Note:

Transliterations of Greek words/phrases in the text are surrounded bybraces, e. G. , {transliteration}. 

CRITICAL MISCELLANIES

BY

JOHN MORLEY

VOL. II. 

Essay 3: Condorcet

LondonMACMILLAN AND CO. , LimitedNew York: The MacMillan Company1905

CONDORCET. 

Condorcet's peculiar position and characteristics 163

Birth, instruction, and early sensibility 166

Friendship with Voltaire and with Turgot 170, 171

Compared with these two great men 172

Currents of French opinion and circumstance in 1774 177

Condorcet's principles drawn from two sources 180

His view of the two English Revolutions 181

His life up to the convocation of the States-General 183

Energetic interest in the elections 189

Want of prevision 191

His participation in political activity down to the end of 1792 193

Chosen one of the secretaries of the Legislative Assembly 198

Elected to the Convention 200

Resistance to the Jacobins, proscription, and death 201

Condorcet's tenacious interest in human welfare 210

Two currents of thought in France at the middle of the eighteenth century 215

Quesnay and the Physiocrats 216

Montesquieu 219

Turgot completed Montesquieu's historical conception 222

Kant's idea of a Universal or Cosmo-Political History 226

Condorcet fuses the conceptions of the two previous sets of thinkers 229

Account of his _Tableau des Progrès_ 230

Omits to consider history of moral improvement 233

And misinterprets the religious element 234

His view of Mahometanism 238

Of Protestantism 240

And of philosophic propagandism 241

Various acute remarks in his sketch 243

His boundless hopes for the future 244

Three directions which our anticipations may take:-- (1) International equality 246 (2) Internal equality 247 (3) Substantial perfecting of nature and society 248

Natural view of the formation of character 252

Central idea of all his aspirations 253

CONDORCET. 

Of the illustrious thinkers and writers who for two generations had beenactively scattering the seed of revolution in France, only Condorcetsurvived to behold the first bitter ingathering of the harvest. Thosewho had sown the wind were no more; he only was left to see the reapingof the whirlwind, and to be swiftly and cruelly swept away by it. Voltaire and Diderot, Rousseau and Helvétius, had vanished, butCondorcet both assisted at the Encyclopædia and sat in the Convention;the one eminent man of those who had tended the tree, who also came indue season to partake of its fruit; at once a precursor, and a sharer inthe fulfilment. In neither character has he attracted the goodwill ofany of those considerable sections and schools into which criticism ofthe Revolution has been mainly divided. As a thinker he is roughlyclassed as an Economist, and as a practical politician he figured firstin the Legislative Assembly, and then in the Convention. Now, as a rule, the political parties that have most admired the Convention have hadleast sympathy with the Economists, and the historians who are mostfavourable to Turgot and his followers, are usually most hostile to theactions and associations of the great revolutionary chamber successivelyswayed by a Vergniaud, a Danton, a Robespierre. Between the two, Condorcet's name has been allowed to lie hidden for the most part in acertain obscurity, or else has been covered with those taunts andinnuendoes, which partisans are wont to lavish on men of whom they donot know exactly whether they are with or against them. 

Generally the men of the Revolution are criticised in blocks andsections, and Condorcet cannot be accurately placed under any of thesereceived schools. He was an Economist, but he was something more; forthe most characteristic article in his creed was a passionate belief inthe infinite perfectibility of human nature. He was more of a Girondinthan a Jacobin, yet he did not always act, any more than he alwaysthought, with the Girondins, and he did not fall when they fell, but wasproscribed by a decree specially levelled at himself. Isolation of thiskind is assuredly no merit in political action, but it explains thecoldness with which Condorcet's memory has been treated; it flowed fromsome marked singularities both of character and opinion which are of thehighest interest, if we consider the position of the man and the lustreof that ever-memorable time. 'Condorcet, ' said D'Alembert, 'is a volcanocovered with snow. ' Said another, less picturesquely: 'He is a sheep ina passion. ' 'You may say of the intelligence of Condorcet in relationto his person, ' wrote Madame Roland, 'that it is a subtle essence soakedin cotton. ' The curious mixture disclosed by sayings like these, of warmimpulse and fine purpose with immovable reserve, only shows that he ofwhom they were spoken belonged to the class of natures which may becalled non-conducting. They are not effective, because without thiseffluence of power and feeling from within, the hearer or onlooker isstirred by no sympathetic thrill. They cannot be the happiest, becauseconsciousness of the inequality between expression and meaning, betweenthe influence intended and the impression conveyed, must be astormenting as to one who dreams is the vain effort to strike a blow. Ifto be of this non-conducting temperament is impossible in the reallygreatest characters, like St. Paul, St. Bernard, or Luther, at least itis no proper object of blame, for it is constantly the companion oflofty and generous aspiration. It was perhaps unfortunate that Condorcetshould have permitted himself to be drawn into a position where his wantof that magical quality by which even Marat could gain the sympathies ofmen, should be so conspicuously made visible. The character ofCondorcet, unlike so many of his contemporaries, offers nothing to thetheatrical instinct. None the less on this account should we be willingto weigh the contributions which he made to the stock of science andsocial speculation, and recognise the fine elevation of his sentiments, his noble solicitude for human wellbeing, his eager and resolute beliefin its indefinite expansion, and the devotion which sealed his faith bya destiny that was as tragical as any in those bloody and most tragicaldays. 

I. 

Until the outbreak of the Revolution, the circumstances of Condorcet'slife were as little externally disturbed or specially remarkable asthose of any other geometer and thinker of the time. He was born at asmall town in Picardy, in the year 1743. His father was a cavalryofficer, but as he died when his son was only three years old, he couldhave exerted no influence upon the future philosopher, save such ascomes of transmission through blood and tissue. Condillac was his uncle, but there is no record of any intercourse between them. His mother was adevout and trembling soul, who dedicated her child to the Holy Virgin, and for eight years or more made him wear the dress of a little girl, byway of sheltering him against the temptations and unbelief of a vileworld. So long as women are held by opinion and usage in a state ofeducational and political subjection, which prevents the growth of alarge intelligence made healthy and energetic by knowledge and byactivity, we may expect pious extravagances of this kind. Condorcet wasweakened physically by much confinement and the constraint of cumbrousclothing; and not even his dedication to the Holy Virgin prevented himfrom growing up the most ardent of the admirers of Voltaire. Hisearliest instructors, as happened to most of the sceptical philosophers, were the Jesuits, then within a few years of their fall. That theseadroit men, armed with all the arts and traditions which their order hadacquired in three centuries, and with the training of the nation almostexclusively in their hands, should still have been unable to shieldtheir persons from proscription and their creed from hatred, is aremarkable instance how little it avails ecclesiastical bodies to have amonopoly of official education, if the spirit of their teaching be outof harmony with those most potent agencies which we sum up as the spiritof the time. The Jesuits were the great official instructors of Francefor the first half of the eighteenth century. In 1764 the order wasthrust forth from the country, and they left behind them an army of thebitterest enemies that Christianity has ever had. To do them justice, they were destroyed by weapons which they had themselves supplied. Theintelligence which they had developed and sharpened, turned inevitablyagainst the incurable faults in their own system. They were admirableteachers of mathematics. Condorcet, instructed by the Jesuits at Rheims, was able when he was only fifteen years old to go through suchperformances in analysis as to win especial applause from illustriousjudges like D'Alembert and Clairaut. It was impossible, however, forJesuits, as it has ever been for all enemies of movement, to constrainwithin prescribed limits the activity which has once been effectivelystirred. Mathematics has always been in the eyes of the Church aharmless branch of knowledge, but the mental energy that mathematicsfirst touched is sure to turn itself by and by to more complex anddangerous subjects in the scientific hierarchy. 

At any rate, Condorcet's curiosity was very speedily drawn to problemsbeyond those which geometry and algebra pretend to solve. 'For thirtyyears, ' he wrote in 1790, 'I have hardly ever passed a single daywithout meditating on the political sciences. '[1] Thus, when onlyseventeen, when the ardour of even the choicest spirits is usually mostpurely intellectual, moral and social feeling was rising in Condorcet tothat supremacy which it afterwards attained in him to so admirable adegree. He wrote essays on integral calculus, but he was alreadybeginning to reflect upon the laws of human societies and the conditionsof moral obligation. At the root of Condorcet's nature was a profoundsensibility of constitution. One of his biographers explains his earlyenthusiasm for virtue and human welfare as the conclusion of a kind ofsyllogism. It is possible that the syllogism was only the later shapeinto which an instinctive impulse threw itself by way of rationalentrenchment. His sensibility caused Condorcet to abandon the barbarouspleasures of the chase, which had at first powerfully attracted him. [2]To derive delight from what inflicts pain on any sentient creaturerevolted his conscience and offended his reason, because he perceivedthat the character which does not shrink from associating its own joywith the anguish of another, is either found or left mortally blunted tothe finest impressions of humanity. 

It is thus assured that from the beginning Condorcet was unable tosatisfy himself with the mere knowledge of the specialist, but felt thenecessity of placing social aims at the head and front of his life, andof subordinating to them all other pursuits. That he values knowledgeonly as a means to social action, is one of the highest titles to ouresteem that any philosopher can have. Such a temper of mind haspenetrated no man more fully than Condorcet, though there are otherthinkers to whom time and chance have been more favourable in makingthat temper permanently productive. There is a fine significance in hiswords, after the dismissal of the great and virtuous Turgot from office:'We have had a delightful dream, but it was too brief. Now I mean toapply myself to geometry. It is terribly cold to be for the futurelabouring only for the _gloriole_, after flattering oneself for a whilethat one was working for the public weal. ' It is true that a geometer, too, works for the public weal; but the process is tardier, and we maywell pardon an impatience that sprung of reasoned zeal for the happinessof mankind. There is something much more attractive about Condorcet'sundisguised disappointment at having to exchange active public labourfor geometrical problems, than in the affected satisfactionconventionally professed by statesmen when driven from place to theirbooks. His correspondence shows that, even when his mind seemed to bemost concentrated upon his special studies, he was incessantly on thealert for every new idea, book, transaction, that was likely tostimulate the love of virtue in individuals, or to increase the strengthof justice in society. It would have been in one sense more fortunatefor him to have cared less for high social interests, if we remember thecontention of his latter days and the catastrophe which brought them toa frightful close. But Condorcet was not one of those natures who canthink it happiness to look passively out from the tranquil literarywatch-tower upon the mortal struggles of a society in revolution. Inmeasuring other men of science--as his two volumes of _Éloges_abundantly show--one cannot help being struck by the eagerness withwhich he seizes on any trait of zeal for social improvement, any signalof anxiety that the lives and characters of our fellows should be betterworth having. He was himself too absolutely possessed by this socialspirit to have flinched from his career, even if he had foreseen themartyrdom which was to consummate it. 'You are very happy, ' he oncewrote to Turgot, 'in your passion for the public good and your power tosatisfy it; it is a great consolation, and of an order very superior tothat of study. '[3]

In 1769, at the age of six-and-twenty, Condorcet became connected withthe Academy, to the mortification of his relations, who hardly pardonedhim for not being a captain of horse as his father had been before him. About the same time, or a little later, he performed a pilgrimage of akind that could hardly help making a mark upon a character so deeplyimpressible. In company with D'Alembert he went to Ferney and sawVoltaire. [4] To the position of Voltaire in Europe in 1770 there hasnever been any other man's position in any age wholly comparable. It istrue that there had been one or two of the great popes, and a greatecclesiastic like St. Bernard, who had exercised a spiritual authority, pretty universally submitted to, or even spontaneously invoked, throughout western Europe. But these were the representatives of apowerful organisation and an accepted system. Voltaire filled a placebefore men's eyes in the eighteenth century as conspicuous and asauthoritative as that of St. Bernard in the twelfth. The difference wasthat Voltaire's place was absolutely unofficial in its origin, andindebted to no system nor organisation for its maintenance. Again, therehave been others, like Bacon or Descartes, destined to make a far morepermanent contribution to the ideas which have extended the powers andelevated the happiness of men; but these great spirits for the most partlaboured for the generation that followed them, and won comparativelyslight recognition from their own age. Voltaire during his life enjoyedto the full not only the admiration that belongs to the poet, butsomething of the veneration that is paid to the thinker, and evensomething of the glory usually reserved for captains and conquerors ofrenown. No other man before or since ever hit so exactly the mark of histime on every side, so precisely met the conditions of fame for themoment, nor so thoroughly dazzled and reigned over the foremost men andwomen who were his contemporaries. Wherever else intellectual fame hasapproached the fame of Voltaire, it has been posthumous. With him it wasimmediate and splendid. Into the secret of this extraordinarycircumstance we need not here particularly inquire. He was anunsurpassed master of the art of literary expression in a country wherethat art is more highly prized than anywhere else; he was the mostbrilliant of wits among a people whose relish for wit is a supremepassion; he won the admiration of the lighter souls by his plays, of thelearned by his interest in science, of the men of letters by hisnever-ceasing flow of essays, criticisms, and articles, not one of whichlacks vigour and freshness and sparkle; he was the most active, bitter, and telling foe of what was then the most justly abhorred of allinstitutions--the Church. Add to these remarkable titles to honour andpopularity that he was no mere declaimer against oppression andinjustice in the abstract, but the strenuous, persevering, andabsolutely indefatigable champion of every victim of oppression orinjustice whose case was once brought under his eye. 

It is not difficult to perceive the fascination which Voltaire, withthis character and this unrivalled splendour of public position, wouldhave for a man like Condorcet. He conceived the warmest attachment toVoltaire, and Voltaire in turn the highest respect for him. Theircorrespondence (1770-1778) is perhaps as interesting as any letters ofthat period that we possess: Voltaire is always bright, playful, andaffectionate; Condorcet more declamatory and less graceful, but full ofreverence and loyalty for his 'dear and illustrious' master, and of hisown peculiar eagerness for good causes and animosity against thedefenders of evil ones. Condorcet was younger than the patriarch ofFerney by nearly half a century, but this did not prevent him from loyalremonstrances on more than one occasion against conduct on Voltaire'spart in this matter or that, which he held to be unworthy of hischaracter and reputation. He went so far as actually to decline to printin the _Mercure_ a letter in which the writer in some fit of spleenplaced Montesquieu below D'Aguesseau. 'My attachment, ' he says, 'bids mesay what will be best for you, and not what might please you most. If Iloved you less, I should not have the courage to thwart you. I am awareof your grievances against Montesquieu; it is worthy of you to forgetthem. ' There was perhaps as much moral courage in doing this as indefying the Men of the Mountain in the days of the Terror. It dispelssome false impressions of Voltaire's supposed intolerance of criticism, to find him thanking Condorcet for one of these friendly protests. Heshowed himself worthy of such courageous conduct. 'One sees things ill, 'he writes, 'when one sees them from too far off. After all, we oughtnever to blush to go to school if we are as old as Methuselah. I repeatmy acknowledgments to you. '[5] Condorcet did not conceive that either tobe blind to a man's errors or to compromise them is to prove yourselfhis friend. There is an integrity of friendship as in public concerns, and he adhered to it as manfully in one as in the other. Throughout hisintercourse with intimate friends there is that happy and frank play ofdirect personal allusion, which is as distinct from flattery when it isabout another, as it is from egoism when it refers to the writerhimself. 

