Fortunately inquirers in another field had set a movement afoot, which was destined to furnish the supplement of their own speculation. This was the remarkable development of the conception of history, which Montesquieu's two memorable books first made conspicuous. Bossuet's well-known discourse on universal history, teeming as it does with religious prejudice, just as Condorcet's sketch teems with prejudice against religion, and egregiously imperfect in execution as it must be pronounced when judged from even the meanest historical standard, had perhaps partially introduced the spirit of Universality, as Comte says, into the study of history. But it was impossible from the nature of the case for any theologian to know fully what this spirit means; and it was not until the very middle of the following century that any effective approach was made to that universality which Bossuet did little more than talk about. Then it came not from theology, but from the much more hopeful sources of a rational philosophy. Before Montesquieu no single stone of the foundation of scientific history can be said to have been laid. Of course, far earlier writers had sought after the circumstances which brought about a given transaction. Thucydides, for example, had attributed the cause of the Peloponnesian war to the alarm of the Lacedaemonians at the greatness of the power of Athens.[46] It is this sense of the need of explanation, however rudimentary it may be, which distinguishes the great historian from the chronicler, even from a very superior chronicler like Livy, who in his account of even so great an event as the Second Punic War plunges straightway into narrative of what happened, without concerning himself why it happened. Tacitus had begun his Histories with remarks upon the condition of Rome, the feeling of the various armies, the attitude of the provinces, so that, as he says, 'non modo casus eventusque rerum, qui plerumque fortuiti sunt, sed ratio etiam causaeque noscantur.'[47] But these and the like instances in historical literature were only political explanations, more or less adequate, of particular transactions; they were no more than the sagacious remarks of men with statesmanlike minds, upon the origin of some single set of circumstances.

The rise from this to the high degree of generality which marks the speculations of Montesquieu, empirical as they are, was as great as the rise from the mere maxims of worldly wisdom to the widest principles of ethical philosophy. Polybius, indeed, in the remarkable chapters with which his Histories open, uses expressions that are so modern as almost to startle us. 'People who study history,' he says, 'in separate and detached portions, without reference to one another, and suppose that from them they acquire a knowledge of the whole, are like a man who in looking on the severed members of what had once been an animated and comely creature, should think that this was enough to give him an idea of its beauty and force when alive. The empire of Rome was what by its extent in Italy, Africa, Asia, Greece, brought history into the condition of being organic (somatoeides).' His object was to examine the general and collective ordering of events; when it came into existence; whence it had its source; how it had this special completion and fulfilment—the universal empire of Rome.[48] Striking as this is, and admirable as it is, there is not in it any real trace of the abstract conception of social history. Polybius recognises the unity of history, so far as that could be understood in the second century before Christ, but he treats his subject in the concrete, describing the chain of events, but not attempting to seek their law. It was Montesquieu who first applied the comparative method to social institutions; who first considered physical conditions in connection with the laws of a country; who first perceived and illustrated how that natural order which the Physiocrats only considered in relation to the phenomena of wealth and its production, really extended over its political phenomena as well; who first set the example of viewing a great number of social facts all over the world in groups and classes; and who first definitely and systematically inquired into the causes of a set of complex historical events and institutions, as being both discoverable and intelligible. This was a very marked advance upon both of the ideas, by one or other of which men had previously been content to explain to themselves the course of circumstances in the world; either the inscrutable decrees of an inhuman providence, or the fortuitous vagaries of an eyeless destiny.

It was Turgot, however, who completed the historical conception of Montesquieu, in a piece written in 1750, two years after the appearance of the Esprit des Lois, and in one or two other fragmentary compositions of about the same time, which are not the less remarkable because the writer was only twenty-three years old when these advanced ideas presented themselves to his intelligence. Vico in Italy had insisted 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 is careful to distinguish the ever-varying spectacle of the succession of men from generation to generation, from the circle of identical revolutions in which the phenomena of nature are enclosed. In the one case time only restores at each instant the image of what it has just caused to disappear; in the other, the reason and the passions are ever incessantly producing new events. 'All the ages are linked together by a succession of causes and effects which bind the state of the world to all the states that have gone before. The multiplied signs of speech and writing, in supplying men with the means of an assured possession of their thoughts and of communicating them to one another, have formed a common treasure that one generation transmits to another, as an inheritance constantly augmented by the discoveries of each generation; and the human race, looked at from its origin, appears in the eyes of the philosopher one immense whole, which, just as in the case of each individual, has its infancy and its growth.'[50]

Pascal and others in ancient and modern times[51] had compared in casual and unfruitful remarks the history of the race to the history of the individual, but Turgot was able in some sort to see the full meaning and extent of the analogy, as well as the limitations proper to it, and to draw from it some of the larger principles which the idea involved. The first proposition in the passage just quoted, that a chain of causes and effects unites each age with every other age that has gone before, is one of the most memorable sentences in the history of thought. And Turgot not only saw that there is a relation of cause and effect between successive states of society; he had glimpses into some of the conditions of that relation. To a generation that stands on loftier heights his attempts seem rudimentary and strangely simple, but it was these attempts which cut the steps for our ascent. How is it, he asked, for instance, that the succession of social states is not uniform? that they follow with unequal step along the track marked out for them? He found the answer in the inequality of natural advantages, and he was able to discern the necessity of including in these advantages the presence, apparently accidental, in some communities and not in others of men of especial genius or capacity in some important direction.[52] Again, he saw that just as in one way natural advantages accelerate the progress of a society, in another natural obstacles also accelerate it, by stimulating men to the efforts necessary to overcome them: le besoin perfectionne l'instrument.[53] The importance of following the march of the human mind over all the grooves along which it travels to further knowledge, was fully present to him, and he dwells repeatedly on the constant play going on between discoveries in one science and those in another. In no writer is there a fuller and more distinct sense of the essential unity and integrity of the history of mankind, nor of the multitude of the mansions into which this vast house is divided, and the many keys which he must possess that would open and enter in.

