countries as vast as our Europe, and nations of equal importance.  We must not, like Bossuet, “overlook the universe in a universal history,” and subordinate humanity to a small population confined to a desolate region around the Dead Sea.[19] Human history is a thing of natural growth like the rest; its direction is due to its own elements; no external force guides it, but the inward forces that create it; it is not tending to any prescribed end but developing a result.  And the chief result is the progress of the human mind.  “Amidst so many ravages and so much destruction, we see a love of order secretly animating the human species, and forestalling its utter ruin.  It is one of the springs of nature ever recovering its energy; it is the source of the formation of the codes of nations; it causes the law and the ministers of the law to be respected in Tinquin and in the islands of Formosa as well as in Rome.”  Man thus possesses, said Voltaire, a “principle of Reason,” namely, a “an instinct for engineering” suggesting to him useful implements;[20] also an instinct of right suggesting to him his moral conceptions.  These two instincts form a part of his makeup; he has them from his birth, “as birds have their feathers, and bears their hair.  Hence he is perfectible through nature, and merely conforms to nature in improving his mind and in bettering his condition.  Extend the idea farther along with Turgot and Condorcet,[21] and, with all its exaggerations, we see arising, before the end of the century, our modern theory of progress, that which founds all our aspirations on the boundless advance of the sciences, on the increase of comforts which their applied discoveries constantly bring to the human condition, and on the increase of good sense which their discoveries, popularized, slowly deposit in the human brain.

A second principle has to be established to complete the foundations of history.  Discovered by Montesquieu it still to-day serves as a constructive support, and, if we resume the work, as if on the substructure of the master’s edifice, it is simply owing to accumulated erudition placing at our disposal more substantial and more abundant materials.  In human society all parts are interdependent; no modification of one can take place without effecting proportionate changes in the others.  Institutions, laws and customs are not mingled together, as in a heap, through chance or caprice, but connected one with the other through convenience or necessity, as in a harmony.[22] According as authority is in all, in several or in one hand, according as the sovereign admits or rejects laws superior to himself, with intermediary powers below him, everything changes or tends to differ in meaning and in importance: 

* public intelligence,

* education,

* the form of judgments,

* the nature and order of penalties,

* the condition of women,

* military organization