During a long period, and in many countries, the word civilisation has been used; ideas more or less clear, more or less expansive, have been attached to it, but it is in general use, and it is understood. It is the general, human, popular meaning of this word that we must study. It almost invariably occurs, that in the usual acceptation of terms most in vogue, there is more truth than in the more rigorous, and apparently more precise, definitions of science. It is good sense which gives their common signification to words, and good sense is the genius of humanity. The popular meaning of a word is constituted by a successive process as facts actually arise; so that when a matter presents itself which seems to be comprised within the meaning of a received term, it is comprehended within it by, as it were, a natural tendency: the signification of the term expands and takes a larger compass; and by degrees the various facts and ideas which, from the very nature of things, men should include under this word, become so included in reality. When the meaning of a word, on the contrary, is determined by science, such determination, being fixed by one or a small number of individuals, is controlled by some particular fact which has struck their minds. Thus scientific definitions are in general much more confined, and from that circumstance alone, much less true at bottom, than popular acceptations. In studying, as a fact, the meaning of the word _civilisation_, in investigating all the ideas comprised within it, according to the common sense of mankind, we shall make greater progress in gaining a knowledge of the fact itself, than if we endeavoured to form for ourselves a scientific definition, although it might appear at first more clear and precise. {28} As a commencement to this investigation, I shall attempt to place before you certain hypotheses--I shall describe certain states of society; and then will arise the question, Whether, by general instinct, the condition of a people advancing in civilisation is at once recognised--whether the meaning which mankind attach naturally to the word _civilisation_ is thereby developed? Let us take a people whose outward existence is agreeable and comfortable, paying few taxes, exposed to no suffering, amongst whom justice is well administered in private affairs; in a word, whose material existence, in its full extent, is well and happily regulated. But at the same time, the intellectual and moral existence of this people is studiously held in a state of numbness and inactivity, I will not say in a state of oppression, because the feeling is unknown to it, but of compression. This order of things is not without example. There has been a great number of small aristocratic republics in which the people have been treated like flocks, well tended, and materially happy, but without moral and intellectual activity. Is this civilisation! Is this a people in the process of self-civilisation?