Even in empirical explanations Turgot shows a breadth and accuracy of vision truly surprising, considering his own youth and what we may venture to call the youth of his subject. The reader will be able to appreciate this, and to discern at the same time the arbitrary nature of Montesquieu's method, if he will contrast, for example, the remarks of this writer upon polygamy with the far wider and more sagacious explanation of the circumstances of such an institution given by Turgot.[54] Unfortunately, he has left us only short and fragmentary pieces, but they suggest more than many large and complete works. That they had a very powerful and direct influence upon Condorcet there is no doubt, as well from the similarity of general conception between him and Turgot, as from the nearly perfect identity of leading passages in their writings. Let us add that in Turgot's fragments we have what is unhappily not a characteristic of Condorcet, the peculiar satisfaction and delight in scientific history of a style which states a fact in such phrases as serve also to reveal its origin, bearings, significance, in which every successive piece of description is so worded as to be self-evidently a link in the chain of explanation, an ordered term in a series of social conditions.

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

The very same course of incidents, which taken separately and individually would have seemed perplexed and incoherent, 'yet viewed in their connection and as the action of the human species and not of independent beings, never fail to observe a steady and continuous, though slow, development of certain great predispositions in our nature.' As it is impossible to presume in the human race any rational purpose of its own, we must seek to observe some natural purpose in the current of human actions. Thus a history of creatures with no plan of their own, may yet admit a systematic form as a history of creatures blindly pursuing a plan of nature. Now we know that all predispositions are destined to develop themselves according to their final purpose. Man's rational predispositions are destined to develop themselves in the species and not in the individual. History then is the progress of the development of all the tendencies laid in man by nature. The method of development is the antagonism of these tendencies in the social state, and its source the unsocial sociality of man—a tendency to enter the social state, combined with a perpetual resistance to that tendency, which is ever threatening to dissolve it. The play of these two tendencies unfolds talents of every kind, and by gradual increase of light a preparation is made for such a mode of thinking as is capable of 'exalting a social concert that had been pathologically extorted from the mere necessities of situation, into a moral union founded on the reasonable choice.' Hence the highest problem for man is the establishment of a universal civil society, founded on the empire of political justice; and 'the history of the human species as a whole may be regarded as the unravelling of a hidden plan of nature for accomplishing a perfect state of civil constitution for society in its internal relations (and, as the condition of that, in its external relations also), as the sole state of society in which the tendencies of human nature can be all and fully developed.' Nor is this all. We shall not only be able to unravel the intricate web of past affairs, but shall also find a clue for the guidance of future statesmen in the art of political prediction. Nay more, this clue 'will open a consolatory prospect into futurity, in which at a remote distance we shall observe the human species seated upon an eminence won by infinite toil, where all the germs are unfolded which nature has implanted within it, and its destination on this earth accomplished.'

That this conception involves an assumption about tendencies and final purposes which reverses the true method of history, and moreover reduces what ought to be a scientific inquiry to be a foregone justification of nature or providence, should not prevent us from appreciating its signal merits in insisting on a systematic presentation of the collective activity of the race, and in pointing out, however cursorily, the use of such an elucidation of the past in furnishing the grounds of practical guidance in dealing with the future and in preparing it. Considering the brevity of this little tract, its pregnancy and suggestiveness have not often been equalled. We have seen enough of it here to enable us to realise the differences between this and the French school. We miss the wholesome objectivity, resulting from the stage which had been reached in France by the physical sciences. Condorcet's series of eloges shows unmistakably how deep an impression the history of physical discovery had made upon him, and how clearly he understood the value of its methods. The peculiar study which their composition had occasioned him is of itself almost enough to account for the fact that a conception which had long been preparing in the superior minds of the time, should fully develop itself in him rather than in anybody else.

FOOTNOTES:

[42] Quesnay; Droit Naturel, ch. v. Les Physiocrates, i. 52.

[43] Economistes Financiers du 18ieme Siecle. Vauban's Projet d'une Dime Royale (p. 33), and Boisguillebert's Factum de la France, etc. (p. 248 et seq.)

[44] De la Riviere, for instance, very notably. Cf. his Ordre Naturel des Societes Politiques. Physiocrates, ii. 469, 636, etc. See also Baudeau 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 same idea, 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 near resemblance of the past.' Bk. i. 22, 4.

[50] Discours en Sorbonne. Oeuv. de Turgot, ii. 597. (Ed. of 1844).