Perhaps we see him most characteristically in his correspondence withTurgot. What Turgot loved in Condorcet was his 'simplicity ofcharacter. '[6] Turgot was almost as much less vivacious than Condorcet, as Condorcet was less vivacious than Voltaire. They belonged to quitedistinct types of character, but this may be a condition of the mostperfect forms of sympathy. Each gives support where the other is mostconscious of needing it. Turgot was one of those serene, capacious, andsure intelligences whose aspirations do not become low nor narrow bybeing watchfully held under the control of reason; whose ideas are noless vigorous or exuberant because they move in a steady and orderedtrain; and who, in their most fervent reactions against abuses orcrimes, resist that vehement temptation to excess which is the besettinginfirmity of generous natures. Condorcet was very different from this. Whatever he wished he wished unrestrainedly. As with most men of theepoch, the habit of making allowances was not his. We observe somethingtheological in his hatred of theologians. Even in his letters thedistant ground-swell of repressed passion sounds in the ear, and atevery mention of false opinion or evil-doing a sombre and angry shadowseems to fall upon the page. Both he and Turgot clung to the doctrine ofthe infinite perfectibility of human nature, and the correspondinglyinfinite augmentation of human happiness; but Condorcet'sever-smouldering impetuosity would be content with nothing less than thearrival of at least a considerable instalment of this infinite quantitynow and instantly. He went so far as to insist that by and by men wouldacquire the art of prolonging their lives for several generations, instead of being confined within the fatal span of threescore years andten. He was impatient of any frittering away of life in scruple, tremors, and hesitations. 'For the most part, ' he once wrote to Turgot, 'people abounding in scruple are not fit for great things: a Christianwill throw away in subduing the darts of the flesh the time which hemight have employed on things of use to mankind; or he will lack courageto rise against a tyrant for fear of his judgment being too hastilyformed. '[7] Turgot's reply may illustrate the difference between the twomen: 'No virtue, in whatever sense you take the word, dispenses withjustice; and I think no more of the people who do great things--as yousay--at the expense of justice, than of poets who fancy they producegreat beauties of imagination without regularity. I know that excessiveexactitude tends slightly to deaden the fire alike of composition and ofaction; but there is a mean in everything. It has never been a questionin our controversy of a capuchin who throws away his time in quenchingthe darts of the flesh (though by the way, in the total of time thrownaway the term that expresses the time lost in satisfying these lusts ismost likely far greater); no more is it a question of a fool who isafraid of rising against tyrants for fear of forming a rashjudgment. '[8]

This ability to conceive a mean case between two extremes was not amongCondorcet's gifts. His mind dwelt too much in the region of excess, alike when he measured the possibilities of the good, and coloured themotives and the situation of those whom he counted the bad. A Christianwas one who wasted his days in merely resisting the flesh; anybody whodeclined to rise against a tyrant was the victim of a slavishscrupulosity. He rather sympathises with a scientific traveller, to whomthe especial charm of natural history resides in the buffets which, ateach step that it takes, it inflicts upon Moses. [9] Well, this temperis not the richest nor the highest, but it often exists in alliance withrich and high qualities. It was so with Condorcet. And we areparticularly bound to remember that with him a harsh and impatienthumour was not, as is so often the case, the veil for an indolentreluctance to form painstaking judgments. Few workers have been soconscientious as he was, in the labour that he bestowed upon subjectswhich he held to be worthy of deliberate scrutiny and consideration. Hisdefect was in finding too few of such subjects, and in having too manyforegone conclusions. Turgot and Montesquieu are perhaps the only twoeminent men in France during this part of the century, of whom the samedefect might not be alleged. Again, Condorcet's impatience of underlyingtemperament did not prevent him from filling his compositions withsolid, sober, and profound reflections, the products of grave andsustained meditation upon an experience, much of which must have beenseverely trying and repugnant to a man of his constitution. Whilerecognising this trait, then, let us not overstate either it or itsconsequences. 

The main currents of opinion and circumstance in France, when Condorcetcame to take his place among her workers, are now well understood. Thethird quarter of the century was just closing. Lewis XV. Died in 1774;and though his death was of little intrinsic consequence, except as theremoval of every corrupt heart is of consequence, it is justly taken tomark the date of the beginning of the French Revolution. It was theaccidental shifting of position which served to disclose that theexisting system was smitten with a mortal paralysis. It is often saidthat what destroyed the French kingdom was despotism. A sounderexplanation discovers the causes less in despotism than inanarchy--anarchy in every department where it could be most ruinous. Nosubstantial reconstruction was possible, because all the evils came fromthe sinister interests of the nobles, the clergy, or the financiers; andthese classes, informally bound together against the common weal, weretoo strong for either the sovereign or the ablest minister to thrustthem aside. The material condition of France was one of supremeembarrassment and disorder, only curable by remedies which the politicaland social condition of the country made it impossible to employ. 

This would explain why a change of some sort was inevitable. But why wasthe change which actually took place in that direction rather thananother? Why did not France sink under her economical disorders, asgreater empires than France had done? Why, instead of sinking andfalling asunder, did the French people advance with a singleness ofimpulse unknown before in their history to their own deliverance? Howwas it that they overthrew the system that was crushing them, and purgedthemselves with fire and sword of those who administered and maintainedit, defying the hopes of the nation; and then successfully encounteredthe giant's task of beating back reactionary Europe with one arm, andreconstructing the fabric of their own society with the other? Theanswer to this question is found in the moral and spiritual condition ofFrance. A generation aroused by the great social ideas of the eighteenthcentury, looking round to survey its own social state, found itself inthe midst of the ruin and disorder of the disintegrated system of thetwelfth century. The life was gone out of the ancient organisation ofCatholicism and Feudalism, and it seemed as if nothing but corruptionremained. What enabled the leaders of the nation to discern the horrorand despair of this anarchic dissolution of the worn-out old, and whatinspired them with hope and energy when they thought of the possiblenew, was the spiritual preparation that had been in swift progress sincethe third decade of the century. The forms and methods of thispreparation were various, as the temperaments that came beneath itsinfluence. But the school of Voltaire, the school of Rousseau, and theschools of Quesnay and Montesquieu, different as they were at the roots, all alike energetically familiarised the public mind with a firm beliefin human reason, and the idea of the natural rights of man. Theyimpregnated it with a growing enthusiasm for social justice. It is truethat we find Voltaire complaining towards the close of his days, of thecentury being satiated and weary, _un siècle dégouté_, not knowing wellwhat it wanted. 'The public, ' he said, 'has been eighty years at table, and now it drinks a little bad cognac at the end of its meal. '[10] Inliterature and art this was true; going deeper than these, the publicwas eager and sensitive with a freshness far more vital and morefruitful than it had known eighty years back. Sitting down with a keenappetite for taste, erudition, and literary knowledge, men had now risenup from a dazzling and palling board, with a new hunger and thirst aftersocial righteousness. This was the noble faith that saved France, bythis sign she was victorious. A people once saturated with a passionateconception of justice is not likely to fall into a Byzantine stage. Thatdestiny only awaits nations where the spiritual power is rigorouslyconfined in the hands of castes and official churches, whichsystematically and of their very constitution bury justice under thesterile accumulations of a fixed superstition. 

Condorcet's principles were deeply coloured by ideas drawn from twosources. He was a Voltairean in the intensity of his antipathies to theChurch, and in the depth and energy of his humanity. But while Voltaireflourished, the destructive movement only reached theology, andVoltaire, though he had more to do than anybody else with the originalimpulse, joined in no attack upon the State. It was from the economicalwriters and from Montesquieu that Condorcet learned to look uponsocieties with a scientific eye, to perceive the influence ofinstitutions upon men, and that there are laws, susceptible ofmodification in practice, which regulate their growth. It was natural, therefore, that he should join with eagerness in the reforming movementwhich set in with such irrestrainable velocity after the death of LewisXV. He was bitter and destructive with the bitterness of Voltaire; hewas hopeful for the future with the faith of Turgot; and he was urgent, heated, impetuous, with a heavy vehemence all his own. In a word, he wasthe incarnation of the revolutionary spirit, as the revolutionary spiritexisted in geometers and Encyclopædists; at once too reasonable and toolittle reasonable; too precise and scientific and too vague; toorigorously logical on the one hand and too abundantly passionate on theother. Perhaps there is no more fatal combination in politics than thedeductive method worked by passion. When applied to the delicate andcomplex affairs of society, such machinery with such motive force is ofruinous potency. 

Condorcet's peculiarities of political antipathy and preference canhardly be better illustrated than by his view of the two greatrevolutions in English history. The first was religious, and thereforehe hated it; the second was accompanied by much argument, and had noreligion about it, and therefore he extolled it. It is scientificknowledge, he said, which explains why efforts after liberty inunenlightened centuries are so fleeting, and so deeply stained bybloodshed. 'Compare these with the happy efforts of America and France;observe even in the same century, but at different epochs, the tworevolutions of England fanatical and England enlightened. We see on theone side contemporaries of Prynne and Knox, while crying out that theyare fighting for heaven and liberty, cover their unhappy country withblood in order to cement the tyranny of the hypocrite Cromwell; on theother, the contemporaries of Boyle and Newton establish with pacificwisdom the freest constitution in the world. '[11] It is not wonderfulthat his own revolution was misunderstood by one who thus loved EnglishWhigs, but hated English Republicans; who could forgive an aristocraticfaction grasping power for their order, but who could not sympathisewith a nation rising and smiting its oppressor, where they smote in thename of the Lord and of Gideon, nor with a ruler who used his power withnoble simplicity in the interests of his people, and established in theheart of the nation a respect for itself such as she has never knownsince, simply because this ruler knew nothing about _principes_ or theRights of Man. However, Nemesis comes. By and by Condorcet found himselfwriting a piece to show that our Revolution of 1688 was very inferior inlawfulness to the French Revolution of the Tenth of August. [12]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Œuv. De Condorcet_ (12 vols. 1847-49), ix. 489. 

[2] _Ib. _ i. 220. 

[3] _Œuv. _ i. 201. See Turgot's wise reply, p. 202. 

[4] Sept. 1770. Voltaire's _Corr. _ vol. Lxxi. P. 147. 

[5] _Œuv. _ i. 41. 

[6] _Œuv. De Turgot_, ii. 817. 

[7] _Œuv. _ i. 228. 

[8] _Ib. _ i. 232. 

[9] _Œuv. _ i. 29. 

[10] Letters to Condorcet (1774). _Œuv. _ i. 35. 

[11] _Éloge de Franklin_, iii. 422. 

[12] _Réflexions sur la Rév. De 1688, et sur celle du 10 Août_, xii. 197. 

II. 

The course of events after 1774 is in its larger features well known toevery reader. Turgot, after a month of office at the Admiralty, was inAugust made Controller-General of Finance. With his accession to power, the reforming ideas of the century became practical. He nominatedCondorcet to be Inspector of Coinage, an offer which Condorcetdeprecated in these words: 'It is said of you in certain quarters thatmoney costs you nothing when there is any question of obliging yourfriends. I should be bitterly ashamed of giving any semblance offoundation to these absurd speeches. I pray you, do nothing for me justnow. Though not rich, I am not pressed for money. Entrust to me someimportant task--the reduction of measures for instance; then wait tillmy labours have really earned some reward. '[13] In this patriotic spirithe undertook, along with two other eminent men of science, the task ofexamining certain projects for canals which engaged the attention of theminister. 'People will tell you, ' he wrote, 'that I have got an officeworth two hundred and forty pounds. Utterly untrue. We undertook it outof friendship for M. Turgot; but we refused the payment that wasoffered. '[14] We may profitably contrast this devotion to the publicinterest with the rapacity of the clergy and nobles, who drove Turgotfrom office because he talked of taxing them like their neighbours, anddeclined to glut their insatiable craving for place and plunder. 

Turgot was dismissed (May 1776), and presently Necker was installed inhis place. Condorcet had defended with much vigour and some asperitythe policy of free internal trade in corn against Necker, who was forthe maintenance of the restrictions on commercial intercourse betweenthe different provinces of the kingdom. Consequently, when the newminister came into office, Condorcet wrote to Maurepas resigning hispost. 'I have, ' he said, 'declared too decidedly what I think about bothM. Necker and his works, to be able to keep any place that depends uponhim. '[15] This was not the first taste that Maurepas had had ofCondorcet's resolute self-respect. The Duke de la Vrillière, one of themost scandalous persons of the century, was an honorary member of theAcademy, and he was the brother-in-law of Maurepas. It was expected fromthe perpetual secretary that he should compose a eulogy upon theoccasion of his death, and Condorcet was warned by friends, who seldomreflect that a man above the common quality owes something more tohimself than mere prudence, not to irritate the powerful minister by aslight upon his relation. He was inflexible. 'Would you rather have mepersecuted, ' he asked, 'for a wrong than for something just and moral?Think, too, that they will pardon my silence much more readily than theywould pardon my words, for my mind is fixed not to betray thetruth. '[16]

In 1782 Condorcet was elected into the Academy. His competitor wasBailly, over whom he had a majority of one. The true contest lay lessbetween the two candidates than between D'Alembert and Buffon, who onthis occasion are said to have fought one of the greatest battles in thenot peaceful history of the Academy, for mighty anger burns even incelestial minds. D'Alembert is said to have exclaimed, we may hope withsome exaggeration, that he was better pleased at winning that victorythan he would have been to find out the squaring of the circle. [17]Destiny, which had so pitiful a doom in store for the two candidates ofthat day, soon closed D'Alembert's share in these struggles of thelearned and in all others. He died in the following year, and by hislast act testified to his trust in the generous character of Condorcet. Having by the benevolence of a lifetime left himself on his deathbedwithout resources, he confided to his friend's care two old and faithfulservants, for whom he was unable to make provision. This charge thephilosopher accepted cheerfully, and fulfilled to the end with piousscrupulosity. The affection between Condorcet and D'Alembert had beenwarm and close as that of some famous pairs of antiquity; a naturalattraction of character had clothed community of pursuit and interestwith the grace of the highest kind of friendship. Even Condorcet's toodeclamatory manner only adds a certain dignity to the pathetic passagewith which he closes the noble _éloge_ on his lost friend. [18] Voltairehad been dead these five years, and Turgot, too, was gone. Societyoffered the survivor no recompense. He found the great world tiresomeand frivolous, and he described its pursuits in phrases that are stilltoo faithful to the fact, as 'dissipation without pleasure, vanitywithout meaning, and idleness without repose. ' It was perhaps to softenthe oppression of these cruel and tender regrets that in 1786 Condorcetmarried. [19]

Events were now very close at hand, in comparison with which even themost critical private transactions of Condorcet's life were pale andinsignificant. In the tranquil seasons of history, when the steadycurrents of circumstance bear men along noiseless, the importance of therelations which we contract seems superlative; in times of storm andsocial wreck these petty fortunes and private chances are engulfed andlost to sight. The ferment was now rapidly rising to its intensestheight, and Condorcet was the last man in France to remain cold to theburning agitations of the time. We have already seen how decidedly tenyears ago he expressed his preference for political activity over themeditative labours of the student. He now threw himself into theRevolution with all the force of an ardent character imbued with fixedand unalterable convictions. We may well imagine him deploring that thegreat ones whom he had known, the immortal Voltaire, the lofty-souledTurgot, had been carried away by the unkind gods, before their eyes hadseen the restoration of their natural rights to men, and the reign ofjustice on the earth. The gods after all were kinder than he knew, forthey veiled from the sight of the enthusiast of '89 the spectres of '93. History might possibly miss most of its striking episodes, if everyactor could know the work to which he was putting his hand; and evenCondorcet's faith might have wavered if he had known that between himand the fulfilment of his desires there was to intrude a long anddeplorable period of despotism and corruption. Still, the vision whichthen presented itself to the eyes of good men was sublime; and just as, when some noble and devoted character has been taken away from us, it isa consolation to remember that we had the happiness of his friendship, so too when a generation awakes from one of these inspiring socialdreams, the wreck of the aspiration is not total nor unrecompensed. Thenext best thing to the achievement of high and generous aims is to havesought them. 

