion, which did not prevent the Moors of Spain from being very enlightened for their time, than to the nature of their despotism of which we have spoken above, and to the complete separation of the nations made subject to their empire—a separation which kept up a war of hatred in the state, and a balance of oppression and revolt. Brought up in harems, abodes of softness and of an authority at the same time ignorant and absolute which could only degenerate into habitual cruelty, the Turks had no industry and knew nothing but violence. The Greeks, bent under a yoke of the harshest kind, lived in fear of it all the time. The enervated Turks, and the oppressed Greeks, both in a state of uncertainty as regards their position, their goods, and their lives, could not think of easing an existence which was so disturbed and so little theirs. Consequently there were no arts at all, apart from those which were absolutely indispensable; and among the others, the few which had been preserved in the seraglio were reduced to techniques without any taste.

The invention of printing spread not only the knowledge of books, but also that of the modern arts, and it has greatly perfected them. Before its invention, a host of admirable techniques, which tradition alone passed on from one craftsman to the other, excited no curiosity at all among the philosophers. When printing had facilitated their communication, men began to describe them for the use of the craftsmen. Through this, men of letters became aware of a thousand ingenious operations of which they had been ignorant, and they found themselves led toward an infinity of notions which were full of interest for physics. It was like a new world, in which everything pricked their curiosity. Thus was born a taste for experimental physics, in which great progress could never have been made without the help of inventions and technical processes….

Afterword by du Pont

It would seem that this work was never completed. M. Turgot regarded it only as a sketch. But although he did not put the finishing touches to it, in which he would perhaps have extended or contracted part of the metaphysical observations, subtle and profound as they are, which are mixed up with his historical views, we have thought fit neither to suppress nor to mutilate an essay which contains such a large number of philosophical truths, often expressed with so much elegance and genius.

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¹ The English for many years have spared nothing to acquire beautiful pictures; and their nation has still not been able to produce a single great painter.

The Italians, the French, and the Flemish, and a very small number of Germans and Spaniards, have been the only ones to be successful in this art. The reason for this is that the English pay only for good pictures. By banning images from the churches, they deprived themselves of the means of supporting bad painters, and even second-rate ones. And in all crafts where bad workers cannot gain a livelihood, and second-rate workers are not comfortably off, great men are not created. Our painters of Notre-Dame bridge, who supply all the little village churches with pictures, constitute an indispensable nursery for the rearing of a few great painters. When starting in an art one is hardly assured of success in it. Thus if one had to be certain of rising to the highest rank in a craft in order to get one’s bread, fathers would never set their children to it.

That is why among the English there is only a very small number of painters. Nearly all the Dutch painters have painted only landscapes, seascapes, or rustic scenes; and I do not believe that one can name a single painter of history who is at all well-known who was not a Catholic. (Note by Turgot.)

² The revolutions which bring about the fall of eloquence and taste in the fine arts, without wiping out the memory of the sciences or preventing a certain amount of cultivation of them, are like the fires which sometimes devastate forests. One can still find a few half-formed trunks remaining alive, but stripped of their branches and their leaves, without flowers and without adornment. (Note by Turgot.)