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

[52] Oeuv. de Turgot, ii. 599, 645, etc.

[53] Ib. ii. 601.

[54] Esprit des Lois, xvi. cc. 2-4. And Discours sur l'Histoire Universelle, in Turgot's Works, ii. 640, 641. For a further account of Turgot's speculations, see article "Turgot" in the present volume.

[55] Idea of a Universal History on a Cosmo-Political Plan. It was translated by De Quincey, and is to be found in vol. xiii. of his collected works, pp. 133-152.



V.

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

This picture will be of a historical character, inasmuch as being subject to perpetual variations it is formed by the observation in due order of different human societies in different epochs through which they have passed. It will expose the order of the various changes, the influence exercised by each period over the next, and thus will show in the modifications impressed upon the race, ever renewing itself in the immensity of the ages, the track that it has followed, and the exact steps that it has taken towards truth and happiness. Such observation of what man has been and of what he is, will then lead us to means proper for assuring and accelerating the fresh progress that his nature allows us to anticipate still further.[56]

'If a man is able to predict with nearly perfect confidence, phenomena with 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 foresee with a large degree of probability the events of the future, why should we treat it as a chimerical enterprise, to trace with some verisimilitude the picture of the future destinies of the human race in accordance with the results of its history? The only foundation of belief in the natural sciences is this idea, that the general laws, known or unknown, which regulate the phenomena of the universe are necessary and constant; and why should this principle be less true for the development of the moral and intellectual faculties of man than for other natural operations? In short, opinions grounded on past experience in objects of the same order being the single rule of conduct for even the wisest men, why should the philosopher be forbidden to rest his conjectures on the same base, provided that he never attributes to them a degree of certainty beyond what is warranted by the number, the constancy, and the accuracy of his observations?'[57]

Thus Condorcet's purpose was not to justify nature, as it had been with Kant, but to search in the past for rational grounds of a belief in the unbounded splendour of men's future destinies. His view of the character of the relations among the circumstances of the social union, either at a given moment or in a succession of periods, was both accurate and far-sighted. When he came actually to execute his own great idea, and to specify the manner in which those relations arose and operated, he instantly diverged from the right path. Progress in his mind is exclusively produced by improvement in intelligence. It is the necessary result of man's activity in the face of that disproportion ever existing between what he knows and what he desires and feels the necessity to know.[58] Hence the most fatal of the errors of Condorcet's sketch. He measures only the contributions made by nations and eras to what we know; leaving out of sight their failures and successes in the elevation of moral standards and ideals, and in the purification of human passions.

Now even if we hold the intellectual principle only to be progressive, and the moral elements to be fixed, being coloured and shaped and quickened by the surrounding intellectual conditions, still, inasmuch as the manner of this shaping and colouring is continually changing and leading to the most important transformations of human activity and sentiment, it must obviously be a radical deficiency in any picture of social progress to leave out the development of ethics, whether it be a derivative or an independent and spontaneous development. One seeks in vain in Condorcet's sketch for any account of the natural history of western morals, or for any sign of consciousness on his part that the difference in ethical discipline and feeling between the most ferocious of primitive tribes and the most enlightened eighteenth-century Frenchmen, was a result of evolution that needed historical explanation, quite as much as the difference between the astrolatry of one age and the astronomy of another. We find no recognition of the propriety of recounting the various steps of that long process by which, to use Kant's pregnant phrase, the relations born of pathological necessity were metamorphosed into those of moral union. The grave and lofty feeling, for example, which inspired the last words of the Tableau—whence came it? Of what long-drawn chain of causes in the past was it the last effect? It is not enough to refer us generally to previous advances in knowledge and intellectual emancipation, because even supposing the successive modifications of our moral sensibilities to be fundamentally due to the progress of intellectual enlightenment, we still want to know in the first place something about the influences which harness one process to the other, and in the second place, something about the particular directions which these modifications of moral constitution have taken.

If this is one very radical omission in Condorcet's scheme, his angry and vehement aversion for the various religions of the world (with perhaps one exception) is a sin of commission still more damaging to its completeness. That he should detest the corrupt and oppressive forms of religion of his own century was neither surprising nor blamable. An unfavourable view of the influences upon human development of the Christian belief, even in its least corrupt forms, was not by any means untenable. Nay, he was at liberty to go further than this, and to depict religion as a natural infirmity of the human mind in its immature stages, just as there are specific disorders incident in childhood to the human body. Even on this theory, he was bound to handle it with the same calmness which he would have expected to find in a pathological treatise by a physician. Who would write of the sweating sickness with indignation, or describe zymotic diseases with resentment? Condorcet's pertinacious anger against theology is just as irrational as this would be, from the scientific point of view which he pretends to have assumed. Theology, in fact, was partly avenged of her assailants, for she had in the struggle contrived to infect them with the bitter contagion of her own traditional spirit.