During the winter of '88 and '89, while all France was astir withelections and preparation for elections for that meeting of theStates-General, which was looked to as the nearing dawn after a longnight of blackness and misery, Condorcet thought he could best servethe movement by calling the minds of the electors to certain sides oftheir duty which they might be in some danger of overlooking. One of thesubjects, for example, on which he felt most strongly, but on which hiscountrymen have not shown any particular sensibility, was slavery andthe slave trade. [20] With a terseness and force not alwayscharacteristic of his writings, he appealed to the electors, while theywere reclaiming their own rights in the name of justice, not to forgetthe half-million blacks, whose rights had been still more shamefullytorn away from them, and whose need of justice was more urgent thantheir own. In the same spirit he published a vehement and ingeniousprotest against the admission of representatives from the St. Domingoplantations to the National Assembly, showing how grossly inconsistentit was with every idea of a free and popular chamber that men should sitas representatives of others who had never chosen them, and that theyshould invoke natural rights in their own favour, when at the sameinstant they were violating the most elementary and undisputed naturalrights of mankind in their own country. [21]

Of general precepts he never tired; one series of them followed another. To us many of them may seem commonplace; but we should reflect that theelection of representatives was an amazing novelty in France, andCondorcet knew men well enough to be aware of the hazards of politicalinexperience. Beware of choosing a clever knave, he said, because hewill follow his own interest and not yours; but at the same time bewareof choosing a man for no better reason than that he is honest, becauseyou need ability quite as much as you need probity. Do not choose a manwho has ever taken sides against the liberty of any portion of mankind;nor one whose principles were never known until he found out that hewanted your votes. Be careful not to mistake heat of head for heat ofsoul; because what you want is not heat but force, not violence butsteadfastness. Be careful, too, to separate a man's actions from theaccidents of his life; for one may be the enemy or the victim of atyrant without being the friend of liberty. Do not be carried away by acandidate's solicitations; but at the same time, make allowance for theexisting effervescence of spirits. Prefer those who have decidedopinions to those who are always inventing plans of conciliation; thosewho are zealous for the rights of man to those who only profess pity forthe misfortunes of the people; those who speak of justice and reason, tothose who speak of political interests and of the prosperity ofcommerce. Distrust those who appeal to sentiment in matters that can bedecided by reason; prefer light to eloquence; and pass over those whodeclare themselves ready to die for liberty, in favour of those who knowin what liberty consists. [22]

In another piece he drew up a list of the rights which the nation had aclaim to have recognised, such as the right to make laws, to exactresponsibility from the ministers of the crown, to the protection ofpersonal liberty, and to the legal administration of justice by regularjudges. These rights he declared it to be the first duty of the Assemblyto draw up in a chart that should be the chief corner-stone of the newconstitution. Then he proceeded to define the various tasks to which heconceived that the legislative body should forthwith apply itself; andamong them, be it said, is no mention of any of those projects ofconfiscation which circumstances so speedily forced upon the Assemblywhen it met. [23]

Though many of these precepts designed to guide the electors in theirchoice of men are sagacious and admirable, they smack strongly of thatabsolute and abstract spirit which can never become powerful in politicswithout danger. It is certain that in the spring of '89, Condorcet heldhereditary monarchy to be most suitable to 'the wealth, the population, the extent of France, and to the political system of Europe. '[24] Yetthe reasons which he gives for thinking this are not very cogent, andhe can hardly have felt them to be so. It is significant, however, ofthe little distance which all the most uncompromising and mostthoughtful revolutionists saw in front of them, that even Condorcetshould, so late as the eve of the assembly of the States-General, havetalked about attachment to the forms of monarchy and respect for theroyal person and prerogative; and should have represented the notion ofthe property of the Church undergoing any confiscation, as an inventionof the enemies of freedom. [25] Before the year was out, the property ofthe Church had undergone confiscation; before two years had gone he wasan ardent Republican; and in less than twelve months after that he hadvoted the guilt of the king. 

It is worth while to cite here a still more pointed example of the wantof prevision, so common and so intelligible at that time. Writing inJuly 1791, he confutes those who asserted that an established andlimited monarchy was a safeguard against a usurper, whose power is onlylimited by his own audacity and address, by pointing out that the extentof France, its divisions into departments, the separation between thevarious branches of the administration, the freedom of the press, themultitude of the public prints, were all so many insurmountable barriersagainst a French Cromwell. 'To anybody who has read with attention thehistory of the usurpation of Cromwell, it is clear that a singlenewspaper would have been enough to stop his success. It is clear thatif the people of England had known how to read other books beside theirBible, the hypocritical tyrant, unmasked from his first step, would soonhave ceased to be dangerous. ' Again, is the nation to be cajoled by someambitious general, gratifying its desire to be an empire-race? 'Is thiswhat is asked by true friends of liberty, those who only seek thatreason and right should have empire over men? _What provinces, conqueredby a French general, will he despoil to buy our suffrages? Will hepromise our soldiers, as the consuls promised the citizens of Rome, thepillage of Spain or of Syria?_ No, assuredly; it is because we cannot bean empire-nation that we shall remain a free nation. '[26] How few years, alas, between this conclusive reasoning, and the pillage of Italy, thecampaign in Syria, the seizure of Spain!

Condorcet was not a member of the Assembly in whose formation andcomposition he had taken so vivid and practical an interest. The firstpolitical functions which he was invited to undertake were those of amember of the municipality of Paris. In the tremendous drama of whichthe scenes were now opening, the Town-hall of Paris was to prove itselffar more truly the centre of movement and action than the ConstituentAssembly. The efforts of the Constituent Assembly to build up were tardyand ineffectual. The activity of the municipality of Paris in pullingdown was after a time ceaseless, and it was thoroughly successful. Thefirst mayor was the astronomer Bailly, Condorcet's defeated competitorat the Academy. With the fall of the Bastille, summary hangings at thenearest lantern-post, October insurrection of women, and triumphant andbloody compulsion of king, queen, and Assembly to Paris from Versailles, the two rivals, now colleagues, must have felt that the contests forthem were indeed no longer academic. The astronomy of the one and thegeometry of the other were for ever done with; and Condorcet's longingfor active political life in preference to mere study was gratified tothe very full. 

Unhappily or not, the movement was beyond the control of anybody who, like Condorcet, had no other force than that of disciplined reason andprinciple. The Bastille no sooner fell, than the Revolution set in withoceanic violence, in the face of which patriotic intention andirrefragable arguments, even when both intention and arguments wereloyally revolutionary, were powerless to save the State. In crises ofthis overwhelming kind, power of reasoning does not tell and meregoodwill does not tell. Exaltation reaches a pitch at which the physicalsensibilities are so quickened as to be supreme over the rest of thenature; and in these moods it is the man gifted with the physicalquality, as mysterious and indescribable as it is resistless, of aMarat, to take a bad example, or a Danton, to take a good one, who can'ride the whirlwind and direct the storm. ' Of this quality Condorcethad nothing. His personal presence inspired a decent respect, but nostrong emotion either of fear or admiration or physical sympathy. Hisvoice was feeble, his utterance indistinct; and he never got over thatnervous apprehension which the spectacle of large and turbulent crowdsnaturally rouses in the student. In a revolution after the manner ofLord Somers he would have been invaluable. He thoroughly understood hisown principles, and he was a master of the art, so useful in its placeand time and so respectable in all places and times, of consideringpolitical projects point by point with reference to a definite frameworkof rational ideas. But this was no time for such an art; this was not arevolution to be guided by reason, not even reason like Condorcet's, streaked with jacobinical fibre. The national ideas in which it hadarisen had transformed themselves into tumultuous passion, and from thisinto frenzied action. 

Every politician of real eminence as a reformer possesses one of threeelements. One class of men is inspired by an intellectual attachment tocertain ideas of justice and right reason: another is moved by a deeppity for the hard lot of the mass of every society: while the third, such men as Richelieu for example, have an instinctive appreciation andpassion for wise and orderly government. The great and typical ruler ismoved in varying degrees by all three in modern times, when the claimsof the poor, the rank and file of the social army, have been raised tothe permanent place that belongs to them. Each of the three types hasits own peculiar conditions of success, and there are circumstances inwhich some one of the three is more able to grapple with the obstaclesto order than either of the other two. It soon became very clear thatthe intellectual quality was not the element likely to quell the tempestthat had arisen now. 

Let it be said, however, that Condorcet showed himself no pedantic norfastidious trifler with the tremendous movement which he had contributedto set afoot. The same practical spirit which drove him into the strife, guided him in the midst of it. He never wrung his hands, nor wept, norbewailed the unreason of the multitudes to whom in vain he preachedreason. Unlike the typical man of letters--for he was without vanity--hedid not abandon the cause of the Revolution because his suggestions wereoften repulsed. 'It would be better, ' he said to the Girondins, 'if youcared less for personal matters and attended only to public interests. 'Years ago, in his _éloge_ on L'Hôpital, he had praised the famousChancellor for incurring the hostility of both of the two envenomedfactions, the League and the Huguenots, and for disregarding theapprobation or disapprobation of the people. 'What operation, ' he asked, 'capable of producing any durable good, can be understood by the people?How should they know to what extent good is possible? How judge of themeans of producing it? It must ever be easier for a charlatan to misleadthe people, than for a man of genius to save it. '[27] Remembering thislaw, he never lost patience. He was cool and intrepid, if hisintrepidity was of the logical sort rather than physical; and he wassteadfast to one or two simple aims, if he was on some occasions toorapid in changing his attitude as to special measures. He was neverafraid of the spectre, as the incompetent revolutionist is. On thecontrary, he understood its whole internal history; he knew what hadraised it, what passion and what weakness gave to it substance, and heknew that presently reason would banish it and restore men to a rightmind. The scientific spirit implanted in such a character asCondorcet's, and made robust by social meditation, builds up animpregnable fortitude in the face of incessant rebuffs anddiscouragements. Let us then picture Condorcet as surveying the terrificwelter from the summer of 1789 to the summer of 1793, from the taking ofthe Bastille to the fall of the Girondins, with something of thefirmness and self-possession of a Roman Cato. 

After the flight of the king in June, and his return in what wasvirtually captivity to Paris, Condorcet was one of the party, very smallin numbers and entirely discountenanced by public opinion, then passingthrough the monarchical and constitutional stage, who boldly gave up theidea of a monarchy and proclaimed the idea of a republic. In July (1791)he published a piece strongly arguing for a negative answer to thequestion whether a king is necessary for the preservation ofliberty. [28] In one sense, this composition is favourable to Condorcet'sforesight; it was not every one who saw with him that the destruction ofthe monarchy was inevitable after the royal flight. This want ofpreparation in the public mind for every great change as it came, is oneof the most striking circumstances of the Revolution, and it explainsthe violent, confused, and inadequate manner in which nearly every oneof these changes was made. It was proposed at that time to appointCondorcet to be governor to the young dauphin. But Condorcet in thispiece took such pains to make his sentiments upon royalty known, that inthe constitutional frame of mind in which the Assembly then was, theidea had to be abandoned. It was hardly likely that a man should bechosen for such an office, who had just declared the public will to be'that the uselessness of a king, the needfulness of seeking means ofdisplacing a power founded on illusions, should be one of the firsttruths offered to his reason; the obligation of concurring in thishimself, one of the first of his moral duties; and the desire not to befreed from the yoke of law by an insulting inviolability, the firstsentiment of his heart. People are well aware that at this moment theobject is much less how to mould a king, than to teach him not to wishto be one. '[29] As all France was then bent on the new constitution, aking included, Condorcet's republican assurance was hardly warranted, and it was by no means well received. 

FOOTNOTES:

[13] _Œuv. _ i. 71. 

[14] _Ib. _ i. 73, 74. 

[15] _Œuv. _ i. 296. 

[16] _Ib. _ i. 78. 

[17] _Œuv. _ i. 89. Condorcet had 16 votes, and Bailly 15. '_Jamaisaucune élection_, ' says La Harpe, who was all for Buffon, '_n'avaitoffert ni ce nombre ni ce partage_. '--_Philos. Du 18ième Siècle_, i. 77. A full account of the election, and of Condorcet's reception, in Grimm's_Corr. Lit. _ xi. 50-56. 

[18] _Œuv. _ iii. 109, 110. 

[19] His wife, said to be one of the most beautiful women of her time, was twenty-three years younger than himself, and survived until 1822. Cabanis married another sister, and Marshal Grouchy was her brother. Madame Condorcet wrote nothing of her own, except some notes to atranslation which she made of Adam Smith's _Theory of Moral Sentiments_. 

