Wesleyan University, Wiley History and Theory

Wesleyan University
The Development of Historical Method in the Eighteenth Century [1954]

Author(s): Günther Pflug
Source: History and Theory, Vol. 11, Beiheft 11: Enlightenment Historiography: Three
German Studies (1971), pp. 1-23
Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan University
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THE DEVELOPMENT OF HISTORICAL METHOD
IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY [19541*
GUNTHER PFLUG
Few periods have witnessed such active attempts to clarify the basic principles
involved in the definition and depiction of history as the period that spans
the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth.1
During the seventeenth century, when a new sense of reality was slowly and
painfully emerging, historians, like other thinkers, began to see the need for
a scientific approach to their subject matter. Descartes had raised the issue
of certitude, and historical inquiry could not ignore it. Eighty years before
Descartes, J. Bodin2 had tried to align the spirit of the skeptics with the
ambitions of historiography. And during the seventeenth century it was, in
fact, skepticism which gave birth to a great body of writings on the possibility
of certitude in history.3
The Cartesian critique of knowledge had offered a preliminary solution to
the problem of achieving certitude in history: it was contained in the idea
that the faculty of reason was accountable only to itself. Imbued with confi-
dence in the powers of the mind, historians following the lead of Descartes
tried to limit the application of skepticism to history and to insure epistemo-
logical certitude by examining historical tradition in the light of pure reason.
With this aim they undertook to examine the existing interpretations of the
corpus of historical tradition to see if they were consistent with the spirit
of the Enlightenment and recent insights gained by the natural sciences.4
* Gunther Pflug, "Die Entwicklung der historischen Methode im 18. Jahrhundert,"

Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift ffir Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 28 (1954),
447-471. Translated by permission of the author.
1. Bibliography: L. Bourdeau, L'Histoire et les historiens (Paris, 1888); E. Cassirer,
Philosophie der Aufkldrung (Tuibingen, 1932); J. Delvaille, Essai sur l'histoire de l'idee de
progress (Paris, 1910); R. Flint, History of the Philosophy of History (Edinburgh and
London, 1893); W. Dilthey, Das 18. Jahrhundert und die geschichtliche Welt, Gesan-
melte Schriften, Vol. 3 (Berlin and Leipzig, 1942); F. Schalk, Einleitung in die Ency-
clopadie der franzosischen Aufklirung (Munich, 1936); K. Lowith, Weltgeschichte und
Heilsgeschehen (Stuttgart, 1953).
2. J. Bodin, Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (Paris, 1566).
3. F. de La Mothe le Vayer, Discours du peu de certitude en l'histoire (Paris, 1668);
C. de St. Real, De l'usage de l'histoire (Paris, 1671).
4. B. de Fontenelle, Histoire des oracles (Paris, 1687); N. Freret, Examen critique
2 GUNTHER PFLUG
However, this procedure clearly revealed the limited usefulness of the

Cartesian method for historical science. It did, indeed, make it possible to
subject interpretations of historical tradition to systematic criticism, but it
left the facts -the backbone of history -completely out of the picture.
Rapin's and St. Evremont's attempts to enhance the certitude attaching to
facts by using comparison of sources did nothing to eliminate this deficiency.5
Once the problem of historical certitude had become acute, a partial solution
could not blunt its edge. Thus the question of historical method amounted to
a gradual re-evaluation of the role skepticism should play. United in their
conviction that history could not achieve final certainty, the members of the
Academie des Inscriptions pursued their famous quarrel merely over defining
the extent of historical uncertainty.
For several decades this quarrel dominated discussion in the Academy, yet
it exercised no influence over the further development of historiography. Be-
cause before historians could embrace one or the other of the alternatives
hammered out in the Academy, one thinker had managed to bring the dis-
cussion of historical method down to a much more basic level, and from
there it went on to become a central preoccupation of French philosophy
throughout the eighteenth century.
Pierre Bayle's chief contribution to the debate over an appropriate method
was to subject the very meaning of history to examination. In the seventeenth
century, the conviction was widespread that history was properly concerned
not with the events of the past but with man in his universal aspects.6 When
Bayle secured the triumph of this idea, he did so not by being the first to
express it but by being the first to draw consequences from it for the structur-
ing of historical studies.
This step, however, marks the moment at which the debate over historical
method became a philosophical issue, that is, a debate over methods for
determining the essential characteristics of man. Philosophers found that
understanding man as an historical phenomenon held out the promise of
understanding the essence of man. To this extent, then, the development of
historical method can be considered an attempt to elucidate a philosophical
problem.
The noble attempt to place mathematical proof at the service of philosophical

inquiry had to be abandoned as a failure only fifty years after its Cartesian
inception. At first, efforts were made to bridge the contradictions; but toward
du Nouveau Testament (London, 1777); Examen critique des apologistes de la religion

chr~tienne (Paris, 1766).
5. R. Rapin, Comparaison de Tucydide et de Live (Paris, 1681); C. de St. Evremont,
Considerations sur Salluste et Tacite (Paris, 1693).
6. Cf. C. de St. Real, De usage de l'histoire.
DEVELOPMENT OF HISTORICAL METHOD 3
the end of the seventeenth century, criticism of Descartes steadily gained

ground, and finally found its great synthesis in the thought of Pierre Bayle.7
Bayle did not make the Cartesian system's insistence on logic the chief
target of his criticism. Rather, he challenged the validity of the cogito as a
premise. Triumphs in mathematics had increased the confidence placed in
the process of pure deduction, and thus proofs provided by pure reason could
hardly be rejected. The critic had rather to question whether logical evidence
had a legitimate place in philosophical inquiry at all. Bayle, who disregarded
post-Newtonian advances in the natural sciences,8 for which Voltaire was later
to take him to task, saw the gap between the act of pure speculation and
the empirical facts as an unbridgeable chasm; for the realm of the given he
demanded a method of proof radically different from the mathematical, that
is, the certitude derived from established historical fact. He therefore set up a
distinction between historical fact and logical conclusion, basing his distinction
on two separate genres de certitude.9
By thus separating that which is thought from that which is, Bayle de-
stroyed all contact between the philosophical systems and reality. Seen as
logical constructs, the systems now simply represented expressions of ab-
stract thought, their only claim to empirical reality being that they existed
as historical phenomena. Thus, the individual philosophical system no longer
described a reality - it itself became a reality which had to be examined.
Bayle accordingly regarded the history of philosophy as a survey of the
particular characteristics of individual systems. What now became most im-
portant was to define the differences among thinkers and to emphasize traits
that were typical of a given historical period. As a result, the chief subject
of Bayle's studies came to be the contradictions among the various systems.'0
After becoming aware that the individual systems were highly contradic-
tory, Bayle came to feel the need for a specific theory to explain the phe-
nomenon. The recent debate - in which he had participated - over the
validity of the Cartesian system had strengthened him in the conviction
that this contradictoriness could no longer be ascribed to logical or meth-
odological errors within the systems. On the contrary, investigation revealed
that the systems shared remarkable similarities precisely in their mode of
deduction, that is, in their application of the laws of logic.
Bayle therefore concluded that contradictoriness had to be included among
the empirical features of the systems, a direct result of the philosophical
mode of reasoning. Disparities among systems thus grew out of the human
7. Pierre Bayle, Oeuvres choisies, Vol. I (The Hague, 1727-31), 749.

