“Battles and revolutions are the smallest part of the plan; squadrons and battalions conquering or being conquered, towns taken and retaken, are common to all history . . . . Take away the arts and the progress of the mind, and you will find nothing” in any age “remarkable enough to attract the attention of posterity.”44 “I wish to write a history not of wars, but of society; and to ascertain how men lived in the interior of their families, and what were the arts which they commonly cultivated . . . . My object is the history of the human mind, and not a mere detail of petty facts; nor am I
...more