[20] Montesquieu, Raynal, and one or two other writers, had attackedslavery long before, and Condorcet published a very effective pieceagainst it in 1781 (_Réflexions sur l'Esclavage des Nègres_; _Œuv. _vii. 63), with an epistle dedicated to the enslaved blacks. About thesame time an Abolition Society was formed in France, following theexample set in England. 

[21] _Au Corps Electoral, contre l'Esclavage des Noirs. _ 3 Fév. 1789. _Sur l'Admission des Députés des Planteurs de Saint Domingue. _ 1789. Ix. 469-485. 

[22] _Lettres d'un Gentilhomme aux Messieurs du Tiers Etat_, ix. 255-259. 

[23] _Réflexions sur les Pouvoirs et Instructions à donner par lesProvinces à leurs Députés aux Etats-Généraux_, ix. 263, 283. 

[24] _Ib. _ ix. 266. 

[25] _Réflexions sur les Pouvoirs et Instructions à donner par lesProvinces à leurs Députés aux Etats-Généraux_, ix. 264. 

[26] _Réflexions sur les Pouvoirs et Instructions à donner par lesProvinces à leurs Députés aux Etats-Généraux_, xii. 228, 229, 234. 

[27] _Œuv. _ iii. 533. As this was written in 1777, Condorcet wasperhaps thinking of Turgot and Necker. Of the latter, his daughter tellsus repeatedly, without any consciousness that she is recording a mostignominious trait, that public approbation was the very breath of hisnostrils, the thing for which he lived, the thing without which he waswretched. --See vol. I. Of _Madame de Staël's Considerations_. 

[28] _Œuv. _ iii. 227. It was followed by a letter, nominally by a youngmechanic, offering to construct an automaton sovereign, like Kempel'schess-player, who would answer all constitutional purposesperfectly. --_Ib. _ 239-241. 

[29] _Œuv. _ xii. 236. 

III. 

When the Constitution was accepted and the Legislative Assembly came tobe chosen, Condorcet proved to have made so good an impression as amunicipal officer, that the Parisians returned him for one of theirdeputies. The Declaration of Pilnitz in August 1791 had mitigated theloyalty that had even withstood the trial of the king's flight. When theLegislative Assembly met, it was found to contain an unmistakableelement of republicanism of marked strength. Condorcet was chosen one ofthe secretaries, and he composed most of those multitudinous addressesin which this most unfortunate and least honoured of all parliamentarychambers tried to prove to the French people that it was actually inexistence and at work. Condorcet was officially to the Legislative whatBarère afterwards was to the Convention. But his addresses are turgid, labouring, and not effective for their purpose. They have neither thehard force of Napoleon's proclamations, nor the flowery eloquence ofthe Anacreon of the Guillotine. To compose such pieces well under suchcircumstances as those of the Assembly, a man must have much imaginationand perhaps a slightly elastic conscience. Condorcet had neither one northe other, but only reason--a hard anvil, out of which he laboriouslystruck flashes and single sounds. 

Perhaps, after all, nobody else could have done better. The situation ofthe Assembly, between a hostile court and a suspicious and distrustfulnation, and unable by its very nature to break the bonds, was from thebeginning desperate. In December 1791 the Legislative through itssecretary informs France of the frankness and loyalty of the king'smeasures in the face of the menaces of foreign war. [30] Within eightmonths, when the king's person was in captivity and his power suspended, the same secretary has to avow that from the very beginning the king hadtreated the Assembly with dissimulation, and had been in virtual leaguewith the national enemies. The documents issued by the Assembly afterthe violent events of the Tenth of August 1792 are not edifying, andimply in Condorcet, who composed them, a certain want of eye forrevolutionary methods. They mark the beginning of that short but mostmomentous period in the history of the Revolution, when formulas, as Mr. Carlyle says, had to be stretched out until they cracked--a processtruly called, 'especially in times of swift change, one of thesorrowfullest tasks poor humanity has. ' You might read the _Expositionof the Motives from which the National Assembly have proclaimed theConvention, and suspended the Executive Power of the King_, [31] withoutdreaming that it is an account of a revolution which arose out ofdistrust or contempt for the Assembly, which had driven the king awayfrom his palace and from power, and which had finally annihilated thevery chamber that was thus professing to expound its motives for doingwhat the violence of Paris had really done in defiance of it. The power, in fact, was all outside the chamber, in Danton and the Commune. Undersuch circumstance it is of no interest to men to learn that 'in themidst of these disasters the National Assembly, afflicted but calm, tookits oath to maintain equality and liberty, or to die at its post; tookthe oath to save France, and looked about for means. '[32] Still moreimpotent and hollow, because still more pompous, is the address of sixdays later. [33] A few days after this, occurred the massacres ofprisoners in September--scenes very nearly, if not quite, as bloody andiniquitous as those which attended the suppression of the rebellion inIreland six years afterwards by English troops. 

When the Convention was chosen, the electors of Paris rejectedCondorcet. He was elected, however (Sept. 6), for the department of theAisne, having among his colleagues in the deputation Tom Paine, and--amuch more important personage--the youthful Saint-Just, who was so soonto stupefy the Convention by exclaiming, with mellow voice and face setimmovable as bronze: 'An individual has no right to be either virtuousor celebrated in your eyes. A free people and a national assembly arenot made to admire anybody. ' The electors of the department of the Aisnehad unconsciously sent two typical revolutionists: the man ofintellectual ideas, and the man of passion heated as in the pit. Intheir persons the Encyclopædia and the Guillotine met. Condorcet, whohad been extreme in the Legislative, but found himself a moderate in theConvention, gave wise counsel as to the true policy towards the newmembers: 'Better try to moderate them than quarrel. ' But in this case, not even in their ruin, were fire and water reconciled. 

On the first great question that the Convention had to decide--the fateof the king--Condorcet voted on the two main issues very much as a wiseman would have voted, knowing the event as we know it. He voted that theking was guilty of conspiring against liberty, and he voted for thepunishment of exile in preference to that of death. On the intermediateissue, whether the decision of the Convention should be final, or shouldbe submitted to the people for ratification, he voted as a wise manshould not have done, in favour of an appeal to the people. Such anappeal must inevitably have led to violent and bloody local struggles, and laid France open to the enemy. It is a striking circumstance that, though Condorcet thus voted that the king was guilty, he had previouslylaid before the Convention a most careful argument to show that theywere neither morally nor legally competent to try the king at all. How, he asked, without violating every principle of jurisprudence, can youact at the same time as legislators constituting the crime, as accusers, and as judges? His proposal was that Lewis XVI. Should be tried by atribunal whose jury and judges should be named by the electoral body ofthe departments. [34] With true respect for Condorcet's honourableanxiety that the conditions of justice should be rigorouslyobserved--for, as he well said, 'there is no liberty in a country wherepositive law is not the single rule of judicial proceedings'--it isdifficult to see why the Convention, coming as it did fresh from theelectoral bodies, who must have had the question what was to be donewith the imprisoned king foremost in their minds, why the members of theConvention should not form as legitimate a tribunal as any body whosecomposition and authority they had themselves defined and created, andwhich would be chosen by the very same persons who less than a monthbefore had invested them with their own offices. Reading this mostscrupulous and juristic composition, we might believe the writer to haveforgotten that France lay mad and frenzied outside the hall where hestood, and that in political action the question what is possible is atleast as important as what is compatible with the maxims of scientificjurisprudence. It was to Condorcet's honour as a jurisconsult that heshould have had so many scruples; it is as much to his credit as apolitician that he laid them aside and tried the king after all. 

It is highly characteristic of Condorcet's tenacity of his own view ofthe Revolution and of its methods, that on the Saturday (January 19, 1793) when the king's fate was decided against Condorcet's convictionand against his vote--the execution taking place on the Mondaymorning--he should have appealed to the Convention, at all events to dotheir best to neutralise the effect of their verdict upon Europe, byinstantly initiating a series of humane reforms in the law among them, including the abolition of the punishment of death. 'The Englishministers, ' he cried, 'are now seeking to excite that nation against us. Do you suppose that they will venture to continue their calumniousdeclamations, when you can say to them: "We have abolished the penaltyof death, while you still preserve it for the theft of a few shillings?You hand over debtors to the greed or spite of their creditors; ourlaws, wiser and more humane, know how to respect poverty and misfortune. Judge between us and you, and see to which of the two peoples thereproach of inhumanity may be addressed with most justice. "'[35] Thiswas the eve of the Terror. Well may Comte distinguish Condorcet as theone philosopher who pursued in the midst of the tempest his regeneratingmeditations. 

But let us banish the notion that the history of the Convention is onlythe history of the guillotine. No chamber in the whole annals ofgoverning assemblies ever displayed so much alertness, energy, andcapacity, in the face of difficulties that might well have crushed them. Besides their efforts, justly held incomparable, to hurl back the enemyfrom the frontiers, they at once in the spirit of Condorcet's speech, made at so strange a season, set vigorously about the not less nobletask of legal reforms and political reorganisation. The unrivalledingenuity and fertility of the French character in all the arts ofcompact and geometric construction never showed itself so supreme. Thecivil code was drawn up in a month. [36] Constitutions abounded. Cynicalhistorians laugh at the eagerness of the nation, during the months thatfollowed the deposition of the king, to have a constitution; and, so faras they believed or hoped that a constitution would remedy all ills, their faith was assuredly not according to knowledge. It shows, however, the fundamental and seemingly ineradicable respect for authority whichtheir history has engendered in the French, that even in this, theirmost chaotic hour, they craved order and its symbols. 

Condorcet, along with Tom Paine, Sièyes, and others, was a member ofthe first committee for framing a constitution. They labouredassiduously from September to February 1793, when the project was laidupon the table, prefaced by an elaborate dissertation of Condorcet'scomposition. [37] The time was inauspicious. The animosities between theGirondins and the Mountain were becoming every day more furious anddeadly. In the midst of this appalling storm of rage and hate andterror, Condorcet--at one moment wounding the Girondins by reproachesagainst their egotism and personalities, at another exasperating theMountain by declaring of Robespierre that he had neither an idea in hishead nor a feeling in his heart--still pertinaciously kept crying outfor the acceptance of his constitution. It was of no avail. Therevolution of the second of June came, and swept the Girondins out ofthe Chamber. Condorcet was not among them, but his political days werenumbered. 'What did you do all that time?' somebody once asked of amember of the Convention, during the period which was now beginning andwhich lasted until Thermidor in 1794. 'I lived, ' was the reply. Condorcet was of another temper. He cared as little for his life asDanton or Saint-Just cared for theirs. Instead of cowering down amongthe men of the Plain or the frogs of the Marsh, he withstood theMountain to the face. 

Hérault de Séchelles, at the head of another committee, brought in a newconstitution which was finally adopted and decreed (June 24, 1793). Ofthis, Sièyes said privately, that it was 'a bad table of contents. 'Condorcet denounced it publicly, and, with a courage hardly excelled, hedeclared in so many words that the arrest of the Girondins had destroyedthe integrity of the national representation. The Bill he handled with aseverity that inflicted the keenest smarts on the self-love of itsdesigners. A few days later, the Capucin Chabot, one of those weak andexcitable natures that in ordinary times divert men by the intensity, multiplicity, and brevity of their enthusiasms, but to whom the fiercerair of such an event as the Revolution is a real poison, rose and in thename of the Committee of General Security called the attention of theChamber to what he styled a sequel of the Girondist Brissot. This was nomore nor less than Condorcet's document criticising the newconstitution. 'This man, ' said Chabot, 'has sought to raise thedepartment of the Aisne against you, imagining that, because he hashappened to sit by the side of a handful of _savants_ of the Academy, it is his duty to give laws to the French Republic. '[38] So a decreewas passed putting Condorcet under arrest. His name was included in thelist of those who were tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal on theThird of October for conspiring against the unity and indivisibility ofthe Republic. He was condemned in his absence, and declared to be _horsla loi_. 

This, then, was the calamitous close of his aspirations from boyhoodupwards to be permitted to partake in doing something for the commonweal. He had still the work to perform by which posterity will bestremember his name, though only a few months intervened between hisflight and his most cruel end. When the decree against him was enactedhe fled. Friends found a refuge for him in the house of a Madame Vernet, a widow in moderate circumstances, who let lodgings to students, and oneof those beneficent characters that show us how high humanity can reach. 'Is he an honest and virtuous man?' she asked; 'in that case let himcome, and lose not a moment. Even while we talk he may be seized. ' Thesame night Condorcet intrusted his life to her keeping, and for ninemonths he remained in hiding under her roof. When he heard of theexecution of the Girondins condemned on the same day with himself, heperceived the risk to which he was subjecting his protectress, and madeup his mind to flee. 'I am an outlaw, ' he said, 'and if I am discoveredyou will be dragged to the same death. ' 'The Convention, ' Madame Vernetanswered, with something of the heroism of more notable women of thattime, 'may put you out of the law; it has not the power to put you outof humanity. You stay. ' This was no speech of the theatre. The wholehousehold kept the most vigorous watch over the prisoner thus generouslydetained, and for many months Madame Vernet's humane firmness wassuccessful in preventing his escape. This time--his soul grievouslyburdened by anxiety as to the fate of his wife and child, and by arestless eagerness not to compromise his benefactress, a bloody deathstaring him every moment in the face--Condorcet spent in thecomposition, without the aid of a single book, of his memorable work onthe progress of the human mind. Among the many wonders of an epoch ofportents, this feat of intellectual abstraction is not the leastamazing. 

When his task was accomplished, Condorcet felt with more keenness thanever the deadly peril in which his presence placed Madame Vernet. He wasaware that to leave her house was to seek death, but he did not fear. Hedrew up a paper of directions to be given one day to his littledaughter, when she should be of years to understand and follow them. They are written with minute care, and though tender and solicitous, they show perfect composure. His daughter is above all things to banishfrom her mind every revengeful sentiment against her father's enemies;to distrust her filial sensibility, and to make this sacrifice for herfather's own sake. This done, he marched downstairs, and having by anartful stratagem thrown Madame Vernet off her guard, he went out at teno'clock in the morning imperfectly disguised into the street. This wasthe fifth of April 1794. By three in the afternoon, exhausted by fatiguewhich his strict confinement for nine months made excessive, he reachedthe house of a friend in the country, and prayed for a night's shelter. His presence excited less pity than alarm. The people gave himrefreshment, and he borrowed a little pocket copy of Horace, with whichhe went forth into the loneliness of the night. He promised himselfshelter amid the stone quarries of Clamart. What he suffered during thisnight, the whole day of the sixth of April, the night, and again thenext day, there is no one to tell. 