8. Voltaire, Oeuvres completes, Vol. XX (Paris, 1784), 54-55.
9. P. Bayle, op. cit., IV, 203; cf. IV, 257, 240; P. Bayle, Lettres choisies, Vol. III
(Rotterdam, 1714), 913.
10. P. Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique, Vol. I (Rotterdam, 1697), 1.
4 GUNTHER PFLUG
differences among individual thinkers.'1 From here Bayle could proceed to

define study of the philosophical systems as a genuine historical study. Just
as writers of history tried to attribute the different courses of action adopted
by noted historical figures to dissimilarities in their characters, so philosoph-
ical study aimed to grasp the range of human possibilities by examining
differences to be found among the various philosophical systems.
In introducing this shift from ontological philosophy to philosophical an-
thropology, Bayle took a step that was to prove momentous to French phi-
losophy. The restriction of philosophy's possible concerns to philosophical
anthropology remained in effect throughout the eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries - until the advent of the great initiators of the philosoph-
ical renaissance - and was accepted unquestioningly by the most noted
thinkers. Even the materialists, who of all eighteenth-century philosophers
were most anxious to find an ontological basis for their doctrines, remained
primarily interested in anthropological problems.12 Not until the end of the
eighteenth century did the first doubts about the legitimacy and fruitfulness
of this restriction on philosophy make their appearance. And French eclec-
ticism never fully succeeded in shaking off its connections with anthropo-
logically-oriented philosophy.
Along with the restriction of philosophy to anthropological concerns.
Bayle also passed on to the eighteenth century a specific view of the an-
thropological situation. Bayle took his cue from Bacon's theories on uniform
application of the empirical principle, and thus directed his attention pri-
marily toward transforming philosophy into an empirical science; he tended
to ignore the factual concerns which the character of anthropology as an
empirical science implied.13 The restructuring of philosophy was the most
pressing issue, for with the collapse of the last ontological endeavors, phi-
losophy had lost its broadest base to the empirical natural sciences; one
could hardly have expected Bayle to devote himself seriously to examining
whether the possibilities offered by an empirical anthropology were practi-
cable and what the prerequisites for their realization might be.
Taking philosophy as the subject of his studies, he adopted the existence
of a general anthropology as a premise, and never thought to question its
validity.
The nature of this anthropology emerges most distinctly from the man-
ner in which Bayle interpreted individuality, which for him represented the
source of all philosophical contradictions. In his efforts to put philosophy
on a new basis, Bayle adhered strictly to tradition insofar as he continued
to assume that the central task of philosophy was to define the essence of
11. P. Bayle, Oeuvres diverges, II, 176-177.

12. E.g., La Mettrie, Helvetius, Bonnet, as well as Holbach and Robinet.
13. P. Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique, IL 430; Oeuvres diverges, I, 79, 264.
things. However, the usual philosophical distinction between essence and

appearance underwent a characteristic change in Bayle's image of man.
Proceeding on empirical assumptions, Bayle was, to be sure, no longer
able to retain the old definition of essence as an irreducible core amidst the
profusion of appearances. Compelled to give all facts equal weight, he could
not employ a principle of selecting among the factual data as a means of
discovering essence. Thus essence was not that which limited appearances,
it had to be that which encompassed all appearances.
On this basis Bayle formulated a new definition of the essence of man.
In the individual phenomenon one had an individuation of the essence,
which in turn summed up all of humanity's possible modes of appearance.
But this meant that a tableau de l'esprit humain would be synonymous with
a definition of the essence of man.
A definition of essence thus turned out to be a summation of all possible
forms of humanity. The method which led to this definition consisted of
strictly empirical observation of the individual phenomena. Any form of
deduction appeared to be a priori out of the question, since there is no kind
of systematic connection between the different individual manifestations.
The scholar's goal therefore consisted of surveying the factual data, pene-
trating the historical givens, without attempting to impose any order unless
it were for mere purposes of clarity.
Having thus reduced systematic structuring to a minimum, Bayle found
that the format of a Dictionnaire offered the best means of creating order
without suggesting any relationship among the individual phenomena. It
satisfied the need for organization without creating the false impression of
an overall system. In addition it permitted the material to be expanded at
will, and it never made any claim to completeness. Bayle consciously relin-
quished any assertion of wholeness, completeness, unity, and even any form
of comparison. Excluding all purely logical operations, he set out to preserve
and cast light on purely factual data.
This interest in preservation led Bayle to accumulate almost unbelievable
collections of philosophical ideas, including some of the most unusual and
far-fetched.14 Having rejected any principle of value judgment, he could not
justifiably omit to examine any fact. And precisely the most out-of-the-way
data on the human spirit seemed to him to offer the best assurance for
completing his projected tableau de l'esprit humain.15
Bayle had made the individual philosophical system his chief subject mat-
ter; since he saw it as expressing the individuality of its creator rather than
referring to reality, Bayle had to find a research method which would guar-
14. Bayle, Dictionnaire, II, 1031; Oeuvres diverses, IV, 540.

15. Dictionnaire, IV, 923.
6 GUNTHER PFLUG
antee that he was not biased toward one of the multitude of historically
established philosophical systems; once philosophical principles had been
made a purely personal matter, no universally valid principle remained
which might help evaluate individual systems. Study of the systems had to
be confined to understanding them in terms of their intrinsic intentions;
Bayle set himself the task of following through the train of thought con-
tained in each system.
Bayle based this approach on a single methodological premise: the logical
consistency of any given system. He was thus able to make a simple analytical
procedure yield a survey of the entire breadth of the human spirit."6
In so doing, Bayle placed only one restriction on the individuality of the
various philosophical systems: he saw them all as subject to the laws of logic;
the rest he left to the free play of their individuality.
This method, of course, permitted him to preserve the equality of all the
different systems. While observing the demands of logical consistency, Bayle
left all empirical or emotional factors to the personal whim of the philoso-
phers and refrained from evaluating them within his objective account. By
thus restricting his field of interest he managed to narrow his approach to
a single method of analysis.
This restriction conveys both the limits of what Bayle could accomplish
and the starting-point of his skepticism.
Since he had renounced any form of inquiry that went beyond the indi-
vidual system, Bayle could never succeed in bringing the single systems to-
gether into an inclusive picture of the mind, into a definition of man's true
essence. Rather, he found himself with a shapeless collection of philosophical
statements on his hands. Nowhere did analysis of the systems suggest their
unifying principle.
Thus Bayle was faced with a vast array of human idiosyncrasies. The
more he discovered that each system proceeded according to its own in-
trinsic necessity and the more he was forced to recognize that contradic-
tions grew out of different but totally legitimate modes of human inquiry,
the more he grew helpless, trying in the face of such a wealth of material
to attempt an all-inclusive theory of the human mind.
The method Bayle had developed for dealing with historical data - anal-
ysis of the facts - fell short when it came to grasping historical reality and
deriving a general schema of the human mind from the profusion of opinions.
Here Bayle's own premises drove him into a skepticism from which he could
not escape.
Overcoming skepticism might thus be seen as a primarily methodological
task. The skepticism that resulted from confining method to an analysis of
16. Oeuvres diverses, IV, 255-256.
discrete facts could be overcome only by extending the method to a com-