From the earliest times to the latest it is all one story according to Condorcet. He can speak with respect of philosophies even when, as in the case of the Scotch school of the last century, he dislikes and condemns them.[59] Of religion his contempt and hatred only vary slightly in degree. Barbarous tribes have sorcerers, trading on the gross superstitions of their dupes: so in other guise and with different names have civilised nations to-day. As other arts progressed, superstition, too, became less rude; priestly families kept all knowledge in their own hands, and thus preserved their hypocritical and tyrannical assumptions from detection. They disclosed nothing to the people without some supernatural admixture, the better to maintain their personal pretensions. They had two doctrines, one for themselves, and the other for the people. Sometimes, as they were divided into several orders, each of them reserved to itself certain mysteries. Thus all the inferior orders were at once rogues and dupes, and the great system of hypocrisy was only known in all its completeness to a few adepts. Christianity belonged to the same class. Its priests, we must admit, 'in spite of their knaveries and their vices, were enthusiasts ready to perish for their doctrines.' In vain did Julian endeavour to deliver the empire from the scourge. Its triumph was the signal for the incurable decay of all art and knowledge. The Church may seem to have done some good in things where her interests did not happen to clash with the interests of Europe, as in helping to abolish slavery, for instance; but after all 'circumstances and manners' would have produced the result necessarily and of themselves. Morality, which was taught by the priests only, contained those universal principles that have been unknown to no sect; but it created a host of purely religious duties, and of imaginary sins. These duties were more rigorously enjoined than those of nature, and actions that were indifferent, legitimate, or even virtuous, were more severely rebuked and punished than real crimes. Yet, on the other hand, 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. So there is in the striking suggestion made in another place, that we should not bless erroneous systems for their utility, simply because they help to repair some small part of the mischief of which they have themselves been the principal cause.[61] But on the whole it is obvious that Condorcet was unfitted by his temper, and that of the school to which he most belonged, from accepting religion as a fact in the history of the human mind that must have some positive explanation. To look at it in this way as the creation of a handful of selfish impostors in each community, was to show a radical incompetence to carry out the scheme which had been so scientifically projected. The picture is ruined by the angry caricature of what ought to have been one of the most important figures in it. To this place the Christian Church is undeniably entitled, however we may be disposed to strike the balance between the undoubted injuries and the undoubted advantages which it has been the means of dealing to the civilisation of the west. Never perhaps was there so thorough an inversion of the true view of the comparative elevation of different parts of human character, as is implied in Condorcet's strange hint that Cromwell's satellites would have been much better men if they had carried instead of the Bible at their saddle-bows some merry book of the stamp of Voltaire's Pucelle.[62]

Apart from the misreading of history in explaining religion by the folly of the many and the frauds of a few, Condorcet's interpretation involved the profoundest infidelity to his own doctrine of the intrinsic purity and exaltation of human nature. This doctrine ought in all reason to have led him to look for the secret of the popular acceptance of beliefs that to him seemed most outrageous, in some possibly finer side which they might possess for others, appealing not to the lower but to the higher qualities of a nature with instincts of perfection. Take his account of Purgatory, for instance. The priests, he says, drew up so minute and comprehensive a table of sins that nobody could hope to escape from censure. Here you come upon one of the most lucrative branches of the sacerdotal trafficking; people were taught to imagine a hell of limited duration, which the priests only had the power to abridge; and this grace they sold, first to the living, then to the kinsmen and friends of the dead.[63] Now it was surely more worthy of a belief in the natural depravity than in the natural perfectibility of the sons of Adam, thus to assume without parley or proviso a base mercenariness on the one hand, and grovelling terror on the other, as the origin of a doctrine which was obviously susceptible of a kinder explanation. Would it not have been more consistent with belief in human goodness to refer the doctrine to a merciful and affectionate and truly humanising anxiety to assuage the horrors of what is perhaps the most frightful idea that has ever corroded human character, the idea of eternal punishment? We could in part have pardoned Condorcet if he had striven to invent ever so fanciful origins for opinions and belief in his solicitude for the credit of humanity. As it is, he distorts the history of religion only to humanity's discredit. How, if the people were always predisposed to virtue, were priests, sprung of the same people and bred in the same traditions, so invariably and incurably devoted to baseness and hypocrisy? Was the nature of a priest absolutely devoid of what physicians call recuperative force, restoring him to a sound mind, in spite of professional perversion? In fine, if man had been so grossly enslaved in moral nature from the beginning of the world down to the year 1789 or thereabouts, how was it possible that notwithstanding the admitted slowness of civilising processes, he should suddenly spring forth the very perfectible and nearly perfected being that Condorcet passionately imagined him to be?[64]

It has already been hinted that there was one partial exception to Condorcet's otherwise all-embracing animosity against religion. This was Mahometanism. Towards this his attitude is fully appreciative, though of course he deplores the superstitions which mixed themselves up with the Arabian 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 creed of Palestine, it is refreshing to find the creed of Arabia almost patronised and praised. The writer who could not have found in his heart to think Gregory the Great or Hildebrand other than a mercenary impostor, nor Cromwell other than an ambitious hypocrite, admits with exquisite blandness of Mahomet that he had the art of employing all the means of subjugating men avec adresse, mais avec grandeur.[65] Another reason, no doubt, besides his hatred of the Church, lay at the bottom of Condorcet's tolerance or more towards Mahometanism. The Arabian superstition was not fatal to knowledge, Arabian activity in algebra, chemistry, optics, and astronomy, atoned in Condorcet's eyes for the Koran.