The door of the house in the Rue Servandoni was left on the latch nightand day for a whole week. But Madame Vernet's generous hope was in vain;while she still hoped and watched, the end had come. On the evening ofthe seventh, Condorcet, with one of his legs torn or broken, hisgarments in rags, with visage gaunt and hunger-stricken, entered an innin the hamlet of Clamart, and called for an omelette. Asked how manyeggs he would have in it, the famishing man answered a dozen. Carpenters, for such he had given himself to be, do not have a dozeneggs in their omelettes. Suspicion was aroused, his hands were not thehands of a workman, and he had no papers to show, but only the pocketHorace. The villagers seized him and hastened to drag him, bound handand foot, to Bourg-la-Reine, then called for a season Bourg-l'Égalité. On the road he fainted, and they set him on a horse offered by a pityingwayfarer. When they reached the prison, Condorcet, starving, bleeding, way-worn, was flung into his cell. On the morrow, when the gaolers cameto seek him, they found him stretched upon the ground, dead and stark. So he perished--of hunger and weariness, say some; of poison evercarried by him in a ring, say others. [39] So, to the last revolvingsupreme cares, this high spirit was overtaken by annihilation. Hismemory is left to us, the fruit of his ideas, and the impression of hischaracter. 

 * * * * *

An eminent man, who escaped by one accident from the hatchets of theSeptembriseurs, and by another from the guillotine of the Terror, whilein hiding and in momentary expectation of capture and death, wrote thusin condemnation of suicide, 'the one crime which leaves no possibilityof return to virtue. ' 'Even at this incomprehensible moment'--the springof 1793--'when morality, enlightenment, energetic love of country, onlyrender death at the prison-wicket or on the scaffold more inevitable;when it might be allowable to choose among the ways of leaving a lifethat can no longer be preserved, and to rob tigers in human form of theaccursed pleasure of dragging you forth and drinking your blood; yes, onthe fatal tumbril itself, with nothing free but voice, I could stillcry, _Take care_, to a child that should come too near the wheel:perhaps he may owe his life to me, perhaps the country shall one day oweits salvation to him. '[40]

More than one career in those days, famous or obscure, was marked bythis noble tenacity to lofty public ideas even in the final moments ofexistence. Its general acceptance as a binding duty, exorcising themournful and insignificant egotisms that haunt and wearily fret and makewaste the remnants of so many lives, will produce the profoundest of allpossible improvements in men's knowledge of the sublime art of thehappiness of their kind. The closing words of Condorcet's lastcomposition show the solace which perseverance in taking thought formankind brought to him in the depths of personal calamity. He hadconcluded his survey of the past history of the race, and had drawn whatseemed in his eyes a moderate and reasonable picture of its future. 'Howthis picture, ' he exclaims, with the knell of his own doom sounding fullin the ear while he wrote, 'this picture of the human race freed fromall its fetters, withdrawn from the empire of chance, as from that ofthe enemies of progress, and walking with firm and assured step in theway of truth, of virtue, and happiness, presents to the philosopher asight that consoles him for the errors, the crimes, the injustice, withwhich the earth is yet stained, and of which he is not seldom thevictim! It is in the contemplation of this picture that he receives thereward of his efforts for the progress of reason, for the defence ofliberty. He ventures to link them with the eternal chain of thedestinies of man: it is there that he finds the true recompense ofvirtue, the pleasure of having done a lasting good. Fate can no longerundo it by any disastrous compensation that shall restore prejudice andbondage. This contemplation is for him a refuge, into which therecollection of his persecutors can never follow him; in which, livingin thought with man reinstated in the rights and the dignity of hisnature, he forgets man tormented and corrupted by greed, by base fear, by envy; it is here that he truly abides with his fellows, in an elysiumthat his reason has known how to create for itself, and that his lovefor humanity adorns with all purest delights. '[41]

It has long been the fashion among the followers of that reaction whichColeridge led and Carlyle has spread and popularised, to dwellexclusively on the coldness and hardness, the excess of scepticism andthe defect of enthusiasm, that are supposed to have characterised theeighteenth century. Because the official religion of the century both inEngland and France was lifeless and mechanical, it has been taken forgranted that the level of thought and feeling was a low one universally;as if the highest moods of every era necessarily clothed themselves inreligious forms. The truth is that, working in such natures asCondorcet's, the principles of the eighteenth century, its homage toreason and rational methods, its exaltation of the happiness of men, notexcluding their material wellbeing, into the highest place, its passionfor justice and law, its large illumination, all engendered a fervour astruly religious as that of Catholicism or of Calvinism at their best, while its sentiment was infinitely less interested and personal. Thepassage just quoted is as little mechanical, as little material, as themost rapturous ejaculations of the Christian saints and confessors. Readin connection with the circumstances of its composition, it may showthat the eighteenth century was able at any rate to inspire its sonswith a faith that could rob death of its sting and the grave of itsvictory, as effectually as if it had rested on a mystery instead of onreason, and been supported by the sanctions of eternal pain and eternalbliss, instead of moving from a confident devotion to humanity. 

FOOTNOTES:

[30] _Déclaration de l'Assemblée Nationale_, 29 Déc. 1791. _Œuv. _ xii. 25. 

[31] 13th August 1792. _Œuv. _ x. 547. 

[32] _Ib. _ x. 560. 

[33] 19th August. _Ib. _ x. 565. 

[34] _Opinion sur le Jugement de Louis XVI. _ Nov. 1792 _Œuv. _ xii. 267-303. 

[35] 19th Jan. 1793. _Œuv. _ xii. 311. 

[36] See M. Edgar Quinet's remarks on this achievement. _La Révolution_, ii. 110. 

[37] _Œuv. _ xii. 333, 417. M. Louis Blanc has contrasted the principleslaid down as the basis of this project with Robespierre's rivalDeclaration of the Rights of Man, printing the two side by side inparallel columns. '_Les voilà donc face à face, après leur communevictoire sur le principe d'autorité, ces deux principes d'individualismeet de fraternité, entre lesquels, aujourd'hui même, le monde balance, invinciblement ému! D'un côté la philosophie du rationalisme pur, quidivise; d'un autre côté la philosophie du sentiment, qui rapproche etréunit. Ici Voltaire et Condorcet, là J. J. Rousseau et Robespierre. _'_Hist. De la Révol. Fran. _ bk. Ix. Ch. V. 

[38] _Extrait du Moniteur. _ _Œuv. _ xii. 677. 

[39] The Abbé Morellet, in his narrative of the death of Condorcet(_Mémoires_, c. Xxiv. ), says that he died of poison, a mixture ofstramonium and opium. He adds that the surgeon described death as due toapoplexy. See Musset-Pathay's _J. J. Rousseau_, ii. 42. 

[40] Dupont de Nemours. _Les Physiocrates_, i. 326. 

[41] _Progrès de l'Esprit Humain. _ _Œuv. _ vi. 276. 

IV. 

The shape of Condorcet's ideas upon history arose from the twofoldnecessity which his character imposed upon him, at once of appeasing hisaspirations on behalf of mankind, and of satisfying a disciplined andscientific intelligence. He was of too robust an understanding to findadequate gratification in the artificial construction of hypotheticalutopias. Conviction was as indispensable as hope; and distinct groundsfor the faith that was in him, as essential as the faith itself. Theresult of this fact of mental constitution, the intellectual conditionsof the time being what they were, was the rise in his mind of the greatand central conception of there being a law in the succession of socialstates, to be ascertained by an examination of the collective phenomenaof past history. The merit of this admirable effort, and of the work inwhich it found expression, is very easily underrated, because the effortwas insufficient and merely preparatory, while modern thought hasalready carried us far beyond it, and at least into sight of the morecomplete truths to which this effort only pointed the way. Let usremember, however, that it did point the way distinctly andunmistakably. A very brief survey of the state of history as a subjectof systematic study enables us to appreciate with precision what serviceit was that Condorcet rendered; for it carries us back from the presentcomparatively advanced condition of the science of society to a timebefore his memorable attempt, when conceptions now become so familiarwere not in existence, and when even the most instructed students ofhuman affairs no more felt the need of a scientific theory of the mannerin which social effects follow social causes, than the least instructedportion of the literary public feels such a need in our own time. It isdifficult after a subject has been separated from the nebulous mass ofunclassified knowledge, after it has taken independent shape, and begunto move in lines of its own, to realise the process by which all thiswas effected, or the way in which before all this the facts concernedpresented themselves to the thinker's mind. That we should overcome thedifficulty is one of the conditions of our being able to do justice tothe great army of the precursors. 

Two movements of thought went on in France during the middle of theeighteenth century, which have been comparatively little dwelt upon byhistorians; their main anxiety has been to justify the foregoneconclusion, so gratifying alike to the partisans of the social reactionand to the disciples of modern transcendentalism in its many disguises, that the eighteenth century was almost exclusively negative, critical, and destructive. Each of these two currents was positive in the highestdegree, and their influence undeniably constructive, if we consider thatit was from their union into a common channel, a work fully accomplishedfirst in the mind of Condorcet, that the notion of the scientifictreatment of history and society took its earliest start. 

The first of the two movements, and that which has been mostunaccountably neglected, consisted in the remarkable attempts of Quesnayand his immediate followers to withdraw the organisation of society fromthe sphere of empiricism, and to substitute for the vulgar conceptionof arbitrary and artificial institutions as the sole foundation of thisorganisation, the idea that there is a certain Natural Order, conformityto which in all social arrangements is the essential condition of theirbeing advantageous to the members of the social union. Natural Order inthe minds of this school was no metaphysical figment evolved fromuninstructed consciousness, but a set of circumstances to be discoveredby continuous and methodical observation. It consisted of physical lawand moral law. Physical law is the regulated course of every physicalcircumstance in the order evidently most advantageous to the human race. Moral law is the rule of every human action in the moral order, conformed to the physical order evidently most advantageous to the humanrace. This order is the base of the most perfect government, and thefundamental rule of all positive laws; for positive laws are only suchlaws as are required to keep up and maintain the natural order that isevidently most advantageous to the race. [42]

Towards the close of the reign of Lewis XIV. The frightfulimpoverishment of the realm attracted the attention of one or twoenlightened observers, and among them of Boisguillebert and Vauban. Theyhad exposed, the former of them with especial force and amplitude, theabsurdity of the general system of administration, which seemed to havebeen devised for the express purpose of paralysing both agriculture andcommerce, and exhausting all the sources of the national wealth. [43]But these speculations had been mainly of a fiscal kind, and pointed notmuch further than to a readjustment of taxation and an improvement inthe modes of its collection. The disciples of the New Science, as it wascalled, the Physiocrats, or believers in the supremacy of Natural Order, went much beyond this, and in theory sought to lay open the whole groundof the fabric of society. Practically they dealt with scarcely any butthe economic circumstances of societies, though some of them mix up withtheir reasonings upon commerce and agriculture crude and incompletehints upon forms of government and other questions that belong not tothe economical but to the political side of social science. [44]Quesnay's famous _Maxims_ open with a declaration in favour of the unityof the sovereign authority, and against the system of counterbalancingforces in government. Almost immediately he passes on to the ground ofpolitical economy, and elaborates the conditions of material prosperityin an agricultural realm. With the correctness of the definitions andprinciples of economic science as laid down by these writers, we havehere nothing to do. Their peculiar distinction in the present connectionis the grasp which they had of the principle of there being a natural, and therefore a scientific, order in the conditions of a society; thatorder being natural in the sense that they attached to the term, whichfrom the circumstances of the case is most beneficial to the race. Fromthis point of view they approach some of the problems of what is nowclassified as social statics; and they assume, without any consciousnessof another aspect being possible, that the society which they arediscussing is in a state of equilibrium. 

It is evident that with this restriction of the speculative horizon, they were and must remain wholly unable to emerge into the full light ofthe completely constituted science of society, with laws of movement aswell as laws of equilibrium, with definite methods of interpreting pastand predicting future states. They could account for and describe thegenesis of the social union, as Plato and Aristotle had in differentways been able to do many centuries before; and they could prescribesome of the conditions of its being maintained in vigour andcompactness. Some of them could even see in a vague way theinterdependence of peoples and the community of the real interests ofdifferent nations, each nation, as De la Rivière expressed it, beingonly a province of the vast kingdom of nature, a branch from the sametrunk as the rest. [45] What they could not see was the great fact ofsocial evolution; and here too, in the succession of social states, there has been a natural and observable order. In a word, they tried tounderstand society without the aid of history. Consequently they laiddown the truths which they discovered as absolute and fixed, when theywere no more than conditional and relative. 

Fortunately inquirers in another field had set a movement afoot, whichwas destined to furnish the supplement of their own speculation. Thiswas the remarkable development of the conception of history, whichMontesquieu's two memorable books first made conspicuous. Bossuet'swell-known discourse on universal history, teeming as it does withreligious prejudice, just as Condorcet's sketch teems with prejudiceagainst religion, and egregiously imperfect in execution as it must bepronounced when judged from even the meanest historical standard, hadperhaps partially introduced the spirit of Universality, as Comte says, into the study of history. But it was impossible from the nature of thecase for any theologian to know fully what this spirit means; and it wasnot until the very middle of the following century that any effectiveapproach was made to that universality which Bossuet did little morethan talk about. Then it came not from theology, but from the much morehopeful sources of a rational philosophy. Before Montesquieu no singlestone of the foundation of scientific history can be said to have beenlaid. Of course, far earlier writers had sought after the circumstanceswhich brought about a given transaction. Thucydides, for example, hadattributed the cause of the Peloponnesian war to the alarm of theLacedæmonians at the greatness of the power of Athens. [46] It is thissense of the need of explanation, however rudimentary it may be, whichdistinguishes the great historian from the chronicler, even from a verysuperior chronicler like Livy, who in his account of even so great anevent as the Second Punic War plunges straightway into narrative of whathappened, without concerning himself why it happened. Tacitus had begunhis _Histories_ with remarks upon the condition of Rome, the feeling ofthe various armies, the attitude of the provinces, so that, as he says, '_non modo casus eventusque rerum, qui plerumque fortuiti sunt, sedratio etiam causæque noscantur_. '[47] But these and the like instancesin historical literature were only political explanations, more or lessadequate, of particular transactions; they were no more than thesagacious remarks of men with statesmanlike minds, upon the origin ofsome single set of circumstances. 