prehensive conception of history. Yet here we also see the limitation upon
all history of philosophy: any attempt to find a comprehensive standard im-
mediately leads to a new system of evaluation, which in its turn has to be
grounded in some systematic principle. But that was supposed the task on
which Bayle's premise was predicated. Thus philosophers could not use
Bayle's achievement as the basis on which to construct a systematic con-
ception of history.
For the period between Pierre Bayle and Royer-Collard the history of phi-
losophy has little progress to record. The most significant works on the
history of philosophy continued in the direction established by Bayle's Dic-
tionnaire, while historical studies - at least in France - drew no benefit
from what Bayle had initiated. They consisted either of Trait's des syste'mes,'7
essentially refutations of individual systems and without claim to historical
completeness or factual accuracy, or else old-style compilations on the his-
tory of philosophy like Deslandes'; these bear no imprint of Bayle's analytical
spirit.'8
Yet, although philosophy could contribute nothing to the development of
a new historical consciousness, the ground broken by Bayle produced fruitful
developments in the general writing of history, developments which ultimately
helped transform the writing of history into an historical science, which, in
turn, created a new historical awareness in philosophy.
With Bayle's method thus transplanted to the writing of general history,
the further development of his premise faced a substantial impediment.
Historiography as a portrayal of historical facts seemed to offer no op-
portunity for applying Bayle's analytical method. In contrast to Bayle's
treatment, historical fact as understood by early eighteenth-century thinkers
was not a logically structured entity; it was simply a fact, that could be
established but not analyzed.
Thus before history could adopt and expand Bayle's findings, as a first
prerequisite, the subject matter of history had to be radically modified. Facts,
which could only be substantiated, had to be replaced by subject matter
that was open to analytical treatment. Such subject matter would thus have
to have a complex structure of some sort. But that immediately presup-
posed that the subject matter would transcend the purely historical. Insofar
as it was open to analysis, i.e., rational dissection, it left the realm of purely
historical examination and entered - like Bayle's subject matter - the realm
of general discussion.
17. E.g., Saint-Aubin, La Mettrie, Condillac.

18. Andre Deslandes, Histoire critique de la philosophic (Amsterdam, 1769).
8 GUNTHER PFLUG
Such a subject matter for history was not found in a day. Taking as his
starting point the relationship of the supernatural to reality, Fontenelle (in
his Histoire des oracles'9) was the first to arrive at a method intended to
apply rational analysis in the historical realm.20
However, Fontenelle's efforts remained confined to the very narrow field
of the miracle. At most he prepared the ground for a general revision of
history's subject matter; he established a general tendency but did not take
the decisive step.
The major change was left to Voltaire. In the Academie des Inscriptions
the dispute Hardouin had initiated over whether an historical science was
possible at all was still raging; Voltaire sided with the skeptics.2' He denied
that historical fact possessed a certitude of its own, thus joining those critics
who, inspired by the natural sciences, had mounted formidable opposition
against historiography in general at the beginning of the eighteenth century.22
Yet when Voltaire criticized claims to historical certitude, he did not mean
to imply that he considered it altogether impossible to establish historical
proof. "Peut-etre arrivera-t-il bientot dans la maniere d'ecrire l'histoire ce qui
est arrive dans la physique. Les nouvelles decouvertes ont fait proscrire les
anciens systemss."3
Voltaire thus faced a twofold task. Inspired by Bayle's insistence on re-
placing the systematic by the factual, yet also enchanted by the triumphs
of natural science, Voltaire tried to unite the two methods into one all-
inclusive method. He first attempted to formulate it in his work on Charles XII
of Sweden, and each succeeding work Voltaire wrote on an historical sub-
ject represented an additional contribution toward clarifying the methodo-
logical situation in historical science.
The first step toward a real historical science that would meet the re-
quirement of being strictly provable necessitated changing the subject mat-
ter of history. For Voltaire, in complete agreement with the skeptics, felt
that uncertainty in the reporting of single facts was the source of uncertainty
in history. If single historical facts could be downgraded in favor of some-
thing more rational, the first step toward the projected science would have
been taken.
That was the task facing Voltaire when the Marquise de Chatelet-Lorraine
asked him to write an outline of world history. The work he wrote for her
19. B. de Fontenelle, Oeuvres, Vol. II (Paris, 1758).

20. Fontenelle, Oeuvres, IX, 356-357.
21. This quarrel, sparked in 1720 by J. Hardouin's Sur les monuments qui ont servi
de Memoires aux premiers historians, remained for almost thirty years the main subject
of academic debate. See R. Flint, Historical Philosophy in France (London, 1893),
255-262.
22. Voltaire, Oeuvres, XLI, 40 ff.
23. Voltaire, Oeuvres, XXVI1I, 68.
marks a breakthrough in the treatment of history. At the very outset Vol-

taire contrasts his new position with the old one: "Vous ne cherchez dans
cette immensity que ce qui merite d'etre connu de vous; l'esprit, les moeurs,
les usages des nations principales, appuyes des faits qu'il n'est permis d'ig-
norer. Le but de ce travail n'est pas de savoir en quelle annee un prince
indigne d'etre connu succeda a un prince barbare chez une nation grossiere.
Si l'on pouvait avoir le malheur de mettre dans sa tete la suite chronologique
de toutes les dynasties, on ne saurait que des mots."24
Here Voltaire offered the first formulation of history's new subject matter:
a scientific study of the human mind and morals. This focus explains the
title of his work: Essai sur les moeurs.
The change in the subject matter created two possibilities -first, the
possibility of applying Bayle's method of analysis to general history, and,
second, of quieting the objections of skeptically-minded historians. To be
sure, Voltaire could not totally banish the single historical fact from his-
torical study, but by reducing its magnitude and importance to a minimum,25
he evaded the skeptics' objections. But in addition, the new subject matter
had a complicated structure which had to be analyzed if it was to be un-
derstood. For in the Voltairean system the spirit of the age expressed in
the morals and life style, and as the products of intellectual activity, amounted
to something very similar in structure to Bayle's subject matter.
Yet the assumptions which Voltaire brought to his method are by no
means identical with Bayle's. Bayle's subject matter had a strictly logical
structure; understanding it involved simply retracing a system of thought.
Voltaire's subject matter, on the other hand, had little of logical structure
about it. Thus one method called for recapitulating a philosophical thought
system, while the other involved analyzing the basic attitudes of an age as
seen in its morals and customs.
As a result of this difference, Voltaire could not assign the same impor-
tance to the logical act as Bayle, for whom it represented the unifying prin-
ciple behind all historical phenomena and thus the prerequisite for the
validity of his method. Voltaire had to find some premise less dependent
on logical consistency.
Here Voltaire went back to a notion which had developed in the course
of the seventeenth-century debate between philosophy and theology. The at-
tempt had been undertaken to infuse all phases of human thought with the
principle of rationality, and religion underwent a broad process of differ-
entiation which led in England to deism, and in France to a strange com-
24. Voltaire, Oeuvres, XVI, 243-244; cf. XIX, 368-369.