It is fair to add further, that Condorcet showed a more just appreciation of the effects of Protestantism upon western development than has been common among French thinkers. He recognises that men who had learnt, however imperfectly, to submit their religious prejudices to rational examination, would naturally be likely to extend the process to political prejudices also. Moreover, if the reformed churches refused to render to reason all its rights, still they agreed that its prison should be less narrow; the chain was not broken, but it ceased to be either so heavy or so short as it had been. And in countries where what was by the dominant sect insolently styled tolerance succeeded in establishing itself, it was possible to maintain the tolerated doctrines with a more or less complete freedom. So there arose in Europe a sort of freedom of thought, not for men, but for Christians; and, 'if we except France, it is only for Christians that it exists anywhere else at the present day,' a limitation which has now fortunately ceased to be altogether exact.[66]

If we have smiled at the ease with which what is rank craftiness in a Christian is toned down into address in a Mahometan, we may be amused too at the leniency that describes some of the propagandist methods of the eighteenth century. Condorcet becomes rapturous as he tells in a paragraph of fine sustention with what admixture of the wisdom of the serpent the humane philosophers of his century 'covered the truth with a veil that prevented it from hurting too weak sight, and left the pleasure of conjecturing it; caressing prejudices with address, to deal them the more certain blows; scarcely ever threatening them, nor ever more than one at once, nor even one in its integrity; sometimes consoling the enemies of reason by pretending to desire no more than a half-tolerance in religion and half-liberty in politics; conciliating despotism while they combated the absurdities of religion, and religion when they rose against despotism; attacking these two scourges in their principle, even when they seemed only to bear ill-will to revolting or ridiculous abuses, and striking these poisonous trees in their very roots, while they appeared to be doing no more than pruning crooked branches.'[67] Imagine the holy rage with which such acts would have been attacked, if Condorcet had happened to be writing about the Jesuits. Alas! the stern and serene composure of the historical conscience 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 without it, 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 in passing, to consider what was the effect upon the Revolution of this artfulness or prudence with which its theoretic precursors sowed the seed. Was it as truly wise as Condorcet supposed? Or did it weaken, almost corrupt, the very roots? Was it the secret of the thoroughness with which the work of demolition was done? Was it, too, the secret of the 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, to the importance to mankind of the appearance among them of one of those men of creative genius, like Archimedes or like Newton, whose lives constitute an epoch in human history. Their very existence he saw to be among the greatest benefits conferred on the race by Nature. He hardly seems to have been struck, on the other hand, with the appalling and incessant waste of these benefits that goes on; with the number of men of Newtonian capacity who are undoubtedly born into the world only to chronicle small beer; with the hosts of high and worthy souls who labour and flit away like shadows, perishing in the accomplishment of minor and subordinate ends. We may suspect that the notion of all this immeasurable profusion of priceless treasures, its position as one of the laws of the condition of man on the globe, would be unspeakably hard of endurance to one holding Condorcet's peculiar form of optimism.

Again, if we had space, it would be worth while to examine some of the acute and ingenious hints which Condorcet throws out by the way. It would be interesting to consider, as he suggests, the influence upon the progress of the human mind of the change from writing on such subjects as science, philosophy, and jurisprudence in Latin, to the usual language of each country. That change rendered the sciences more popular, but it increased the trouble of the scientific men in following the general march of knowledge. It caused a book to be read in one country by more men of inferior competence, but less read throughout Europe by men of superior light. And though it relieves men who have no leisure for extensive study from the trouble of learning Latin, it imposes upon profounder persons the necessity of learning a variety of modern languages.[69] Again, ground is broken for the most important reflection, in the remark that men preserve the prejudices of their childhood, their country, and their age, long after they have recognised all the truths necessary to destroy them.[70] Perhaps most instructive and most tranquillising of all is this, that the progress of physical knowledge is constantly destroying in silence erroneous opinions which had never seemed to be attacked.[71] And in reading history, how much ignorance and misinterpretation would have been avoided, if the student had but been careful to remember that 'the law as written and the law as administered; the principles of those in power, and the modification of their action by the sentiments of the governed; an institution as it emanates from those who form it, and the same institution realised; the religion of books, and that of the people; the apparent universality of a prejudice, and the substantial adhesion that it receives; these may all differ in such a way that the effects absolutely cease to answer to the public and recognised causes.'[72]

FOOTNOTES:

[56] Tableau des Progres de l'Esprit Humain. Oeuv. vi. 12, 13.

[57] Oeuv. vi. 236.

[58] Ib. vi. 21.

[59] Oeuv. vi. 186.

[60] Oeuv. vi. pp. 35, 55, 101, 102, 111, 117, 118, etc.

[61] Dissertation sur cette question: S'il est utile aux hommes d'etre trompes?—one of the best of Condorcet's writings. Oeuv. v. 360.

[62] See Condorcet's vindication of the Pucelle in his Life of Voltaire. Oeuv. iv. 88, 89. See also Comte's Phil. Pos. v. 450.

[63] Oeuv. vi. 118.