The rise from this to the high degree of generality which marks thespeculations of Montesquieu, empirical as they are, was as great as therise from the mere maxims of worldly wisdom to the widest principles ofethical philosophy. Polybius, indeed, in the remarkable chapters withwhich his _Histories_ open, uses expressions that are so modern asalmost to startle us. 'People who study history, ' he says, 'in separateand detached portions, without reference to one another, and supposethat from them they acquire a knowledge of the whole, are like a manwho in looking on the severed members of what had once been an animatedand comely creature, should think that this was enough to give him anidea of its beauty and force when alive. The empire of Rome was what byits extent in Italy, Africa, Asia, Greece, brought history into thecondition of being organic (σωματοειδής {sômatoeidês}). ' His object wasto examine the general and collective ordering of events; when it cameinto existence; whence it had its source; how it had this specialcompletion and fulfilment--the universal empire of Rome. [48] Striking asthis is, and admirable as it is, there is not in it any real trace ofthe abstract conception of social history. Polybius recognises the unityof history, so far as that could be understood in the second centurybefore Christ, but he treats his subject in the concrete, describing thechain of events, but not attempting to seek their law. It wasMontesquieu who first applied the comparative method to socialinstitutions; who first considered physical conditions in connectionwith the laws of a country; who first perceived and illustrated how thatnatural order which the Physiocrats only considered in relation to thephenomena of wealth and its production, really extended over itspolitical phenomena as well; who first set the example of viewing agreat number of social facts all over the world in groups and classes;and who first definitely and systematically inquired into the causes ofa set of complex historical events and institutions, as being bothdiscoverable and intelligible. This was a very marked advance upon bothof the ideas, by one or other of which men had previously been contentto explain to themselves the course of circumstances in the world;either the inscrutable decrees of an inhuman providence, or thefortuitous vagaries of an eyeless destiny. 

It was Turgot, however, who completed the historical conception ofMontesquieu, in a piece written in 1750, two years after the appearanceof the _Esprit des Lois_, and in one or two other fragmentarycompositions of about the same time, which are not the less remarkablebecause the writer was only twenty-three years old when these advancedideas presented themselves to his intelligence. Vico in Italy hadinsisted on the doctrine that the course of human affairs is in a cycle, and that they move in a constant and self-repeating orbit. [49] Turgot, on the contrary, with more wisdom, at the opening of his subject iscareful to distinguish the ever-varying spectacle of the succession ofmen from generation to generation, from the circle of identicalrevolutions in which the phenomena of nature are enclosed. In the onecase time only restores at each instant the image of what it has justcaused to disappear; in the other, the reason and the passions are everincessantly producing new events. 'All the ages are linked together bya succession of causes and effects which bind the state of the world toall the states that have gone before. The multiplied signs of speech andwriting, in supplying men with the means of an assured possession oftheir thoughts and of communicating them to one another, have formed acommon treasure that one generation transmits to another, as aninheritance constantly augmented by the discoveries of each generation;and the human race, looked at from its origin, appears in the eyes ofthe philosopher one immense whole, which, just as in the case of eachindividual, has its infancy and its growth. '[50]

Pascal and others in ancient and modern times[51] had compared in casualand unfruitful remarks the history of the race to the history of theindividual, but Turgot was able in some sort to see the full meaning andextent of the analogy, as well as the limitations proper to it, and todraw from it some of the larger principles which the idea involved. Thefirst proposition in the passage just quoted, that a chain of causes andeffects unites each age with every other age that has gone before, isone of the most memorable sentences in the history of thought. AndTurgot not only saw that there is a relation of cause and effect betweensuccessive states of society; he had glimpses into some of theconditions of that relation. To a generation that stands on loftierheights his attempts seem rudimentary and strangely simple, but it wasthese attempts which cut the steps for our ascent. How is it, he asked, for instance, that the succession of social states is not uniform? thatthey follow with unequal step along the track marked out for them? Hefound the answer in the inequality of natural advantages, and he wasable to discern the necessity of including in these advantages thepresence, apparently accidental, in some communities and not in othersof men of especial genius or capacity in some important direction. [52]Again, he saw that just as in one way natural advantages accelerate theprogress of a society, in another natural obstacles also accelerate it, by stimulating men to the efforts necessary to overcome them: _le besoinperfectionne l'instrument_. [53] The importance of following the march ofthe human mind over all the grooves along which it travels to furtherknowledge, was fully present to him, and he dwells repeatedly on theconstant play going on between discoveries in one science and those inanother. In no writer is there a fuller and more distinct sense of theessential unity and integrity of the history of mankind, nor of themultitude of the mansions into which this vast house is divided, and themany keys which he must possess that would open and enter in. 

Even in empirical explanations Turgot shows a breadth and accuracy ofvision truly surprising, considering his own youth and what we mayventure to call the youth of his subject. The reader will be able toappreciate this, and to discern at the same time the arbitrary nature ofMontesquieu's method, if he will contrast, for example, the remarks ofthis writer upon polygamy with the far wider and more sagaciousexplanation of the circumstances of such an institution given byTurgot. [54] Unfortunately, he has left us only short and fragmentarypieces, but they suggest more than many large and complete works. Thatthey had a very powerful and direct influence upon Condorcet there is nodoubt, as well from the similarity of general conception between him andTurgot, as from the nearly perfect identity of leading passages in theirwritings. Let us add that in Turgot's fragments we have what isunhappily not a characteristic of Condorcet, the peculiar satisfactionand delight in scientific history of a style which states a fact in suchphrases as serve also to reveal its origin, bearings, significance, inwhich every successive piece of description is so worded as to beself-evidently a link in the chain of explanation, an ordered term in aseries of social conditions. 

Before returning to Condorcet we ought to glance at the remarkablepiece, written in 1784, in which Kant propounded his idea of auniversal or cosmo-political history, which contemplating the agency ofthe human will upon a large scale should unfold to our view a regularstream of tendency in the great succession of events. [55] The willmetaphysically considered, Kant said, is free, but its manifestations, that is to say, human actions, 'are as much under the control ofuniversal laws of nature as any other physical phenomena. '

The very same course of incidents, which taken separately andindividually would have seemed perplexed and incoherent, 'yet viewed intheir connection and as the action of the human _species_ and not ofindependent beings, never fail to observe a steady and continuous, though slow, development of certain great predispositions in ournature. ' As it is impossible to presume in the human race any _rational_purpose of its own, we must seek to observe some _natural_ purpose inthe current of human actions. Thus a history of creatures with no planof their own, may yet admit a systematic form as a history of creaturesblindly pursuing a plan of nature. Now we know that all predispositionsare destined to develop themselves according to their final purpose. Man's rational predispositions are destined to develop themselves in thespecies and not in the individual. History then is the progress of thedevelopment of all the tendencies laid in man by nature. The method ofdevelopment is the antagonism of these tendencies in the social state, and its source the _unsocial sociality_ of man--a tendency to enter thesocial state, combined with a perpetual resistance to that tendency, which is ever threatening to dissolve it. The play of these twotendencies unfolds talents of every kind, and by gradual increase oflight a preparation is made for such a mode of thinking as is capable of'exalting a social concert that had been _pathologically_ extorted fromthe mere necessities of situation, into a _moral_ union founded on thereasonable choice. ' Hence the highest problem for man is theestablishment of a universal civil society, founded on the empire ofpolitical justice; and 'the history of the human species as a whole maybe regarded as the unravelling of a hidden plan of nature foraccomplishing a perfect state of civil constitution for society in itsinternal relations (and, as the condition of that, in its externalrelations also), as the sole state of society in which the tendencies ofhuman nature can be all and fully developed. ' Nor is this all. We shallnot only be able to unravel the intricate web of past affairs, but shallalso find a clue for the guidance of future statesmen in the art ofpolitical prediction. Nay more, this clue 'will open a consolatoryprospect into futurity, in which at a remote distance we shall observethe human species seated upon an eminence won by infinite toil, whereall the germs are unfolded which nature has implanted within it, andits destination on this earth accomplished. '

That this conception involves an assumption about tendencies and finalpurposes which reverses the true method of history, and moreover reduceswhat ought to be a scientific inquiry to be a foregone justification ofnature or providence, should not prevent us from appreciating its signalmerits in insisting on a systematic presentation of the collectiveactivity of the race, and in pointing out, however cursorily, the use ofsuch an elucidation of the past in furnishing the grounds of practicalguidance in dealing with the future and in preparing it. Considering thebrevity of this little tract, its pregnancy and suggestiveness have notoften been equalled. We have seen enough of it here to enable us torealise the differences between this and the French school. We miss thewholesome objectivity, resulting from the stage which had been reachedin France by the physical sciences. Condorcet's series of _éloges_ showsunmistakably how deep an impression the history of physical discoveryhad made upon him, and how clearly he understood the value of itsmethods. The peculiar study which their composition had occasioned himis of itself almost enough to account for the fact that a conceptionwhich had long been preparing in the superior minds of the time, shouldfully develop itself in him rather than in anybody else. 

FOOTNOTES:

[42] Quesnay; _Droit Naturel_, ch. V. _Les Physiocrates_, i. 52. 

[43] _Economistes Financiers du 18ième Siècle. _ Vauban's _Projet d'uneDime Royale_ (p. 33), and Boisguillebert's _Factum de la France_, etc. (p. 248 _et seq. _)

[44] De la Rivière, for instance, very notably. Cf. His _Ordre Natureldes Sociétés Politiques_. _Physiocrates_, ii. 469, 636, etc. See alsoBaudeau on the superiority of the Economic Monarchy _Ib. _ pp. 783-791. 

[45] _Ordre Nat. Des Soc. Pol. _ p. 526. 

[46] Bk. I. 23. 

[47] _Hist. _ i. 4. 

[48] Polyb. _Hist. _ I. Iii. 4; iv. 3, 7. 

[49] The well-known words of Thucydides may contain the germ of the sameidea, when he speaks of the future as being likely to represent again, after the fashion of human things, 'if not the very image, yet the nearresemblance of the past. ' Bk. I. 22, 4. 

[50] _Discours en Sorbonne. _ _Œuv. De Turgot_, ii. 597. (Ed. Of 1844). 

[51] Cf. Sir G. C. Lewis's _Methods of Observation in Politics_, ii. 439, note. 

[52] _Œuv. De Turgot_, ii. 599, 645, etc. 

[53] _Ib. _ ii. 601. 

[54] _Esprit des Lois_, xvi. Cc. 2-4. And _Discours sur l'HistoireUniverselle_, in Turgot's Works, ii. 640, 641. For a further account ofTurgot's speculations, see article "Turgot" in the present volume. 

[55] _Idea of a Universal History on a Cosmo-Political Plan. _ It wastranslated by De Quincey, and is to be found in vol. Xiii. Of hiscollected works, pp. 133-152. 

V. 

The Physiocrats, as we have seen, had introduced the idea of there beinga natural order in social circumstances, that order being natural whichis most advantageous to mankind. Turgot had declared that one age isbound to another by a chain of causation. Condorcet fused these twoconceptions. He viewed the history of the ages as a whole, and found intheir succession a natural order; an order which, when uninterrupted andundisturbed, tended to accumulate untold advantages upon the human race, which was every day becoming more plain to the vision of men, andtherefore every day more and more assured from disturbance by ignorantprejudice and sinister interests. There is an order at once among thecircumstances of a given generation, and among the successive sets ofcircumstances of successive generations. 'If we consider the developmentof human faculties in its results, so far as they relate to theindividuals who exist at the same time on a given space, and if wefollow that development from generation to generation, then we havebefore us the picture of the progress of the human mind. This progressis subject to the same general laws that are to be observed in thedevelopment of the faculties of individuals, for it is the result ofthat development, considered at the same time in a great number ofindividuals united in society. But the result that presents itself atany one instant depends upon that which was offered by the instantspreceding; in turn it influences the result in times still to follow. '

This picture will be of a historical character, inasmuch as beingsubject to perpetual variations it is formed by the observation in dueorder of different human societies in different epochs through whichthey have passed. It will expose the order of the various changes, theinfluence exercised by each period over the next, and thus will show inthe modifications impressed upon the race, ever renewing itself in theimmensity of the ages, the track that it has followed, and the exactsteps that it has taken towards truth and happiness. Such observation ofwhat man has been and of what he is, will then lead us to means properfor assuring and accelerating the fresh progress that his nature allowsus to anticipate still further. [56]

'If a man is able to predict with nearly perfect confidence, phenomenawith whose laws he is acquainted; if, even when they are unknown to him, he is able, in accordance with the experience of the past, to foreseewith a large degree of probability the events of the future, why shouldwe treat it as a chimerical enterprise, to trace with someverisimilitude the picture of the future destinies of the human race inaccordance with the results of its history? The only foundation ofbelief in the natural sciences is this idea, that the general laws, known or unknown, which regulate the phenomena of the universe arenecessary and constant; and why should this principle be less true forthe development of the moral and intellectual faculties of man than forother natural operations? In short, opinions grounded on past experiencein objects of the same order being the single rule of conduct for eventhe wisest men, why should the philosopher be forbidden to rest hisconjectures on the same base, provided that he never attributes to thema degree of certainty beyond what is warranted by the number, theconstancy, and the accuracy of his observations?'[57]

Thus Condorcet's purpose was not to justify nature, as it had been withKant, but to search in the past for rational grounds of a belief in theunbounded splendour of men's future destinies. His view of the characterof the relations among the circumstances of the social union, either ata given moment or in a succession of periods, was both accurate andfar-sighted. When he came actually to execute his own great idea, and tospecify the manner in which those relations arose and operated, heinstantly diverged from the right path. Progress in his mind isexclusively produced by improvement in intelligence. It is the necessaryresult of man's activity in the face of that disproportion ever existingbetween what he knows and what he desires and feels the necessity toknow. [58] Hence the most fatal of the errors of Condorcet's sketch. Hemeasures only the contributions made by nations and eras to what weknow; leaving out of sight their failures and successes in theelevation of moral standards and ideals, and in the purification ofhuman passions. 

Now even if we hold the intellectual principle only to be progressive, and the moral elements to be fixed, being coloured and shaped andquickened by the surrounding intellectual conditions, still, inasmuch asthe manner of this shaping and colouring is continually changing andleading to the most important transformations of human activity andsentiment, it must obviously be a radical deficiency in any picture ofsocial progress to leave out the development of ethics, whether it be aderivative or an independent and spontaneous development. One seeks invain in Condorcet's sketch for any account of the natural history ofwestern morals, or for any sign of consciousness on his part that thedifference in ethical discipline and feeling between the most ferociousof primitive tribes and the most enlightened eighteenth-centuryFrenchmen, was a result of evolution that needed historical explanation, quite as much as the difference between the astrolatry of one age andthe astronomy of another. We find no recognition of the propriety ofrecounting the various steps of that long process by which, to useKant's pregnant phrase, the relations born of pathological necessitywere metamorphosed into those of moral union. The grave and loftyfeeling, for example, which inspired the last words of the_Tableau_--whence came it? Of what long-drawn chain of causes in thepast was it the last effect? It is not enough to refer us generally toprevious advances in knowledge and intellectual emancipation, becauseeven supposing the successive modifications of our moral sensibilitiesto be fundamentally due to the progress of intellectual enlightenment, we still want to know in the first place something about the influenceswhich harness one process to the other, and in the second place, something about the particular directions which these modifications ofmoral constitution have taken. 

