Chapter I: Front Matter

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 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 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 Helvétius, had vanished, but Condorcet both assisted at the Encyclopædia 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 his person,' wrote Madame Roland, 'that it is a subtle essence soaked in cotton.' The curious mixture disclosed by sayings like these, of warm impulse and fine purpose with immovable reserve, only shows that he of whom they were spoken belonged to the class of natures which may be called non-conducting. They are not effective, because without this effluence of power and feeling from within, the hearer or onlooker is stirred by no sympathetic thrill. They cannot be the happiest, because consciousness of the inequality between expression and meaning, between the influence intended and the impression conveyed, must be as tormenting as to one who dreams is the vain effort to strike a blow. If to be of this non-conducting temperament is impossible in the really greatest characters, like St. Paul, St. Bernard, or Luther, at least it is no proper object of blame, for it is constantly the companion of lofty and generous aspiration. It was perhaps unfortunate that Condorcet should have permitted himself to be drawn into a position where his want of that magical quality by which even Marat could gain the sympathies of men, should be so conspicuously made visible. The character of Condorcet, unlike so many of his contemporaries, offers nothing to the theatrical instinct. None the less on this account should we be willing to weigh the contributions which he made to the stock of science and social speculation, and recognise the fine elevation of his sentiments, his noble solicitude for human wellbeing, his eager and resolute belief in its indefinite expansion, and the devotion which sealed his faith by a destiny that was as tragical as any in those bloody and most tragical days.