[64] As M. Comte says in his remarks on Condorcet (Phil. Pos. iv. 185-193): 'Le progres total finalement accompli ne peut etre sans doute que le resultat general de l'accumulation spontanee des divers progres partiels successivement realises depuis l'origine de la civilisation, en vertu de la marche successivement lente et graduelle de la nature humaine;' so that Condorcet's picture presents a standing miracle, 'ou l'on s'est meme interdit d'abord la ressource vulgaire de la Providence.' Comte's criticism, however, seems to leave out of sight what full justice Condorcet did to the various partial advances in the intellectual order.

[65] Oeuv. vi. 120-123.

[66] Oeuv. vi. 149, 153.

[67] Ib. 187-189.

[68] It is worth while to quote on this subject a passage from Condorcet as historically instructive as it is morally dangerous. 'La necessite de mentir pour desavouer un ouvrage est une extremite qui repugne egalement a la conscience et a la noblesse du caractere; mais le crime est pour les hommes injustes qui rendent ce desaveu necessaire a la surete de celui qu'ils y forcent. Si vous avez erige en crime ce qui n'en est pas un, si vous avez porte atteinte, par des lois absurdes ou par des lois arbitraires, au droit naturel qu'ont tous les hommes, non seulement d'avoir une opinion, mais de la rendre publique, alors vous meritez de perdre celui qu'a chaque homme d'entendre la verite de la bouche d'un autre, droit qui fonde seul l'obligation rigoureuse de ne pas mentir. S'il n'est pas permis de tromper, c'est parceque tromper quelqu'un, c'est lui faire un tort, ou s'exposer a lui en faire un; mais le tort suppose un droit, et personne n'a celui de cherche, a s'assurer les moyens de commettre une injustice.' Vie de Voltaire; Oeuv. iv. 33, 34. Condorcet might have found some countenance for his sophisms in Plato (Republ. ii. 383); but even Plato restricted the privilege of lying to statesmen (iii. 389). He was in a wiser mood when he declared (Oeuv. v. 384) that it is better to be imprudent than a hypocrite,—though for that matter these are hardly the only alternatives.

[69] Oeuv. vi. 163.

[70] Ib. vi. 22.

[71] Ib. p. 220.

[72] Oeuv. p. 234.



VI.

We have now seen something of Condorcet's ideas of the past, and of his conception 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 details to which his study of the science of man conducted him. It is well to perceive at the outset that Condorcet's views of the Tenth Epoch, as he counts the period extending from the French Revolution to the era of the indefinite perfection of man, were in truth not the result of any scientific processes whatever, properly so called. He saw, and this is his merit, that such processes were applicable to the affairs of society; and that, as he put it, all political and moral errors rest upon error in philosophy, which in turn is bound up with erroneous methods in physical science.[73] But in the execution of his plan he does not succeed in showing the nature of the relations of these connected forces; still less does he practise the scientific duty, for illustrating which he gives such well-deserved glory to Newton,[74] of not only accounting for phenomena, but also of measuring the quantity of forces. His conception, therefore, of future progress, however near conjecture may possibly have brought him to the truth, is yet no more than 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 freedom and enlightenment, and that we might therefore confidently expect still further advances to be made in the same direction with an accelerated rapidity, and with certain advantageous effects upon the happiness of the whole mass of the human race. In short, the end of the speculation is a confirmed and heightened conviction of the indefinite perfectibility of the species, with certain foreshadowings of the direction which this perfectibility would ultimately follow. The same rebellion against the disorder and misery of the century, which drove some thinkers and politicians into fierce yearnings for an imaginary state of nature, and others into an extravagant admiration for the ancient republics, caused a third school, and Condorcet among them, to turn their eyes with equally boundless confidence and yearning towards an imaginary future. It was at all events the least desperate error of the three.

Our expectations for the future, Condorcet held, may be reduced to these three points: the destruction of inequality among nations; the progress of equality among the people of any given nation; and, finally the substantial perfecting (perfectionnement reel) of man.

I. With reference to the first of these great aspirations, it will be brought about by the abandonment by European peoples of their commercial monopolies, their treacherous practices, their mischievous and extravagant proselytising, and their sanguinary contempt for those of another colour or another creed. Vast countries, now a prey to barbarism and violence, will present in one region numerous populations only waiting to receive the means and instruments of civilisation from us, and as soon as they find brothers in the Europeans, will joyfully become their friends and pupils; and in another region, nations enslaved under the yoke of despots or conquerors, crying aloud for so many ages for liberators. In yet other regions, it is true, there are tribes almost savage, cut off by the harshness of their climate from a perfected civilisation, or else conquering hordes, ignorant of every law but violence and every trade but brigandage. The progress of these last two descriptions of people will naturally be more tardy, and attended by more storm and convulsion. It is possible even, that reduced in number, in proportion as they see themselves repulsed by civilised nations, they will end by insensibly disappearing.[75] It is perhaps a little hard to expect Esquimaux or the barbaric marauders of the sandy expanses of Central Asia insensibly to disappear, lest by their cheerless presence they should destroy the unity and harmony of the transformation scene in the great drama of Perfectibility.

