This explanation of history as a necessary development of society corresponding to a necessary succession of ideas differs in two important points from the explanations of Hegel and Cousin.  The succession of ideas is not conceived as a transcendent logic, but is determined by the laws of the human mind and belongs to the domain of psychology.  Here Jouffroy is on the same ground as Vico.  In the second place, it is not a closed system; room remains for an indefinite development in the future.

6.

While Cousin was discoursing on philosophy at Paris in the days of the last Bourbon king, Guizot was drawing crowded audiences to his lectures on the history of European civilisation, [Footnote:  Histoire de la civilisation en Europe.] and the keynote of these lectures was Progress.  He approached it with a fresh mind, unencumbered with any of the philosophical theories which had attended and helped its growth.

Civilisation, he said, is the supreme fact so far as man is concerned, “the fact par excellence, the general and definite fact in which all other facts merge.”  And “civilisation” means progress or development.  The word “awakens, when it is pronounced, the idea of a people which is in motion, not to change its place but to change its state, a people whose condition is expanding and improving.  The idea of progress, development, seems to me to be the fundamental idea contained in the word civilisation.”

There we have the most important positive idea of eighteenth century speculation, standing forth detached and independent, no longer bound to a system.  Fifty years before, no one would have dreamed of defining civilisation like that and counting on the immediate acquiescence of his audience.  But progress has to be defined.  It does not merely imply the improvement of social relations and public well-being.  France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was behind Holland and England in the sum and distribution of well-being among individuals, and yet she can claim that she was the most “civilised” country in those ages.  The reason is that civilisation also implies the development of the individual life, of men’s private faculties, sentiments, and ideas.  The progress of man therefore includes both these developments.  But they are intimately connected.  We may observe how moral reformers generally recommend their proposals by promising social amelioration as a result, and that progressive politicians maintain that the progress of society necessarily induces moral improvement.  The connection may not always be apparent, and at different times one or other kind of progress predominates.  But one is followed by the other ultimately, though it may be after a long interval, for “la Providence a ses aises dans le temps.”  The rise of Christianity was one of the crises of civilisation, yet it did not in its early stages aim at any improvement of social conditions; it did not attack the great injustices which were wrought in the world.  It meant a great crisis because it changed the beliefs and sentiments of individuals; social effects came afterwards.