M. Royer-Collard, a man whom I am proud to call my friend, who has passed from such peaceable meetings as ours to assume the first station in more stormy and influential assemblies, and whose words remain engraved wherever they fall, has solved this question, or he has at least, according to his own conviction, solved it, in his speech on the project of law relative to sacrilege. I find in that speech these two sentences: 'Human societies are born, live, and die on the earth; their destinies are there accomplished. But they contain not the whole man. After he has bound himself to society, there remains to him the noblest part of himself, those lofty powers by which he elevates himself to God, to a future life, to unknown bliss in an invisible world. We as individual and identical creatures, as veritable beings endowed with immortality, have a different destiny to that of states.' I will add nothing, nor will I undertake to treat the question itself; I content myself with bringing it forward. It will be met at the end of the history of civilisation. When the history of civilisation is run through, when there is nothing more to say concerning actual life, we are irresistibly driven to ask ourselves whether all is exhausted, whether we have reached the end? This, then, is the last and highest problem to which the history of civilisation can conduct us. It is sufficient for me to have indicated its position and importance. From all that I have said, it is clear that the history of civilisation may be treated of after two modes, drained at two sources, considered under two different aspects. The historian may place himself in the depths of the human mind for a given period, a series of ages, and amongst a certain people; he may study, describe, relate all the events, transformations, and revolutions which are accomplished in the internal man; and when he has reached the end, he will have a history of civilisation amongst the people, and for the period he chose. He may proceed in a different manner. Instead of penetrating the inward man, he may place himself in the midst of the worldly spectacle; instead of describing the vicissitudes in the ideas and sentiments of the individual being, he may describe external facts, the events and fluctuations of the social state. These two portions, these two histories, of civilisation are closely united to each other; each is the reflection and image of the other. Nevertheless, they may be separated, and perhaps they ought to be so, at least in the beginning, in order that both the one and the other may be treated of in detail, and with perspicuity. For my own part, I do not propose to investigate the history of civilisation in the inward workings of the human mind; it is only with the history of the external events of the visible and social world that I shall occupy myself. I had a desire to unfold the fact of civilisation, such as I conceive it, in all its complexity and extent, and to