532 Darwinism and History 



His Prolegomena to Homer (1795) announced new modes of attack. 

 Historical investigation was soon transformed by the elaboration of 

 new methods. 



5. "Progress" involves a judgment of value, which is not involved 

 in the conception of history as a genetic process. It is also an idea 

 distinct from that of evolution. Nevertheless it is closely related to 

 the ideas which revolutionised history at the beginning of the last 

 century ; it swam into men's ken simultaneously ; and it helped 

 effectively to establish the notion of history as a continuous process 

 and to emphasise the significance of time. Passing over earlier 

 anticipations, I may point to a Discours of Turgot (1750), where 

 history is presented as a process in which "the total mass of the 

 human race" "marches continually though sometimes slowly to an 

 ever increasing perfection." That is a clear statement of the concep- 

 tion which Turgot's friend Condorcet elaborated in the famous work, 

 published in 1795, Esquisse dun tableau historique des progres de 

 Vesprit humain. This work first treated with explicit fulness the 

 idea to which a leading role was to fall in the ideology of the 

 nineteenth century. Condorcet's book reflects the triumphs of 

 the Tiers 4tat, whose growing importance had also inspired Turgot ; 

 it was the political changes in the eighteenth century which led to 

 the doctrine, emphatically formulated by Condorcet, that the masses 

 are the most important element in the historical process. I dwell on 

 this because, though Condorcet had no idea of evolution, the pre- 

 dominant importance of the masses was the assumption which made 

 it possible to apply evolutional principles to history. And it enabled 

 Condorcet himself to maintain that the history of civilisation, a 

 progress still far from being complete, was a development conditioned 

 by general laws. 



6. The assimilation of society to an organism, which was a 

 governing notion in the school of Savigny, and the conception of 

 progress, combined to produce the idea of an organic development, 

 in which the historian has to determine the central principle or 

 leading character. This is illustrated by the apotheosis of democracy 

 in Tocqueville's Democratic en Ameriqiie, where the theory is main- 

 tained that " the gradual and progressive development of equality is 

 at once the past and the future of the history of men." The same 

 two principles are combined in the doctrine of Spencer (who held 

 that society is an organism, though he also contemplated its being 

 what he calls a "super-organic aggregate") 1 , that social evolution is 

 a progressive change from militarism to industrialism. 



1 A society presents suggestive analogies with an organism, but it certainly is not an 

 organism, and sociologists who draw inferences from the assumption of its organic nature 

 must fall into error. A vital organism and a society are radically distinguished by tbe 