If this is one very radical omission in Condorcet's scheme, his angryand vehement aversion for the various religions of the world (withperhaps one exception) is a sin of commission still more damaging to itscompleteness. That he should detest the corrupt and oppressive forms ofreligion of his own century was neither surprising nor blamable. Anunfavourable view of the influences upon human development of theChristian belief, even in its least corrupt forms, was not by any meansuntenable. Nay, he was at liberty to go further than this, and to depictreligion as a natural infirmity of the human mind in its immaturestages, just as there are specific disorders incident in childhood tothe human body. Even on this theory, he was bound to handle it with thesame calmness which he would have expected to find in a pathologicaltreatise by a physician. Who would write of the sweating sickness withindignation, or describe zymotic diseases with resentment? Condorcet'spertinacious anger against theology is just as irrational as this wouldbe, from the scientific point of view which he pretends to have assumed. Theology, in fact, was partly avenged of her assailants, for she had inthe struggle contrived to infect them with the bitter contagion of herown traditional spirit. 

From the earliest times to the latest it is all one story according toCondorcet. He can speak with respect of philosophies even when, as inthe case of the Scotch school of the last century, he dislikes andcondemns them. [59] Of religion his contempt and hatred only varyslightly in degree. Barbarous tribes have sorcerers, trading on thegross superstitions of their dupes: so in other guise and with differentnames have civilised nations to-day. As other arts progressed, superstition, too, became less rude; priestly families kept allknowledge in their own hands, and thus preserved their hypocritical andtyrannical assumptions from detection. They disclosed nothing to thepeople without some supernatural admixture, the better to maintain theirpersonal pretensions. They had two doctrines, one for themselves, andthe other for the people. Sometimes, as they were divided into severalorders, each of them reserved to itself certain mysteries. Thus all theinferior orders were at once rogues and dupes, and the great system ofhypocrisy was only known in all its completeness to a few adepts. Christianity belonged to the same class. Its priests, we must admit, 'inspite of their knaveries and their vices, were enthusiasts ready toperish for their doctrines. ' In vain did Julian endeavour to deliver theempire from the scourge. Its triumph was the signal for the incurabledecay of all art and knowledge. The Church may seem to have done somegood in things where her interests did not happen to clash with theinterests of Europe, as in helping to abolish slavery, for instance; butafter all 'circumstances and manners' would have produced the resultnecessarily and of themselves. Morality, which was taught by the priestsonly, contained those universal principles that have been unknown to nosect; but it created a host of purely religious duties, and of imaginarysins. These duties were more rigorously enjoined than those of nature, and actions that were indifferent, legitimate, or even virtuous, weremore severely rebuked and punished than real crimes. Yet, on the otherhand, a moment of repentance, consecrated by the absolution of a priest, opened the gates of heaven to the worst miscreants. [60]

In the opening of the last of these remarks there is much justice. Sothere is in the striking suggestion made in another place, that weshould not bless erroneous systems for their utility, simply becausethey help to repair some small part of the mischief of which they havethemselves been the principal cause. [61] But on the whole it is obviousthat Condorcet was unfitted by his temper, and that of the school towhich he most belonged, from accepting religion as a fact in thehistory of the human mind that must have some positive explanation. Tolook at it in this way as the creation of a handful of selfish impostorsin each community, was to show a radical incompetence to carry out thescheme which had been so scientifically projected. The picture is ruinedby the angry caricature of what ought to have been one of the mostimportant figures in it. To this place the Christian Church isundeniably entitled, however we may be disposed to strike the balancebetween the undoubted injuries and the undoubted advantages which it hasbeen the means of dealing to the civilisation of the west. Never perhapswas there so thorough an inversion of the true view of the comparativeelevation of different parts of human character, as is implied inCondorcet's strange hint that Cromwell's satellites would have been muchbetter men if they had carried instead of the Bible at their saddle-bowssome merry book of the stamp of Voltaire's _Pucelle_. [62]

Apart from the misreading of history in explaining religion by the follyof the many and the frauds of a few, Condorcet's interpretation involvedthe profoundest infidelity to his own doctrine of the intrinsic purityand exaltation of human nature. This doctrine ought in all reason tohave led him to look for the secret of the popular acceptance of beliefsthat to him seemed most outrageous, in some possibly finer side whichthey might possess for others, appealing not to the lower but to thehigher qualities of a nature with instincts of perfection. Take hisaccount of Purgatory, for instance. The priests, he says, drew up sominute and comprehensive a table of sins that nobody could hope toescape from censure. Here you come upon one of the most lucrativebranches of the sacerdotal trafficking; people were taught to imagine ahell of limited duration, which the priests only had the power toabridge; and this grace they sold, first to the living, then to thekinsmen and friends of the dead. [63] Now it was surely more worthy of abelief in the natural depravity than in the natural perfectibility ofthe sons of Adam, thus to assume without parley or proviso a basemercenariness on the one hand, and grovelling terror on the other, asthe origin of a doctrine which was obviously susceptible of a kinderexplanation. Would it not have been more consistent with belief in humangoodness to refer the doctrine to a merciful and affectionate and trulyhumanising anxiety to assuage the horrors of what is perhaps the mostfrightful idea that has ever corroded human character, the idea ofeternal punishment? We could in part have pardoned Condorcet if he hadstriven to invent ever so fanciful origins for opinions and belief inhis solicitude for the credit of humanity. As it is, he distorts thehistory of religion only to humanity's discredit. How, if the peoplewere always predisposed to virtue, were priests, sprung of the samepeople and bred in the same traditions, so invariably and incurablydevoted to baseness and hypocrisy? Was the nature of a priest absolutelydevoid of what physicians call recuperative force, restoring him to asound mind, in spite of professional perversion? In fine, if man hadbeen so grossly enslaved in moral nature from the beginning of the worlddown to the year 1789 or thereabouts, how was it possible thatnotwithstanding the admitted slowness of civilising processes, he shouldsuddenly spring forth the very perfectible and nearly perfected beingthat Condorcet passionately imagined him to be?[64]

It has already been hinted that there was one partial exception toCondorcet's otherwise all-embracing animosity against religion. This wasMahometanism. Towards this his attitude is fully appreciative, though ofcourse he deplores the superstitions which mixed themselves up with theArabian prophet's efforts for the purification of the men of his nation. After the seven vials of fiery wrath have been poured out upon the creedof Palestine, it is refreshing to find the creed of Arabia almostpatronised and praised. The writer who could not have found in his heartto think Gregory the Great or Hildebrand other than a mercenaryimpostor, nor Cromwell other than an ambitious hypocrite, admits withexquisite blandness of Mahomet that he had the art of employing all themeans of subjugating men _avec adresse, mais avec grandeur_. [65] Anotherreason, no doubt, besides his hatred of the Church, lay at the bottom ofCondorcet's tolerance or more towards Mahometanism. The Arabiansuperstition was not fatal to knowledge, Arabian activity in algebra, chemistry, optics, and astronomy, atoned in Condorcet's eyes for theKoran. 

It is fair to add further, that Condorcet showed a more justappreciation of the effects of Protestantism upon western developmentthan has been common among French thinkers. He recognises that men whohad learnt, however imperfectly, to submit their religious prejudices torational examination, would naturally be likely to extend the process topolitical prejudices also. Moreover, if the reformed churches refused torender to reason all its rights, still they agreed that its prisonshould be less narrow; the chain was not broken, but it ceased to beeither so heavy or so short as it had been. And in countries where whatwas by the dominant sect insolently styled tolerance succeeded inestablishing itself, it was possible to maintain the tolerated doctrineswith a more or less complete freedom. So there arose in Europe a sortof freedom of thought, not for men, but for Christians; and, 'if weexcept France, it is only for Christians that it exists anywhere else atthe present day, ' a limitation which has now fortunately ceased to bealtogether exact. [66]

If we have smiled at the ease with which what is rank craftiness in aChristian is toned down into address in a Mahometan, we may be amusedtoo at the leniency that describes some of the propagandist methods ofthe eighteenth century. Condorcet becomes rapturous as he tells in aparagraph of fine sustention with what admixture of the wisdom of theserpent the humane philosophers of his century 'covered the truth with aveil that prevented it from hurting too weak sight, and left thepleasure of conjecturing it; caressing prejudices with address, to dealthem the more certain blows; scarcely ever threatening them, nor evermore than one at once, nor even one in its integrity; sometimesconsoling the enemies of reason by pretending to desire no more than ahalf-tolerance in religion and half-liberty in politics; conciliatingdespotism while they combated the absurdities of religion, and religionwhen they rose against despotism; attacking these two scourges in theirprinciple, even when they seemed only to bear ill-will to revolting orridiculous abuses, and striking these poisonous trees in their veryroots, while they appeared to be doing no more than pruning crookedbranches. '[67] Imagine the holy rage with which such acts would havebeen attacked, if Condorcet had happened to be writing about theJesuits. Alas! the stern and serene composure of the historicalconscience was as unknown to him as it is always to orthodox apologists. It is to be said, moreover, that he had less excuse for being withoutit, for he rested on the goodness of men, and not, as theologians rest, on their vileness. It is a most interesting thing, we may notice inpassing, to consider what was the effect upon the Revolution of thisartfulness or prudence with which its theoretic precursors sowed theseed. Was it as truly wise as Condorcet supposed? Or did it weaken, almost corrupt, the very roots? Was it the secret of the thoroughnesswith which the work of demolition was done? Was it, too, the secret ofthe many and disastrous failures in the task of reconstruction?[68]

There are one or two detached remarks suggested by Condorcet's picture, which it may be worth while to make. He is fully alive, for example, tothe importance to mankind of the appearance among them of one of thosemen of creative genius, like Archimedes or like Newton, whose livesconstitute an epoch in human history. Their very existence he saw to beamong the greatest benefits conferred on the race by Nature. He hardlyseems to have been struck, on the other hand, with the appalling andincessant waste of these benefits that goes on; with the number of menof Newtonian capacity who are undoubtedly born into the world only tochronicle small beer; with the hosts of high and worthy souls who labourand flit away like shadows, perishing in the accomplishment of minor andsubordinate ends. We may suspect that the notion of all thisimmeasurable profusion of priceless treasures, its position as one ofthe laws of the condition of man on the globe, would be unspeakably hardof endurance to one holding Condorcet's peculiar form of optimism. 

Again, if we had space, it would be worth while to examine some of theacute and ingenious hints which Condorcet throws out by the way. Itwould be interesting to consider, as he suggests, the influence uponthe progress of the human mind of the change from writing on suchsubjects as science, philosophy, and jurisprudence in Latin, to theusual language of each country. That change rendered the sciences morepopular, but it increased the trouble of the scientific men in followingthe general march of knowledge. It caused a book to be read in onecountry by more men of inferior competence, but less read throughoutEurope by men of superior light. And though it relieves men who have noleisure for extensive study from the trouble of learning Latin, itimposes upon profounder persons the necessity of learning a variety ofmodern languages. [69] Again, ground is broken for the most importantreflection, in the remark that men preserve the prejudices of theirchildhood, their country, and their age, long after they have recognisedall the truths necessary to destroy them. [70] Perhaps most instructiveand most tranquillising of all is this, that the progress of physicalknowledge is constantly destroying in silence erroneous opinions whichhad never seemed to be attacked. [71] And in reading history, how muchignorance and misinterpretation would have been avoided, if the studenthad but been careful to remember that 'the law as written and the law asadministered; the principles of those in power, and the modification oftheir action by the sentiments of the governed; an institution as itemanates from those who form it, and the same institution realised; thereligion of books, and that of the people; the apparent universality ofa prejudice, and the substantial adhesion that it receives; these mayall differ in such a way that the effects absolutely cease to answer tothe public and recognised causes. '[72]

FOOTNOTES:

[56] _Tableau des Progrès de l'Esprit Humain. _ _Œuv. _ vi. 12, 13. 

[57] _Œuv. _ vi. 236. 

[58] _Ib. _ vi. 21. 

[59] _Œuv. _ vi. 186. 

[60] _Œuv. _ vi. Pp. 35, 55, 101, 102, 111, 117, 118, etc. 

[61] _Dissertation sur cette question: S'il est utile aux hommes d'êtretrompés?_--one of the best of Condorcet's writings. _Œuv. _ v. 360. 

[62] See Condorcet's vindication of the _Pucelle_ in his Life ofVoltaire. _Œuv. _ iv. 88, 89. See also Comte's _Phil. Pos. _ v. 450. 

[63] _Œuv. _ vi. 118. 

[64] As M. Comte says in his remarks on Condorcet (_Phil. Pos. _ iv. 185-193): '_Le progrès total finalement accompli ne peut être sans douteque le résultat général de l'accumulation spontanée des divers progrèspartiels successivement réalisés depuis l'origine de la civilisation, envertu de la marche successivement lente et graduelle de la naturehumaine;_' so that Condorcet's picture presents a standing miracle, '_oùl'on s'est même interdit d'abord la ressource vulgaire de laProvidence. _' Comte's criticism, however, seems to leave out of sightwhat full justice Condorcet did to the various partial advances in theintellectual order. 

[65] _Œuv. _ vi. 120-123. 

[66] _Œuv. _ vi. 149, 153. 

[67] _Ib. _ 187-189. 

[68] It is worth while to quote on this subject a passage from Condorcetas historically instructive as it is morally dangerous. '_La nécessitéde mentir pour désavouer un ouvrage est une extrémité qui répugneégalement à la conscience et à la noblesse du caractère; mais le crimeest pour les hommes injustes qui rendent ce désaveu nécessaire à lasûreté de celui qu'ils y forcent. Si vous avez érigé en crime ce quin'en est pas un, si vous avez porté atteinte, par des lois absurdes oupar des lois arbitraires, au droit naturel qu'ont tous les hommes, nonseulement d'avoir une opinion, mais de la rendre publique, alors vousméritez de perdre celui qu'a chaque homme d'entendre la vérité de labouche d'un autre, droit qui fonde seul l'obligation rigoureuse de nepas mentir. S'il n'est pas permis de tromper, c'est parceque tromperquelqu'un, c'est lui faire un tort, ou s'exposer à lui en faire un; maisle tort suppose un droit, et personne n'a celui de cherche, à s'assurerles moyens de commettre une injustice. _' _Vie de Voltaire_; _Œuv. _ iv. 33, 34. Condorcet might have found some countenance for his sophisms inPlato (Republ. Ii. 383); but even Plato restricted the privilege oflying to statesmen (iii. 389). He was in a wiser mood when he declared(_Œuv. _ v. 384) that it is better to be imprudent than ahypocrite, --though for that matter these are hardly the onlyalternatives. 