25. See 0. Braun in Grundriss der Geschichtswissenschaften, ed. A. Meister, Vol. I
(Berlin, 1913), 43.
10 GUNTHER PFLUG
bination of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy with Christianity.26 The

result of this movement was that religion found itself consigned to the realm
of ethics, restricted there to a practical code of morals which was to be based
on principles of reason.
This introduction of reason into the field of human behavior presupposed
the acceptance of universally understandable and applicable principles of
human behavior; these were thought to be based on a general source of ra-
tional thinking, le bon sens. The thinkers responsible for this theory were
the adherents of the Port Royal School; their attempt to harmonize Cartesian
philosophy with Christian tradition laid the foundations for a theory of bon
sens. Using Pascal as a point of departure,27 Bossuet28 and Fenelon29 in
particular concentrated on establishing a theory of bon sens, or sens common
-two expressions which, with the exception of an Aristotelian variant of
the latter,30 were used interchangeably in France. But the topic was first
analyzed exhaustively by C. Buffier,3' who tried to make sens common the
basis for all knowledge. He became the founding father of the entire common-
sense movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through his in-
fluence on Reid32 he also indirectly determined the development of French
eclectic philosophy, which had lost any direct connection with his thought.
Voltaire transferred the concept of bon sens from philosophical and theo-
logical debate to the sphere of history. To do so he had to overcome the
dualism still present in the Port Royal School's treatment of the two sources
of knowledge. These were differentiated in terms of two separate realms,
and so the Port Royal thinkers made a clear distinction between sens common
and rational sources of knowledge. Not until the two sources had been traced
back to a common origin could discussion of sens common move beyond
the confines of theology. In this respect Voltaire followed Buffier. For both
men, bon sens does not constitute the opposite of ratio; rather it is seen
as that part of the mind which is responsible for all intellectual perception,
for in the face of all the differences between individuals it is precisely that
which forms the common basis of thought and action.
Here Voltaire exceeded the limits which Bayle had placed upon human
26. The movements inspired by Gassendi included both an Epicurean and a Stoic
version, which, however, deliberately strove for reconciliation with the Christian tradi-
tion. See G. du Vair, De la philosophic morale des stoiques (1603) and G. de Balzac,
Platon chretien (1652).
27. B. Pascal, Pensees, Oeuvres, ed. Brunschvicg, Vol. II (Paris, 1904), 199, 203.
28. J.-B. Bossuet, Oeuvres choisies (Edition Bons livres), Vol. I, 428-429.
29. F. de Fenelon, Oeuvres completes, Vol. XIII (Toulouse, 1810), 343.
30. Bossuet, op. cit., I, 9.
31. C. Buffier, Traite des premieres verites (Paris, 1717); Elements de metaphysique
(Paris, 1724).
32. Reid, Works, ed. W. Hamilton, Vol. I (Edinburgh, 1872), 27, 423.
similarity. The doctrine of bon sens, an outgrowth of the debate over find-
ing a rational basis for ethics, has now avowedly become a universally ap-
plicable theory of human behavior. It gave Voltaire the grounds for judging
human behavior, just as logic had given Bayle the grounds for judging hu-
man thought. In addition, Voltaire's program emerged as far more inclusive
than Bayle's, for it was obvious that a theory of human activity had to in-
clude logic as one determinant of action. In this respect Voltaire's ideas
represented in fact an extension of Bayle's work.
Bon sens, taken as a universally binding principle governing human be-
havior, could now fulfill the same function within Voltaire's system as
logical consistency fulfilled in the area of human thought for Bayle: it pro-
vided guidelines for understanding the morals of an historical epoch in the
same way as logical consistency had formed the basis for analyzing the
various philosophical systems. Voltaire thus found it possible to apply a
common principle to the heterogeneous behavior of different individuals,
at least to the extent of excluding only certain forms of behavior as contrary
to bon sens, just as Bayle had excluded totally illogical systems.
Voltaire's change in the subject matter of historical science went hand
in hand with new developments in historical method. In the attempt to
make the writing of history a science, it seemed natural to draw on the
successes chalked up by the natural sciences in the century just past. Bayle
had overlooked this conjunction of mathematical deduction with empirical
data in physics, but during the first half of the new century the new gen-
eration, intent on justifying historical science, tried to exploit this possibility.
Before historical science could be related to physics, a concept of order
had to be developed, which would introduce the notion of causation into
history. This concept evolved in several stages and was finally made prac-
ticable by Voltaire.
It was once again Fontenelle who first formulated the principle of causal
connection in history. "Ce n'est pas une science de s'etre rempli la tete de
toutes les extravagances des Pheniciens & des Grecs; mais c'en est une de
savoir ce qui a conduit les Pheniciens & les Grecs a ces extravagances. Tous
les hommes se ressemblent si fort, qu'il n'y a point de peuple dont les sotises
ne nous doivent faire trembler."33 But Fontenelle did not take any concrete
steps toward developing this principle into a system. He borrowed the idea
of causation entirely from the contemporary situation in the natural sciences.
He saw its application to history as a goal, but not as the primary task of
historical research. He never inquired into the nature of causation in history,
leaving it undecided whether the historian should trace the individual fact
back to a general continuum or evolve causal chains to link individual facts
33. Fontenelle, Oeuvres, IX, 356-357.
12 GUNTHER PFLUG
to each other. He accordingly overlooked the essential precondition for ap-

