In short, Voltaire’s great panorama, magnificent as it is and most royally planned, is not drawn in lines and with colour that explain the story or lay bare the principles of its progress. The plan is imposed from without, just as in Bossuet’s case, not carefully sought from within the facts themselves. What is meant then by the assertion that Voltaire’s Essay is one of the foundations of modern history? If he gives no explanation of the course of history, none to himself probably, and none to us assuredly, what is his merit? This, that he has fully placed before us the history which is to be explained; that he has presented the long external succession of facts in their true magnitude and in a definite connection; that he did not write a history of France, or of the papacy, or of the Mahometan power, or of the crusades, but that he saw the advantage, as we see the unavoidable necessity, of comprehending in a single idea and surveying in a single work the various activities, the rise and fall of power, the transference from one to another of political predominance, the contributions to the art of living, among the societies which were once united in a single empire. The history of each of these societies, England, France, Spain, Italy, the Byzantine Empire, is followed in relation to the history of Europe, which is indeed composed of these co-ordinate parts. The movement of communities since the dissolution of the Roman Empire is exhibited in a collective form, and that it should be exhibited and accepted in this form was obviously a preliminary step to an organic treatment of the multiplied laws of social physics.