[69] _Œuv. _ vi. 163. 

[70] _Ib. _ vi. 22. 

[71] _Ib. _ p. 220. 

[72] _Œuv. _ p. 234. 

VI. 

We have now seen something of Condorcet's ideas of the past, and of hisconception of what he was perhaps the first to call the Science of Man. Let us turn to his hopes for the future, and one or two of the detailsto which his study of the science of man conducted him. It is well toperceive at the outset that Condorcet's views of the Tenth Epoch, as hecounts the period extending from the French Revolution to the era of theindefinite perfection of man, were in truth not the result of anyscientific processes whatever, properly so called. He saw, and this ishis merit, that such processes were applicable to the affairs ofsociety; and that, as he put it, all political and moral errors restupon error in philosophy, which in turn is bound up with erroneousmethods in physical science. [73] But in the execution of his plan hedoes not succeed in showing the nature of the relations of theseconnected forces; still less does he practise the scientific duty, forillustrating which he gives such well-deserved glory to Newton, [74] ofnot only accounting for phenomena, but also of measuring the _quantity_of forces. His conception, therefore, of future progress, however nearconjecture may possibly have brought him to the truth, is yet no morethan conjecture. The root of it is found in nothing more precise, definite, or quantified than a general notion gathered from history, that some portions of the race had made perceptible advances in freedomand enlightenment, and that we might therefore confidently expect stillfurther advances to be made in the same direction with an acceleratedrapidity, and with certain advantageous effects upon the happiness ofthe whole mass of the human race. In short, the end of the speculationis a confirmed and heightened conviction of the indefiniteperfectibility of the species, with certain foreshadowings of thedirection which this perfectibility would ultimately follow. The samerebellion against the disorder and misery of the century, which drovesome thinkers and politicians into fierce yearnings for an imaginarystate of nature, and others into an extravagant admiration for theancient republics, caused a third school, and Condorcet among them, toturn their eyes with equally boundless confidence and yearning towardsan imaginary future. It was at all events the least desperate error ofthe three. 

Our expectations for the future, Condorcet held, may be reduced to thesethree points: the destruction of inequality among nations; the progressof equality among the people of any given nation; and, finally thesubstantial perfecting (_perfectionnement réel_) of man. 

I. With reference to the first of these great aspirations, it will bebrought about by the abandonment by European peoples of their commercialmonopolies, their treacherous practices, their mischievous andextravagant proselytising, and their sanguinary contempt for those ofanother colour or another creed. Vast countries, now a prey to barbarismand violence, will present in one region numerous populations onlywaiting to receive the means and instruments of civilisation from us, and as soon as they find brothers in the Europeans, will joyfully becometheir friends and pupils; and in another region, nations enslaved underthe yoke of despots or conquerors, crying aloud for so many ages forliberators. In yet other regions, it is true, there are tribes almostsavage, cut off by the harshness of their climate from a perfectedcivilisation, or else conquering hordes, ignorant of every law butviolence and every trade but brigandage. The progress of these last twodescriptions of people will naturally be more tardy, and attended bymore storm and convulsion. It is possible even, that reduced in number, in proportion as they see themselves repulsed by civilised nations, theywill end by insensibly disappearing. [75] It is perhaps a little hard toexpect Esquimaux or the barbaric marauders of the sandy expanses ofCentral Asia insensibly to disappear, lest by their cheerless presencethey should destroy the unity and harmony of the transformation scene inthe great drama of Perfectibility. 

II. The principal causes of the inequality that unfortunately existsamong the people of the same community are three in number:--inequalityin wealth; inequality of condition between the man whose means ofsubsistence are both assured and transmissible, and him for whom thesemeans depend upon the duration of his working life; thirdly, inequalityof instruction. How are we to establish a continual tendency in thesethree sources of inequality to diminish in activity and power? Tolessen, though not to demolish, inequalities in wealth, it will benecessary for all artificial restrictions and exclusive advantages to beremoved from fiscal or other legal arrangements, by which property iseither acquired or accumulated: and among social changes tending in thisdirection will be the banishment by public opinion of an avaricious ormercenary spirit from marriage. Again, inequality between permanent andprecarious incomes will be radically modified by the development of theapplication of the calculation of probabilities to life. The extensionof annuities and insurance will not only benefit many individuals, butwill benefit society at large by putting an end to that periodical ruinof a large number of families, which is such an ever-renewing source ofmisery and degradation. Another means to the same end will be found indiscovering, by the same doctrine of probabilities, some other equallysolid base for credit instead of a large capital, and for rendering theprogress of industry and the activity of commerce more independent ofthe existence of great capitalists. Something approaching to equality ofinstruction, even for those who can only spare a few of their earlyyears for study, and in after times only a few hours of leisure, willbecome more attainable by improved selection of subjects, and improvedmethods of teaching them. The dwellers in one country will cease to bedistinguished by the use of a rude or of a refined dialect; and this, itmay be said in passing, has actually been the result of the schoolsystem in the United States. One portion of them will no longer bedependent upon any other for guidance in the smallest affairs. We cannotobliterate nor ignore natural differences of capacity, but after publicinstruction has been properly developed, 'the difference will be betweenmen of superior enlightenment, and men of an upright character who feelthe value of light without being dazzled by it; between talent orgenius, and that good sense which knows how to appreciate and to enjoyboth. Even if this difference were greater than has been said, if wecompare the force and extent of faculty, it would become none the lessinsensible, if we compare their respective effects upon the relations ofmen among themselves, upon all that affects their independence and theirhappiness. '[76]

III. What are the changes that we may expect from the substantialperfecting of human nature and society? If, before making this forecast, we reflect with what feeble means the race has arrived at its presentknowledge of useful and important truths, we shall not fear the reproachof temerity in our anticipations for a time when the force of all thesemeans shall have been indefinitely increased. The progress ofagricultural science will make the same land more productive, and thesame labour more efficient. Nay, who shall predict what the art ofconverting elementary substances into food for our use may one daybecome? The constant tendency of population to advance to the limits ofthe means of subsistence thus amplified, will be checked by a risingconsciousness in men, that if they have obligations in respect ofcreatures still unborn, these obligations consist in giving them, notexistence but happiness, in adding to the wellbeing of the family, andnot cumbering the earth with useless and unfortunate beings. Thischanged view upon population will partly follow from the substitution ofrational ideas for those prejudices which have penetrated morals with anausterity that is corrupting and degrading. [77] The movement will befurther aided by one of the most important steps in human progress--thedestruction, namely, of the prejudices that have established inequalityof rights between the two sexes, and which are so mischievous even tothe sex that seems to be most favoured. [78] We seek in vain for anyjustification of such an inequality in difference of physicalorganisation, in force of intelligence, or in moral sensibility. It hasno other origin than abuse of strength, and it is to no purpose thatattempts are made to excuse it by sophisms. The destruction of theusages springing from this custom will render common those domesticvirtues which are the foundation of all others, and will encourageeducation as well as make it more general, both because instructionwould be imparted to both sexes with more equality, and because itcannot become general even for males without the aid of the mother ofthe family. [79]

Among other improvements under our third head will be the attainment ofgreater perfection in language, leading at once to increased accuracyand increased concision. Laws and institutions, following the progressof knowledge, will be constantly undergoing modifications tending toidentify individual with collective interests. Wars will grow lessfrequent with the extinction of those ideas of hereditary and dynasticrights, that have occasioned so many bloody contests. The art oflearning will be facilitated by the institution of a Universal Language;and the art of teaching by resort to Technical Methods, or systems whichunite in orderly arrangement a great number of different objects, sothat their relations are perceived at a single glance. [80]

Finally, progress in medicine, the use of more wholesome food andhealthy houses, the diminution of the two most active causes ofdeterioration, namely, misery and excessive wealth, must prolong theaverage duration of life, as well as raise the tone of health while itlasts. The force of transmissable diseases will be gradually weakened, until their quality of transmission vanishes. May we then not hope forthe arrival of a time when death will cease to be anything but theeffect either of extraordinary accidents, or of the destruction, everslower and slower, of the vital forces? May we not believe that theduration of the middle interval between birth and this destruction hasno assignable term? Man will never become immortal, but is it a merechimera to hold that the term fixed to his years is slowly andperpetually receding further and further from the moment at which hisexistence begins?[81]

 * * * * *

The rapidity and the necessary incompleteness with which Condorcet threwout in isolated hints his ideas of the future state of society, impartto his conception a certain mechanical aspect, which conveys anincorrect impression of his notion of the sources whence social changemust flow. His admirable and most careful remarks upon the moraltraining of children prove him to have been as far removed as possiblefrom any of those theories of the formation of character which merelyprescribe the imposition of moulds and casts from without, instead ofcarefully tending the many spontaneous and sensitive processes of growthwithin. [82] Nobody has shown a finer appreciation of the delicacy ofthe material out of which character is to be made, and of thesusceptibility of its elementary structure; nor of the fact thateducation consists in such a discipline of the primitive impulses asshall lead men to do right, not by the constraint of mechanical externalsanctions, but by an instant, spontaneous, and almost inarticulaterepugnance to cowardice, cruelty, apathy, self-indulgence, and the othergreat roots and centres of wrong-doing. It was to a society composed ofmen and women whose characters had been shaped on this principle, thatCondorcet looked for the realisation of his exalted hopes forhumanity. [83]

With machinery and organisation, in truth, Condorcet did not greatlyconcern himself; probably too little rather than too much. The centralidea of all his aspirations was to procure the emancipation of reason, free and ample room for its exercise, and improved competence among menin the use of it. The subjugation of the modern intelligence beneath thedisembodied fancies of the grotesque and sombre imagination of theMiddle Ages, did not offend him more than the idea of any fixedorganisation of the spiritual power, or any final and settled anduniversally accepted solution of belief and order would have done. WithDe Maistre and Comte the problem was the organised and systematicreconstruction of an anarchic society. With Condorcet it was how topersuade men to exert the individual reason methodically andindependently, not without co-operation, but without anything likeofficial or other subordination. 

His cardinal belief and precept was, as with Socrates, that the βίοςἀνεξέταστος {bios anexetastos} is not to be lived by man. As we haveseen, the freedom of the reason was so dear to him, that he counted itan abuse for a parent to instil his own convictions into the defencelessminds of his young children. This was the natural outcome of Condorcet'smode of viewing history as the record of intellectual emancipation, while to Comte its deepest interest was as a record of moral andemotional cultivation. If we value in one type of thinker theintellectual conscientiousness, which refrains from perplexing men bypropounding problems unless the solution can be set forth also, perhapswe owe no less honour in the thinker of another type to thatintellectual self-denial which makes him very careful lest the too rigidprojection of his own specific conclusions should by any means obstructthe access of a single ray of fertilising light. This religiousscrupulosity, which made him abhor all interference with the freedom andopenness of the understanding as the worst kind of sacrilege, wasCondorcet's eminent distinction. If, as some think, the world willgradually transform its fear or love of unknowable gods into a devoutreverence for those who have stirred in men a sense of the dignity oftheir own nature and of its large and multitudinous possibilities, thenwill his name not fail of deep and perpetual recollection. 

FOOTNOTES:

[73] _Ib. _ p. 223. 

[74] _Ib. _ p. 206. 

[75] _Œuv. _ pp. 239-244. 

[76] _Œuv. _ pp. 244-251. 

[77] _Œuv. _ pp. 257, 258. 

[78] Condorcet had already assailed the prejudices that keep women insubjection in an excellent tract, published in 1790; _Sur l'Admissiondes Femmes au Droit de Cité. _ _Œuv. _ x. 121-130. 

[79] _Œuv. _ p. 264. The rest of the passage is not perfectlyintelligible to me, so I give it as it stands. '_Cet hommage troptardif, rendu enfin à l'équité et au bon sens, ne tarirait-il pas unesource trop féconde d'injustices, de cruautés et de crimes, en faisantdisparaître une opposition si dangereuse entre le penchant naturel leplus vif, le plus difficile à réprimer, et les devoirs de l'homme ou lesintérêts de la société? Ne produirait-il pas, enfin, des mœursnationales douces et pures, formées non de privations orgueilleuses, d'apparences hypocrites, de réserves imposées par la crainte de la honteou les terreurs religieuses, mais d'habitudes librement contractées, inspirées par la nature, avouées par la raison?_' Can these habitudes bethe habitudes of Free Love, or what are they? Condorcet, we know, thought the indissolubility of marriage a monstrously bad thing, but thegrounds which he gives for his thinking so would certainly lead to theinfinite dissolubility of society. See a truly astounding passage in the_Fragment on the Tenth Epoch_, vi. 523-526. See also some curious wordsin a letter to Turgot, i. 221, 222. 

[80] _Œuv. _ pp. 269-272. 

[81] _Œuv. _ pp. 272-275. Also p. 618. 

[82] See _Fragment de l'Histoire de la Xe Epoque. _ '_Il ne faut pasleur dire, mais les accoutumer à croire, à trouver au dedansa'eux-mêmes, que la bonté et la justice sont nécessaires au bonheur, comme une respiration facile et libre l'est à la santé. _' Of books forthe young: '_Il faut qu'ils n'excédent jamais l'étendue ou ladélicatesse de la sensibilité. _' '_Il faut renoncer à l'idée de parleraux enfans de ce que ni leur esprit ni leur âme ne peuvent encorecomprendre; ne pas leur faire admirer une constitution et réciter parcœur les droits politiques de l'homme quand ils ont à peine une idéenette de leurs relations avec leur famille et leurs camarades. _'

Still more objectionable, we may be sure, would he have found thepractice of drilling little children by the hearth or at the school-deskin creeds, catechisms, and the like repositories of mysteries baleful tothe growing intelligence. '_Aidons le développement des facultéshumaines pendant la faiblesse de l'enfance_, ' he said admirably, '_maisn'abusons pas de cette faiblesse pour les mouler au gré de nos opinionsde nos intérêts, ou de notre orgueil. _'--_Œuv. _ vi. 543-554. 

Cf. Also v. 363-365, where there are some deserved strictures on themalpractice of teaching children as truth what the parents themselvesbelieve to be superstition or even falsehood. 

The reader may remember the speech of the Patriarch, in Lessing's play, against the Jew:

 _Der mit Gewalt ein armes Christenkind Dem Bunde seiner Tauf' entreisst! Denn ist Nicht alles, was man Kindern thut, Gewalt? Zu sagen: ausgenommen, was die Kirch', An Kindern thut. _

[83] His _Mémoires sur l'Instruction Publique_, written in 1791-1792, and printed in the seventh volume of the works, are still very wellworth turning to. 

Transcribers' Notes:

Minor printer errors (omitted or incorrect punctuation) have beenamended without note. Other errors have been amended and are listedbelow. 

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