plying scientific principles to history: the establishment of generalizations
which would enable the historian to apply the same principles of causation
to disparate historical events.
Voltaire, too, did not adopt causal methods for history as extensively as
he had proposed at the beginning of the Essai sur les moeurs. He did rec-
ognize clearly the significance of generalizing as the necessary prerequisite
for the causal method, but the direction in which it took him was inappro-
priate for forming a general theory.
His central work in this regard was the Siecle de Louis XIV. Here he
attempted to portray the entire breadth of an historical epoch, with all its
tendencies and achievements, as belonging to one coherent phenomenon.
"On veut essayer de peindre 'a la posterity, non les actions d'un seul homme,
mais l'esprit des hommes dans le siecle le plus eclaire qui efit jamais."34 This
spirit of the people in a given epoch forms the common factor on which a
causal method can be based. A twofold task arose from this position. On
the one hand, to determine the Zeitgeist one had to derive the individual
phenomena of an epoch from some unity of spirit that animated them. On
the other hand, one also had to link the individual epochs causally to one
another. Voltaire was interested only in the first task. By restricting his stud
to a single epoch, he avoided the second problem altogether.
Yet even discharging the first responsibility involved Voltaire's system in
concrete difficulties. Deriving historical data from the esprit du temps thus
became a limitation of his causal method. For when he tried to connect all
events to a common source, he had to assume that this source could be
perceived. But where else could he find this Zeitgeist but in the events them-
selves-which were supposedly determined by the Zeitgeist? He was thus
caught in an inescapable circle, and the direction of his researches turned
out to be diametrically opposite to the direction he had intended. Instead
of deriving historical fact from the Zeitgeist, he ended up deriving his image
of the Zeitgeist from the historical facts. And this meant that his method
remained primarily analytical.
Yet Voltaire escaped the narrow confines of Bayle's analytical method
when he succeeded in establishing a systematic connection between the in-
dividual data of an epoch. For although he could not work out a genuine
causal method, he did manage, by positing a common source, to bring the
disparate historical data into relationship to one another. In the attempt to
find their common cause, the analytical method was necessarily enlarged to
include comparison.
Here Voltaire adopted an idea which was first expressed in Montesquieu's
34. Voltaire, Oeuvres, XX, 189.
Considerations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur de'ca-

dence.35 But it was left largely to Montesquieu to develop it into a method
central to historical science. Voltaire himself could not extend the compara-
tive method, evolved in his work on a narrow historical period, to the entire
breadth of historical perspective.
Once again the impetus for improving historical method came from outside.
After the great geographical discoveries of the preceding two centuries, the
seventeenth century produced a great literature of geographical and ethno-
graphical description, and the more material on the differences among peo-
ples increased, the more morality was seen as a relative phenomenon.
At first the life patterns of exotic peoples merely seemed strange, but more
and more European thinkers began to be convinced that standards of moral-
ity were totally relative. Thus geographical studies provided a standpoint
from which differences in human customs might be treated.
At the turn of the seventeenth century, geographical relativism gave rise
to a special literary genre which attempted to observe European customs
and morals as they would strike a non-European.36 At first these works were
based on real ethnological findings, but more and more they gave way to
works which used the ethnological approach merely as a pretext for analyz-
ing the European spirit as part of a general historical spectrum. Prime ex-
amples of this genre are Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Montesquieu's Lettres
persanes. Yet it was Montesquieu himself who proceeded from these begin-
nings to develop a general theoretical basis for geographical and ethnological
studies.
The comparative method which grew out of this geographical literature
was applied to Montesquieu to historical writing in his Considerations. Here
Montesquieu reached a new stage in mastering the problem of grasping the
totality, a problem which had been introduced by Bayle and Voltaire. Vol-
taire had linked historical facts to the general power of an esprit du temps
and thus imposed some kind of law-like conception on Bayle's thesis that
historical phenomena were purely random; but this enterprise had created
the obstinate circle which made definition of the Zeitgeist dependent on the
facts and vice versa. This circle, to be sure, was the natural outcome of
deciding that the task of historians was to deal with individual historical
data. On the one hand, the individual historical fact was subjected to his-
torical study, while on the other hand the same method had also to help
define the totality upon which the individual fact depended. Using the same
35. C. de Montesquieu, Considerations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et

de leur decadence (Paris, 1769), 5, 23-24, 36, 47, 83.
36. J. du Fresny, Amusements serieux et comiques d'un Siamois (Paris, 1707);
J. Chardin, Voyages (Paris, 1711).
14 GUNTHER PFLUG
method for defining the part and the law of the whole could provide under-
standing of the part in terms of the law only at the price of entering the
vicious circle.
To escape this circle Montesquieu had to make an even stricter methodo-
logical distinction than Voltaire between the individual and the general. With
Bayle it had been logic, with Voltaire, additionally, a certain emotional fac-
tor, bon sens, that had been abstracted from the historical realm to consti-
tute an area for generalized, non-historical study. Montesquieu took the last
step and abstracted the phenomenon of man from the Zeitgeist and placed
it squarely in the area of generalized study. "Comme les homes ont eu
dans tous les temps les memes passions, les occasions qui produisent les
grands changements sont differentes, mais les causes sont toujours les
memes."3
By seeing man as remaining essentially the same through the ages, even
in his emotions and desires, Montesquieu removed him from the historical
situation; action alone remained subject to historical influence. And by sep-
arating the historical event into the non-temporal component of human pas-
sions and the temporal component of historical situations, Montesquieu
succeeded in avoiding Voltaire's circularity. With man as such no longer
treated on the level of historical fact, the entire realm of human intentions
could be approached with a single, non-historical method, all that remained
to history were individual facts. The causes of actions, which lay in the
passions, remained outside history, while their effect on reality crystallized
in historical facts.
Montesquieu's research thus dealt with two distinct areas of causal inquiry.
On the one hand, he had developed a general anthropology, which promised
to become essentially a theory of the passions along the lines of La Bruyere,
and this anthropology provided him with a typology of man which could be
used for comparing the actions of men in different ages. Montesquieu under-
took such studies completely in conformity with Bayle's premises. Bayle had
seen logic as the basis on which one could compare different thought sys-
tems; Voltaire had relied upon bon sens; and now Montesquieu found his
field for comparative generalizations in a theory of the universal human
passions.
However, this aspect of causality was not Montesquieu's central concern
in his historical studies. He was far more interested in the other aspect, the
relationship between the individual manifestation of an action and the gen-
eral law. The essential issue was thus not the relationship among humans
in general in terms of their variations but the relationship of the general
passion to the singular act.
37. Montesquieu, Considerations, 4.
Here Montesquieu was the first to succeed in establishing general laws