II. The principal causes of the inequality that unfortunately exists among the people of the same community are three in number:—inequality in wealth; inequality of condition between the man whose means of subsistence are both assured and transmissible, and him for whom these means depend upon the duration of his working life; thirdly, inequality of instruction. How are we to establish a continual tendency in these three sources of inequality to diminish in activity and power? To lessen, though not to demolish, inequalities in wealth, it will be necessary for all artificial restrictions and exclusive advantages to be removed from fiscal or other legal arrangements, by which property is either acquired or accumulated: and among social changes tending in this direction will be the banishment by public opinion of an avaricious or mercenary spirit from marriage. Again, inequality between permanent and precarious incomes will be radically modified by the development of the application of the calculation of probabilities to life. The extension of annuities and insurance will not only benefit many individuals, but will benefit society at large by putting an end to that periodical ruin of a large number of families, which is such an ever-renewing source of misery and degradation. Another means to the same end will be found in discovering, by the same doctrine of probabilities, some other equally solid base for credit instead of a large capital, and for rendering the progress of industry and the activity of commerce more independent of the existence of great capitalists. Something approaching to equality of instruction, even for those who can only spare a few of their early years for study, and in after times only a few hours of leisure, will become more attainable by improved selection of subjects, and improved methods of teaching them. The dwellers in one country will cease to be distinguished by the use of a rude or of a refined dialect; and this, it may be said in passing, has actually been the result of the school system in the United States. One portion of them will no longer be dependent upon any other for guidance in the smallest affairs. We cannot obliterate nor ignore natural differences of capacity, but after public instruction has been properly developed, 'the difference will be between men of superior enlightenment, and men of an upright character who feel the value of light without being dazzled by it; between talent or genius, and that good sense which knows how to appreciate and to enjoy both. Even if this difference were greater than has been said, if we compare the force and extent of faculty, it would become none the less insensible, if we compare their respective effects upon the relations of men among themselves, upon all that affects their independence and their happiness.'[76]

III. What are the changes that we may expect from the substantial perfecting of human nature and society? If, before making this forecast, we reflect with what feeble means the race has arrived at its present knowledge of useful and important truths, we shall not fear the reproach of temerity in our anticipations for a time when the force of all these means shall have been indefinitely increased. The progress of agricultural science will make the same land more productive, and the same labour more efficient. Nay, who shall predict what the art of converting elementary substances into food for our use may one day become? The constant tendency of population to advance to the limits of the means of subsistence thus amplified, will be checked by a rising consciousness in men, that if they have obligations in respect of creatures still unborn, these obligations consist in giving them, not existence but happiness, in adding to the wellbeing of the family, and not cumbering the earth with useless and unfortunate beings. This changed view upon population will partly follow from the substitution of rational ideas for those prejudices which have penetrated morals with an austerity that is corrupting and degrading.[77] The movement will be further aided by one of the most important steps in human progress—the destruction, namely, of the prejudices that have established inequality of rights between the two sexes, and which are so mischievous even to the sex that seems to be most favoured.[78] We seek in vain for any justification of such an inequality in difference of physical organisation, in force of intelligence, or in moral sensibility. It has no other origin than abuse of strength, and it is to no purpose that attempts are made to excuse it by sophisms. The destruction of the usages springing from this custom will render common those domestic virtues which are the foundation of all others, and will encourage education as well as make it more general, both because instruction would be imparted to both sexes with more equality, and because it cannot become general even for males without the aid of the mother of the family.[79]

Among other improvements under our third head will be the attainment of greater perfection in language, leading at once to increased accuracy and increased concision. Laws and institutions, following the progress of knowledge, will be constantly undergoing modifications tending to identify individual with collective interests. Wars will grow less frequent with the extinction of those ideas of hereditary and dynastic rights, that have occasioned so many bloody contests. The art of learning will be facilitated by the institution of a Universal Language; and the art of teaching by resort to Technical Methods, or systems which unite in orderly arrangement a great number of different objects, so that their relations are perceived at a single glance.[80]

Finally, progress in medicine, the use of more wholesome food and healthy houses, the diminution of the two most active causes of deterioration, namely, misery and excessive wealth, must prolong the average duration of life, as well as raise the tone of health while it lasts. The force of transmissable diseases will be gradually weakened, until their quality of transmission vanishes. May we then not hope for the arrival of a time when death will cease to be anything but the effect either of extraordinary accidents, or of the destruction, ever slower and slower, of the vital forces? May we not believe that the duration of the middle interval between birth and this destruction has no assignable term? Man will never become immortal, but is it a mere chimera to hold that the term fixed to his years is slowly and perpetually receding further and further from the moment at which his existence begins?[81]

* * * * *

The rapidity and the necessary incompleteness with which Condorcet threw out in isolated hints his ideas of the future state of society, impart to his conception a certain mechanical aspect, which conveys an incorrect impression of his notion of the sources whence social change must flow. His admirable and most careful remarks upon the moral training of children prove him to have been as far removed as possible from any of those theories of the formation of character which merely prescribe the imposition of moulds and casts from without, instead of carefully tending the many spontaneous and sensitive processes of growth within.[82] Nobody has shown a finer appreciation of the delicacy of the material out of which character is to be made, and of the susceptibility of its elementary structure; nor of the fact that education consists in such a discipline of the primitive impulses as shall lead men to do right, not by the constraint of mechanical external sanctions, but by an instant, spontaneous, and almost inarticulate repugnance to cowardice, cruelty, apathy, self-indulgence, and the other great roots and centres of wrong-doing. It was to a society composed of men and women whose characters had been shaped on this principle, that Condorcet looked for the realisation of his exalted hopes for humanity.[83]

