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 d’un 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 dat, 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 Démocratie en Amérique, 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 ”)}, 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 the 