that governed historical fact; to be sure, he could do this only by making
the broad assumption that all men were essentially the same. His solution
depended largely on the fact that the point of departure for his studies was
geography. His ethnological method offered chiefly geographical and mete-
orological differences as an explanation for the diversity of the world's peo-
ples.38 Montesquieu thus divided historical science into two components: into
a general theory of character and a specific study of geographical ethnology;
this latter exhibited all the traits of a natural science.
Montesquieu arrived at his strict version of a scientific approach to histor
only by making several far-reaching concessions. We have already mentioned
that one of the prerequisites for Montesquieu's method was a highly typo-
logical view of man, completely removed from the realm of historicity.
However, this typological approach would accomplish what Montesquieu
claimed for it only if it could establish a science of man that was subject
to deducible evidence: a science, therefore, which rested on the same founda-
tions as logic did in Bayle's system. It was, to be sure, not absolutely neces-
sary that this science also adopt logical forms of proof - Voltaire had, after
all, invoked bon sens as a special form of historical evidence. Yet if this bon
sens was to form the basis for a science, it had to display the characteristic
of universal applicability. Thus the success of Montesquieu's method de-
pended on whether a generally applicable theory of bon sens could be de-
veloped. To follow this development we would have to look at the Scottish
school: only a thorough elucidation of the idea of bon sens could render
Montesquieu's view of history useful for a general historical science and
thereby for the history of philosophy as well.
Furthermore, Montesquieu also had to place severe restrictions on his
subject matter. Introduction of the geographical approach into historical
study narrowed his range to those human activities that seemed explicitly
suited to such an approach. For, unlike Cabanis later, Montesquieu in no
way intended to ascribe man's entire form of existence to his physical sur-
roundings. Montesquieu indubitably had leanings in this direction,39 yet the
framework of his studies remained clearly within the domain of political
history. He always fixed his attention on the structure of a given society,
never on the specific actions of an individual. The penchant for pure con-
stitutional history, present in Montesquieu from the very beginning, gr
increasingly strong as a result of the consequences of his theory. In the Let-
tres persanes, the question of customs and morals was still explicitly central;
38. C. de Montesquieu, De l'esprit des lois, ed. G. Truc, Vol. I (Paris, n.d.) 239.
39. E.g., "Les Indiens sont naturellement sans courages; les enfants meme des Euro-
peens nes aux Indes perdent celui de leur climat," De l'esprit des lois, I, 243; see also I,
239 ff. and 293 f.
16 GUNTHER PFLUG
by contrast, in the Considerations the field had already narrowed, and in

L'Esprit des lois constitutional history had become his overriding concern.
By thus restricting his field, Montesquieu was able to pursue his thesis
to its logical conclusion, but its usefulness for a general theory of the human
mind was diminished. In contrast to what Voltaire had attempted in his
Siecle de Louis XIV, Montesquieu did not succeed in establishing an es
tial connection between anything a man achieved independently of the con-
stitutional structure of his society and that structure itself. Thus the very
factor which Voltaire hoped would help establish an inclusive historical
science, the esprit du temps, remained generally excluded from Montesquieu
method. Deriving intellectual attainments from a universal human component
as well as geographical and ethnographical components is thereby shown to
be inadequate for any comprehensive theory of the historical.
These are the two great limitations which Montesquieu took upon himself
in order to derive history from two concrete sciences. Leaving these limita-
tions aside, the chief drawback of Montesquieu's attempt was that he lost
sight of the historical. By reducing the historical to a generalizing anthro-
pology and to a descriptive geography, he robbed his studies of any spe-
cifically historical character. For the historical science created by combining
two separate sciences lacked one concept essential to history, time. As a re-
sult, the distinction between history and geography is also necessarily blurred.
The last and only residue of a time concept could be found in the notion
of historical distance, and that is encumbered throughout by the spatial
concept of geographical distance.
Here we see clearly that one cannot assign historical fact alone to the
influence of time while assigning the force that works upon it to a general
realm totally divorced from the historical. If historical research is to mean
anything, the concept of law governing historical phenomena must also be
made subject to time.
These difficulties result from separating two components of an historical
fact: uniqueness and generality. If one equates this distinction with the dis-
tinction between temporality and timelessness, and at the same time makes
the timeless component the source of all particular characteristics, one has
annihilated historical science properly so called.
Yet eliminating this identification threatens the form of proof which Mon-
tesquieu had managed to establish by attributing the individual phenomenon
to a general law. The problem that arises here is thus that of finding a
method which will provide a generalized view of an individual historical fact
while abandoning the idea of a general law of a non-historical kind. In other
words, historical science requires that the concept of time be introduced int
the category of the universal.
When we discussed the attempts made by thinkers from Montesquieu to
Voltaire to derive historical phenomena from a general law, it became clear

that the thinker's personal development often interfered with the continuity
with which theory is developed; thus, for instance, Montesquieu had already
formulated a substantial part of his theory before Voltaire even began work,
while on the other hand Voltaire preceded Montesquieu in developing a

general theory of the subject matter of history. Similarly, general debate
over historicizing the universal began well before Montesquieu and Voltaire
took up the problem. And we would expect that with such extensive devel-
opments crammed into so few years, the different thinkers would have mu-
tually influenced one another. Yet apparently the thinkers only borrowed
from each other what would further their own endeavor, without identifying
the basic differences in their programs.
The general interaction of historical continuity and individual develop-
ment also appears in the efforts to redefine the concept of time in history.
When in 1750 Jacques Turgot delivered his two Discours at the Sorbonne,
he by-passed Voltaire's and Montesquieu's labors, reaching back instead to
Bayle's period, from which he borrowed a new element in the conception
of history. The title of his first Discours, Sur les advantages que l'etablisse-
ment du christianisme a procure au genre humnain, reveals the young Turgot's
debt to Bossuet's Discours sur l'histoire universelle. This book, which ap-
peared in 1681 and in one hundred years went through more than thirty
editions, remained, despite all the efforts of the philosophes, the true hand-
book of world history for the eighteenth century.
Permeated with the spirit of Christianity, this work can be considered
the major attempt to portray history as the establishment of the kingdom
of heaven on earth. "Mais, comme mon intention principal est de vous
faire observer, dans cette suite des temps celle de la religion, et celle des
grands empires; apres avoir fait aller ensemble, selon le cours des annees,
les faits qui regardent ces deux choses, je reprendrai en particulier, avec les
reflexions necessaires, premierement ceux qui nous font entendre la duree
perpetuelle de la religion, et enfin ceux qui nous decouvrent les causes des
grands changements arrives dans les empires."40
When Turgot borrowed Bossuet's idea that the Christian was superior to
pre-Christian man, it gave him the key to introducing the concept of time
into the universal. To be sure, since Bayle, increasing value had been placed
on the purely factual, and therefore Bossuet's work, with its strong emphasis
on deduction, could no longer hold its own in the middle of the eighteenth
century. The concept of general laws that he used as the basis of his theo-
logical speculation could not be reconciled with the Enlightenment's critique
of the power of pure reasoning. But what Turgot took over from Bossuet
40. J.-B. Bossuet, Discours sur l'histoire universelle, Vol. I (Lyon, 1811), 6.
18 GUNTHER PFLUG
was not the idea of pure speculation but the idea of connecting a universal
principle with the concept of time - as embodied in Bossuet's plan of a
world developing toward a Christian kingdom of heaven on earth. This con-
cept of progress became the central pillar of Turgot's conception of history.
Yet if we compare Bossuet's Discours with Turgot's formulations, it
immediately becomes clear that this idea of progress underwent a significant
transformation with Turgot. While Bossuet intended it merely to describe
the growth and dissemination of the Christian idea, Turgot used it to suggest
a general structural change in mankind.
Thus Bossuet's interpretation of progress might be seen as a static concept
of the universal. He saw the Christian world as not only universal, but also
a priori established by God. It was in no way predicated on a concept of
time, hence it provided no yardstick for the historical. History was for
Bossuet merely the extension of the ideal world into the real. Thus his con-
cept of progress did not denote the law-like character of the universal, but
rather the influence of the universal on the historically unique. The concept
thus represented an addition to rather than a structural transformation of
historical reality.4'
Reinterpretation of the concept of progress began within an intellectual
movement diametrically opposed to Bossuet's theological position. Toward the
end of the seventeenth century, the great strides of the natural sciences and
the massive accumulation of descriptive material gave rise to the concept of
the progress des sciences, which became a slogan in the eighteenth century.42
The idea of progress now was reinterpreted in terms of perfection. The core
of the idea of progress was no longer that of mere dissemination or expan-
sion, but that of completion of a condition of all-encompassing and perfected
knowledge. In this sense the concept of perfection des sciences is used syn-
onymously with progress des sciences in the literature of the time.43
This reinterpretation of the concept of progress now made it possible to
apply the idea of time to the universal without negating the possibility of
a science of history in advance. For with the idea of development one could
easily explain the uniqueness of an event by pointing to the uniqueness of
41. See K. Lowith, op. cit., 129.

