Mr, Buckle s Fallacies. 145 



society, are to be deemed rather presentiments of 

 the truth than the results of deliberate investiga 

 tion. Machiavelli was one of the first to subject 

 social phenomena to a careful study ; but he ar 

 rived at no broad generalizations, and u he suf 

 fered, moreover, from the serious deficiency of 

 being too much occupied with the practical utility 

 of his subject.&quot; 1 The &quot; Scienza Nuova &quot; of Vico 

 contained many new and startling views of his 

 tory, and the writings of Montesquieu presented 

 a daring attempt to constitute a social science ; 

 but both these great thinkers were crippled by a 

 lack of materials, owing to the imperfect condi 

 tion of physical knowledge at the time when they 

 wrote. Condorcet, proceeding from the sugges 

 tions of his friend Turgot, arrived at the law 

 that the whole human race is in a course of evo 

 lution, from the less perfect to the more perfect; 

 but his writings are encumbered with metaphysi 

 cal notions, and he had no idea of the true nature 

 of human development. For above all his pre 

 decessors stands Voltaire, whose &quot; Essai sur les 

 Moeurs &quot; was an immortal attempt to apply the 

 principles of scientific investigation to the entire 

 history of our race. Nothing more was done in 

 this direction until the unprecedented develop- 



1 Buckle, vol. i. p. 751, note 131. 

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