His aim, therefore, was not to build a history of warfare or politics, nor an ecclesiastical history, nor a topographical or natural history, but rather ‘a project that should make known the system of Legislation and of all the domestic management of the Monarchy’, in other words, a History of the ‘system’ of ‘Civil Society’ ( Plano …[Plan] ). According to Caetano do Amaral, this history will be extremely useful because it will show ‘the legislator clearly the genius and character of his people, the passions that have dominated them; the effects that this or that type of legislation has had on them … the occasion that has given rise to many laws’. Only in this H istory too, he adds , will the Jurisconsult ‘find … the true art of legal interpretation’, and only in it will ministers find the means that the country has within itself to grow in opulence and policing. For better political organisation, knowledge of the spirit or nature of the people is therefore essential. It is the idea that nothing can help the future of a state more than knowing its specific qualities: its people, its history, its resources, its passions, and its customs.

The kind of H istory that ACA sets out to do should , therefore , ultimately contribute to greater governing rationality in his country, and this will come above all from a better understanding of the nature of the Portuguese people because good government is also the government of passions. History is , therefore, ultimately, political intervention, but for ACA it is also proposed as religious intervention by comparing the Church discipline of his time with the lives and works of St Fructuos us and St Martin – the subject of two of his publications mentioned below – and therefore with the Ecclesiastical Discipline ‘of the happy times of the primitive Church’ .

His fellow members applauded the Projecto [Project] but remained sceptical about the feasibility of implementing such an ambitious plan. It was, however, no different from the Academy ’ s own project, expressed by Abbot Correia da Serra in his ‘Discurso Preliminar’ [‘Preliminary Speech’] for the edition of Memorias Económicas da Academia Real das Ciências [Economic memoirs of the Royal Academy of Sciences] (volume I, 1789). Correia da Serra, the institution ’ s Secretary and one of its main figures, says that the ultimate aim of the Academy is to advance public prosperity, towards which H istory contributes decisively: ‘the knowledge of what the nation is and what it can be, based on what it has already been, is of the greatest benefit to its happiness, and can only be expected from the united efforts of a body such as the Academy’ ( Memorias … , [M emoirs] V olume I, pp. 10 - 11) . And why? According to Correia da Serra, because the history of each people corresponds to ‘a series of actions, motivated by modes of seeing, speaking, and desiring’. The history of the nation , therefore , shows ‘the way of being’ or, in ACA ’ s words, the ‘genius’ of a people. In the Colecção de Livros Inéditos [Collection of Unpublished B ooks] published by order of the Academia Real, the Academy ’ s secretary reiterates the same opinion as ACA: for the laws that govern us, the form of public administration and the customs we follow, only in H istory can we find ‘the explanation of their nature’ (‘Discurso Preliminar’ in Colecção … ) [‘Preliminary Speech’ in Collection…] . To summarise, ‘in the end, ACA concludes, we need to know ourselves’. Rationalism or pre-romanticism in this view of history and politics? Perhaps just a time of transition, which means multiple combinations between past and future, i.e . , multiple timescales.

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