42. Bossuet, Histoire universelle, II, 2; Bayle, Oeuvres diverses, I, 560; Fontenelle,
Oeuvres, V, 188; Abbe de Saint Pierre, Oeuvres, Vol. XV (Paris, 1730), 100; P. de
Maupertuis, Oeuvres, Vol. II (Lyon, 1768), 375, 257; F. Quesnay, Oeuvres econonmiques
et philosophiques, ed. Oncken, 312; Voltaire, Oeuvres, IV, 370, LX, 363; Turgot,
Oeuvres, ed. Daine, II, 642, 633, I, 12; J. d'Alembert, Oeuvres, ed. Condorcet (1853),
217; J.-J. Rousseau, Discours (1755), 11; E. de Condillac, Art de penser, Vol. II (1870),
3; J. S. Bailly, Histoire de l'astronomie ancienne (1775), 19.
43. Bayle, Oeuvres diverses, I, 163, 177; Fontenelle, Oeuvres, IV, 181; Buffon,
Oiseaux, XI, 93; V. de Mirabeau, L'Ami des hommes, II, 212; La Science, Vol. XI;
Turgot, Oeuvres, II, 633.
its cause, while the cause itself could be explained in terms of a universal
law of development.
In addition, the idea of development made it possible to preserve the
chronology of events. Whereas neither Voltaire nor Montesquieu could see
any necessary reason for the factual succession of events, the idea of devel-
opment took the time factor back, as far back as the ultimate causes of
phenomena. The only thing to remain untouched by development was the
law of development itself.
The relationship between general law and specific fact had been redefined
in terms of the concept of progress, but it still required a precise outline.
A theory of intellectual development based on the concept of progres des
sciences could certainly lead to a general history of the sciences, such as
J. L. Lagrange produced - at least for a limited field - in his Mechanique
analytique.44 But this interpretation of progress could hardly produce a sig-
nificant transformation in political history, since political development could
hardly be treated with the same kind of evidence for development as could
the history of science. Hence Turgot made it his first task to develop a gen-
eral theory of human progress for the historical sciences that would go be-
yond the merely intellectual.
He took over from Montesquieu two essential prerequisites. The first was
the eighteenth century's unshakable conviction that man made history. In
contrast to Bossuet, and even to Vico, eighteenth-century French thought
held fast to the idea of history as human action. Deeply suspicious of any
form of deduction, all the thinkers after Bayle tried to eliminate the deduc-
tive principle from history, advocating instead a concept of history that posits
man as the author of history.45 This principle, clearly articulated by Bayle,46
was implied again in Montesquieu's thesis that human volition remained
constant.
Here we find the other prerequisite Turgot took over from Montesquieu:
the transposition of historical causes to the realm of human volition. Mon-
tesquieu had separated history into an anthropological and a geographical
component, and in his study of the former he placed his main emphasis on
that sector of anthropology which dealt with the way man expressed himself
in historical reality. Such a mode of observation, concentrating as it did on
the self-expression and behavior of man in historical reality, necessarily
placed the doctrine of human volition at the center.
Montesquieu had extended the area of general human characteristics to
44. J. L. Lagrange, Mechanique analytique (Paris, 1788).

45. See Voltaire's and Turgot's criticism of Bossuet; Voltaire, Oeuvres, XXVII, 10
and LX, 363; Turgot, Oeuvres, II, 626.
46. P. Bayle, Oeuvres diverges, IV, 970.
20 GUNTHER PFLUG
include just about everything; now Turgot restricted it somewhat, not to

bare logic, as Bayle had, but to certain aspects of human volition.
Whereas Montesquieu's thesis that human volition was universally the same
in structure involved him in an endless process of finding similarities, Turgot
concentrated on defining more precisely the extent of common characteristics.
Ever since ethics had been dubbed a theological matter and had fallen
out of favor in France, those attempting to describe human volition in terms
of a philosophical discipline found themselves in a poor position. The em-
pirical spirit, which demanded that theses be proved demonstrably, had little
use for old-style ethics. What was wanted was less a doctrine of obligations
than a theory of behavior.
When he encountered this difficulty, Turgot was able to draw support from
a science which, although it was only a few years old, significantly deter-
mined the direction of his interests: political economy.
France had suffered from chronic economic difficulties for over one hun-
dred years, and particularly the bitter experience with Law's finance system
had demonstrated to the perceptive that the general welfare depended on
having an adequate economic system and consequently that it was essential
to create an independent science to deal with matters thus far left to ad-
ministrative initiative. Thus France witnessed the creation of a science which
specifically opposed Colbert's economic theory and attempted to develop a
general theory of political economy based firmly on agrarian needs.47
This science, growing out of economic necessity, turned out to be work-
ing along the same lines as those ethical theories being developed in England
which posited happiness as the goal of human striving, and which, when
applied to economics, gave rise to a general theory of human well-being.
This was the point of departure for Turgot's examination of the philoso-
phy of history. He left the Sorbonne and was introduced by Gournay to the
circle of Parisian economists gathered around Quesnay. There he found a
new basis for his old plan of reviving Bossuet's Histoire universeile48 i
light of the new scientific spirit. He now made the universal striving for well-
being the key to his concept of history.
In so doing, Turgot had found a universally binding principle of human
volition. The conviction, born of the general monetary theory of the time
and already recognized by Law as fundamental,49 that well-being was the
47. J. F. Melon, Essai politique sur le commerce (1734); Dutot, Reflexions politiques
sur les finnances et le commerce (1735); P. de Boisguillebert, De'tail de la France
(1695); Du Pin, Memoire sur le commerce des bWs (1754); Cantillon, Essai sur la
nature du commerce (1755); Herbert, Essai sur la police generate des grains (1755);
Quesnay's article in the Encyclopedie; V. de Mirabeau, L'Ami des hommes (1757).
48. J. Turgot, Oeuvres, II, 626 ff.
49. Law, Oeuvres, ed. M. de Senovert (Paris, 1790), 6 ff.
basis for the whole range of human desires, permitted Turgot to reduce
history to a history of economic systems.
In this theory, that prosperity represents the common goal of mankind,
Turgot found the starting-point for his application of the concept of progress
to history. Bayle had seen the multiplicity of human phenomena as a barrier
to comparison; Turgot's supposition of a universal human tendency preserves
the usefulness of the comparative method developed by Montesquieu, insofar
as all actions could be subsumed under the general tendency of striving for
well-being.
Having discovered a universal similarity, Turgot was also under the ne-
cessity of explaining human differences. His solution had to be governed by
the following considerations: first, the source of disparities could not be al-
lowed to negate the newly discovered uniformity; this had happened to logic
in Bayle's system, when it failed to provide enough similarities to guarantee
commensurability among the individual systems.
Further, the source itself had to be so historical, that is, so concretely
unique, that the concept of time would not be eliminated as it had been in
Montesquieu's system.
Here the concept of progress came into its own. Turgot portrayed human
behavior as a result of the two functions of desire and experience, and by
retaining desire as a constant succeeded in linking the concept of progress
to the realm of experience.
This step corresponded to the use made of experimental evidence in the
natural sciences. It transcended Bayle's concept of experience by describing
not only the relations of men to one another and to their surroundings, but
also the relationship of men to the intellectual tradition they inherited. In
accordance with the scientific conception, experience was strongly colored
by the data of experience already transmitted by tradition.
But the consequences of this were twofold: first, the experiences of differ-
ent ages could never be seen as identical. What one generation experienced
directly came down to later generations reflected in tradition. Here the con-
stancy of experience posited by Bayle, which permitted him to coordinate
different philosophical systems, was abandoned in favor of a premise which
linked the notion of historical development of knowledge with the idea of
an overall system. This new approach, as developed by Turgot, was eagerly
received in the writings of his period.50
Second, every item of experience was placed in the context of the char-
acteristic experience of its age. The resulting diversity of experiential stand-
50. V. de Mirabeau, La Science (Lausanne, 1774); J.-J. Rousseau, Discours sur

