



Produced by Paul Murray, Rene Anderson Benitz and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net






Note:

Greek words/phrases in the text are noted as +Greek text+.
OE/oe ligatures have not been retained in this version.




CRITICAL MISCELLANIES


BY

JOHN MORLEY


VOL. II.

Essay 3: Condorcet




London
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
New York: The MacMillan Company
1905






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 Progres_                          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 been
actively scattering the seed of revolution in France, only Condorcet
survived to behold the first bitter ingathering of the harvest. Those
who had sown the wind were no more; he only was left to see the reaping
of the whirlwind, and to be swiftly and cruelly swept away by it.
Voltaire and Diderot, Rousseau and Helvetius, had vanished, but
Condorcet both assisted at the Encyclopaedia and sat in the Convention;
the one eminent man of those who had tended the tree, who also came in
due season to partake of its fruit; at once a precursor, and a sharer in
the fulfilment. In neither character has he attracted the goodwill of
any of those considerable sections and schools into which criticism of
the Revolution has been mainly divided. As a thinker he is roughly
classed as an Economist, and as a practical politician he figured first
in the Legislative Assembly, and then in the Convention. Now, as a rule,
the political parties that have most admired the Convention have had
least sympathy with the Economists, and the historians who are most
favourable to Turgot and his followers, are usually most hostile to the
actions and associations of the great revolutionary chamber successively
swayed by a Vergniaud, a Danton, a Robespierre. Between the two,
Condorcet's name has been allowed to lie hidden for the most part in a
certain obscurity, or else has been covered with those taunts and
innuendoes, which partisans are wont to lavish on men of whom they do
not know exactly whether they are with or against them.

Generally the men of the Revolution are criticised in blocks and
sections, and Condorcet cannot be accurately placed under any of these
received schools. He was an Economist, but he was something more; for
the most characteristic article in his creed was a passionate belief in
the infinite perfectibility of human nature. He was more of a Girondin
than a Jacobin, yet he did not always act, any more than he always
thought, with the Girondins, and he did not fall when they fell, but was
proscribed by a decree specially levelled at himself. Isolation of this
kind is assuredly no merit in political action, but it explains the
coldness with which Condorcet's memory has been treated; it flowed from
some marked singularities both of character and opinion which are of the
highest interest, if we consider the position of the man and the lustre
of that ever-memorable time. 'Condorcet,' said D'Alembert, 'is a volcano
covered with snow.' Said another, less picturesquely: 'He is a sheep in
a passion.' 'You may say of the intelligence of Condorcet in relation
to