Throughout this survey Chastellux does not, like Turgot, make any attempt to show that the race was progressing, however slowly. On the contrary, he sets the beginning of continuous Progress in the Renaissance--here agreeing with d'Alembert and Voltaire. The intellectual movement, which originated then and resulted in the enlightenment of his own day, was a condition of social progress. But alone it would not have been enough, as is proved by the fact that the intellectual brilliancy of the great age of Greece exerted no beneficent effects on the well-being of the people. Nor indeed was there any perceptible improvement in the prospect of happiness for the people at large during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, notwithstanding the progress of science and the arts. But the terrible wars of this period exhausted Europe, and this financial exhaustion has supplied the requisite conditions for attaining a measure of felicity never realised in the past. Peace is an advantageous condition for the progress of reason, but especially when it is the result of the exhaustion of peoples and their satiety of fighting. Frivolous ideas disappear; political bodies, like organisms, have the care of self-preservation impressed upon them by pain; the human mind, hitherto exercised on agreeable objects, falls back with more energy on useful objects; a more successful appeal can be made to the rights of humanity; and princes, who have become creditors and debtors of their subjects, permit them to be happy in order that they may be more solvent or more patient. This is not very lucid or convincing; but the main point is that intellectual enlightenment would be ineffective without the co-operation of political events, and no political events would permanently help humanity without the progress of knowledge.