l'origine et les fondements de l'inegalite parmi les hommes (Amsterdam, 1755); A. de
Condorcet, Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progres de l'esprit humain (Paris, 1793).
22 GUNTHER PFLUG
points corresponded to Voltaire's esprit du temps, with which it shared the

idea that what the intellectual achievements of a period have in common
is that they were linked in one great complex. But Turgot went a significant
step beyond Voltaire when he succeeded in forming an organic totality of
the many esprits du temps, which for Voltaire bore no relation to one an-
other and could not be compared. Imbued with the scientific conviction that
the manner of formulating a question- which determines the answer just
as much as its object does -was never a matter of mere chance, Turgot
found that the thesis of progress offered the possibility of comparing indi-
vidual stages in the historical world.
This linking of experiences into a system of experience revealed, in agree-
ment with the natural scientists' conviction, that a general enrichment of
experience took place in the course of historical development. By applying
the idea of progress to a theory of accumulation of knowledge, Turgot also
managed to preserve the principle of general comparability even in the realm
of the historically unique. For by exhibiting the differences among individual
historical phenomena as differences in experience, and these in turn as stages
in a general progress of the human spirit, Turgot was able to compare two
qualitatively different historical events by reference to the quantitatively dif-
ferent stages of the experiential complexes on which they rested.
Here we see how much the introduction of the idea of progress into his-
torical science implied. For the first time, the comparative method did not
require eo ipso that similarities be assumed as premises; the only require-
ment was that the phenomena could be ordered in a general system.
But the idea of progress had yet another effect on historical science: thanks
to his method, Turgot was able to dispel the difficulties Montesquieu had had
with the concept of time. The idea that the field of experience was constantly
growing made it possible to perceive a necessary chronological order between
two different historical states of being, simply by comparing the experience-
content on which they were based. Thus time had been recovered as a
constitutive element of history, and it had proved possible to use the meth-
odological procedures already developed by Montesquieu to define temporal
relationships.
That is how historical method developed from Voltaire to Turgot. Counter

to Bayle's analysis, the possibility of comparing, of tracing causes, and of
dealing separately with the general and the particular was systematically
annexed. Of course these gains were made at the price of forfeiting Bayle's
freedom from preconceptions. Whereas the only preconditions for Bayle's
method had been the functions of logic, the comparative method had to
begin with the considerably more substantive requirement of a uniformity
of mankind; in addition, refinement of the causal method required the sup-
position that there was a force determining historical events and that we
know it by extra-historical means. The consequence of this limitation was
the belief in universal progress as a constitutive principle that is itself not
subject to factual confirmation.

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The Development of Historical Method in the Eighteenth Century [1954]

* Gunther Pflug, "Die Entwicklung der historischen Methode im 18. Jahrhundert,"

However, this procedure clearly revealed the limited usefulness of the

The noble attempt to place mathematical proof at the service of philosophical

du Nouveau Testament (London, 1777); Examen critique des apologistes de la religion

the end of the seventeenth century, criticism of Descartes steadily gained

7. Pierre Bayle, Oeuvres choisies, Vol. I (The Hague, 1727-31), 749.

differences among individual thinkers.'1 From here Bayle could proceed to

11. P. Bayle, Oeuvres diverges, II, 176-177.

things. However, the usual philosophical distinction between essence and

14. Bayle, Dictionnaire, II, 1031; Oeuvres diverses, IV, 540.

16. Oeuvres diverses, IV, 255-256.

discrete facts could be overcome only by extending the method to a com-

17. E.g., Saint-Aubin, La Mettrie, Condillac.

19. B. de Fontenelle, Oeuvres, Vol. II (Paris, 1758).

marks a breakthrough in the treatment of history. At the very outset Vol-

24. Voltaire, Oeuvres, XVI, 243-244; cf. XIX, 368-369.

bination of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy with Christianity.26 The

33. Fontenelle, Oeuvres, IX, 356-357.

to each other. He accordingly overlooked the essential precondition for ap-

34. Voltaire, Oeuvres, XX, 189.

Considerations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur de'ca-

35. C. de Montesquieu, Considerations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et

37. Montesquieu, Considerations, 4.

Here Montesquieu was the first to succeed in establishing general laws

by contrast, in the Considerations the field had already narrowed, and in

Voltaire to derive historical phenomena from a general law, it became clear

while on the other hand Voltaire preceded Montesquieu in developing a

41. See K. Lowith, op. cit., 129.

44. J. L. Lagrange, Mechanique analytique (Paris, 1788).

include just about everything; now Turgot restricted it somewhat, not to

50. V. de Mirabeau, La Science (Lausanne, 1774); J.-J. Rousseau, Discours sur

points corresponded to Voltaire's esprit du temps, with which it shared the

That is how historical method developed from Voltaire to Turgot. Counter

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