With machinery and organisation, in truth, Condorcet did not greatly concern himself; probably too little rather than too much. The central idea of all his aspirations was to procure the emancipation of reason, free and ample room for its exercise, and improved competence among men in the use of it. The subjugation of the modern intelligence beneath the disembodied fancies of the grotesque and sombre imagination of the Middle Ages, did not offend him more than the idea of any fixed organisation of the spiritual power, or any final and settled and universally accepted solution of belief and order would have done. With De Maistre and Comte the problem was the organised and systematic reconstruction of an anarchic society. With Condorcet it was how to persuade men to exert the individual reason methodically and independently, not without co-operation, but without anything like official or other subordination.

His cardinal belief and precept was, as with Socrates, that the bios anexetastos is not to be lived by man. As we have seen, the freedom of the reason was so dear to him, that he counted it an abuse for a parent to instil his own convictions into the defenceless minds of his young children. This was the natural outcome of Condorcet's mode of viewing history as the record of intellectual emancipation, while to Comte its deepest interest was as a record of moral and emotional cultivation. If we value in one type of thinker the intellectual conscientiousness, which refrains from perplexing men by propounding problems unless the solution can be set forth also, perhaps we owe no less honour in the thinker of another type to that intellectual self-denial which makes him very careful lest the too rigid projection of his own specific conclusions should by any means obstruct the access of a single ray of fertilising light. This religious scrupulosity, which made him abhor all interference with the freedom and openness of the understanding as the worst kind of sacrilege, was Condorcet's eminent distinction. If, as some think, the world will gradually transform its fear or love of unknowable gods into a devout reverence for those who have stirred in men a sense of the dignity of their own nature and of its large and multitudinous possibilities, then will his name not fail of deep and perpetual recollection.

FOOTNOTES:

[73] Ib. p. 223.

[74] Ib. p. 206.

[75] Oeuv. pp. 239-244.

[76] Oeuv. pp. 244-251.

[77] Oeuv. pp. 257, 258.

[78] Condorcet had already assailed the prejudices that keep women in subjection in an excellent tract, published in 1790; Sur l'Admission des Femmes au Droit de Cite. Oeuv. x. 121-130.

[79] Oeuv. p. 264. The rest of the passage is not perfectly intelligible to me, so I give it as it stands. 'Cet hommage trop tardif, rendu enfin a l'equite et au bon sens, ne tarirait-il pas une source trop feconde d'injustices, de cruautes et de crimes, en faisant disparaitre une opposition si dangereuse entre le penchant naturel le plus vif, le plus difficile a reprimer, et les devoirs de l'homme ou les interets de la societe? Ne produirait-il pas, enfin, des moeurs nationales douces et pures, formees non de privations orgueilleuses, d'apparences hypocrites, de reserves imposees par la crainte de la honte ou les terreurs religieuses, mais d'habitudes librement contractees, inspirees par la nature, avouees par la raison?' Can these habitudes be the habitudes of Free Love, or what are they? Condorcet, we know, thought the indissolubility of marriage a monstrously bad thing, but the grounds which he gives for his thinking so would certainly lead to the infinite dissolubility of society. See a truly astounding passage in the Fragment on the Tenth Epoch, vi. 523-526. See also some curious words in a letter to Turgot, i. 221, 222.

[80] Oeuv. pp. 269-272.

[81] Oeuv. pp. 272-275. Also p. 618.

[82] See Fragment de l'Histoire de la Xe Epoque. 'Il ne faut pas leur dire, mais les accoutumer a croire, a trouver au dedans a'eux-memes, que la bonte et la justice sont necessaires au bonheur, comme une respiration facile et libre l'est a la sante.' Of books for the young: 'Il faut qu'ils n'excedent jamais l'etendue ou la delicatesse de la sensibilite.' 'Il faut renoncer a l'idee de parler aux enfans de ce que ni leur esprit ni leur ame ne peuvent encore comprendre; ne pas leur faire admirer une constitution et reciter par coeur les droits politiques de l'homme quand ils ont a peine une idee nette de leurs relations avec leur famille et leurs camarades.'

Still more objectionable, we may be sure, would he have found the practice of drilling little children by the hearth or at the school-desk in creeds, catechisms, and the like repositories of mysteries baleful to the growing intelligence. 'Aidons le developpement des facultes humaines pendant la faiblesse de l'enfance,' he said admirably, 'mais n'abusons pas de cette faiblesse pour les mouler au gre de nos opinions de nos interets, ou de notre orgueil.'—Oeuv. vi. 543-554.

Cf. also v. 363-365, where there are some deserved strictures on the malpractice of teaching children as truth what the parents themselves believe 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 Memoires sur l'Instruction Publique, written in 1791-1792, and printed in the seventh volume of the works, are still very well worth turning to.

Transcribers' Notes:

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

List of Amendments:

Page 201: colleages amended to colleagues; "... among his colleagues in the deputation ..."

Page 240: added missing footnote anchor [66] to paragraph ending "... ceased to be altogether exact."

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