and 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 of
the seventh, Condorcet, with one of his legs torn or broken, his
garments in rags, with visage gaunt and hunger-stricken, entered an inn
in the hamlet of Clamart, and called for an omelette. Asked how many
eggs he would have in it, the famishing man answered a dozen.
Carpenters, for such he had given himself to be, do not have a dozen
eggs in their omelettes. Suspicion was aroused, his hands were not the
hands of a workman, and he had no papers to show, but only the pocket
Horace. The villagers seized him and hastened to drag him, bound hand
and 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 pitying
wayfarer. When they reached the prison, Condorcet, starving, bleeding,
way-worn, was flung into his cell. On the morrow, when the gaolers came
to seek him, they found him stretched upon the ground, dead and stark.
So he perished--of hunger and weariness, say some; of poison ever
carried by him in a ring, say others.[39] So, to the last revolving
supreme cares, this high spirit was overtaken by annihilation. His
memory is left to us, the fruit of his ideas, and the impression of his
character.
* * * * *
An eminent man, who escaped by one accident from the hatchets of the
Septembriseurs, and by another from the guillotine of the Terror, while
in hiding and in momentary expectation of capture and death, wrote thus
in condemnation of suicide, 'the one crime which leaves no possibility
of return to virtue.' 'Even at this incomprehensible moment'--the spring
of 1793--'when morality, enlightenment, energetic love of country, only
render death at the prison-wicket or on the scaffold more inevitable;
when it might be allowable to choose among the ways of leaving a life
that can no longer be preserved, and to rob tigers in human form of the
accursed pleasure of dragging you forth and drinking your blood; yes, on
the fatal tumbril itself, with nothing free but voice, I could still
cry, _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 owe
its salvation to him.'[40]
More than one career in those days, famous or obscure, was marked by
this noble tenacity to lofty public ideas even in the final moments of
existence. Its general acceptance as a binding duty, exorcising the
mournful and insignificant egotisms that haunt and wearily fret and make
waste the remnants of so many lives, will produce the profoundest of all
possible improvements in men's knowledge of the sublime art of the
happiness of their kind. The closing words of Condorcet's last
composition show the solace which perseverance in taking thought for
mankind brought to him in the depths of personal calamity. He had
concluded his survey of the past history of the race, and had drawn what
seemed in his eyes a moderate and reasonable picture of its future. 'How
this picture,' he exclaims, with the knell of his own doom sounding full
in the ear while he wrote, 'this picture of the human race freed from
all its fetters, withdrawn from the empire of chance, as from that of
the enemies of progress, and walking with firm and assured step in the
way of truth, of virtue, and happiness, presents to the philosopher a
sight that consoles him for the errors, the crimes, the injustice, with
which the earth is yet stained, and of which he is not seldom the
victim! It is in the contemplation of this picture that he receives the
reward of his efforts for the progress of reason, for the defence of
liberty. He ventures to link them with the eternal chain of the
destinies of man: it is there that he finds the true recompense of
virtue, the pleasure of having done a lasting good. Fate can no longer
undo it by any disastrous compensation that shall restore prejudice and
bondage. This contemplation is for him a refuge, into which the
recollection of his persecutors can never follow him; in which, living
in thought with man reinstated in the rights and the dignity of his
nature, 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 elysium
that his reason has known how to create for itself, and that his love
for humanity adorns with all purest delights.'[41]
It has long been the fashion among the followers of that reaction which
Coleridge led and Carlyle has spread and popularised, to dwell
exclusively on the coldness and hardness, the excess of scepticism and
the defect of enthusiasm, that are supposed to have characterised the
eighteenth century. Because the official religion of the century both in
England and France was lifeless and mechanical, it has been taken for
granted that the level of thought and feeling was a low one universally;
as if the highest moods of every era necessarily clothed themselves in
religious forms. The truth is that, working in such natures as
Condorcet's, the principles of the eighteenth century, its homage to
reason and rational methods, its exaltation of the happiness of men, not
excluding their material wellbeing, into the highest place, its passion
for justice and law, its large illumination, all engendered a fervour as
truly religious as that of Catholicism or of Calvinism at their best,
while its sentiment was infinitely less interested and personal. The
passage just quoted is as little mechanical, as little material, as the
most rapturous ejaculations of the Christian saints and confessors. Read
in connection with the circumstances of its composition, it may show
that the eighteenth century was able at any rate to inspire its sons
with a faith that could rob death of its sting and the grave of its
victory, as effectually as if it had rested on a mystery instead of on
reason, and been supported by the sanctions of eternal pain and eternal
bliss, instead of moving from a confident devotion to humanity.
FOOTNOTES:
[30] _Déclaration de l'Assemblée Nationale_, 29 Déc. 1791. _Oeuv._ xii.
25.
[31] 13th August 1792. _Oeuv._ x. 547.
[32] _Ib._ x. 560.
[33] 19th August. _Ib._ x. 565.
[34] _Opinion sur le Jugement de Louis XVI._ Nov. 1792 _Oeuv._ xii.
267-303.
[35] 19th Jan. 1793. _Oeuv._ xii. 311.
[36] See M. Edgar Quinet's remarks on this achievement. _La Révolution_,
ii. 110.
[37] _Oeuv._ xii. 333, 417. M. Louis Blanc has contrasted the principles
laid down as the basis of this project with Robespierre's rival
Declaration of the Rights of Man, printing the two side by side in
parallel columns. '_Les voilà donc face à face, après leur commune
victoire sur le principe d'autorité, ces deux principes d'individualisme
et de fraternité, entre lesquels, aujourd'hui même, le monde balance,
invinciblement ému! D'un côté la philosophie du rationalisme pur, qui
divise; d'un autre côté la philosophie du sentiment, qui rapproche et
réunit. Ici Voltaire et Condorcet, là J. J. Rousseau et Robespierre._'
_Hist. de la Révol. Fran._ bk. ix. ch. v.
[38] _Extrait du Moniteur._ _Oeuv._ 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 of
stramonium and opium. He adds that the surgeon described death as due to
apoplexy. See Musset-Pathay's _J. J. Rousseau_, ii. 42.
[40] Dupont de Nemours. _Les Physiocrates_, i. 326.
[41] _Progrès de l'Esprit Humain._ _Oeuv._ vi. 276.
IV.
The shape of Condorcet's ideas upon history arose from the twofold
necessity which his character imposed upon him, at once of appeasing his
aspirations on behalf of mankind, and of satisfying a disciplined and
scientific intelligence. He was of too robust an understanding to find
adequate gratification in the artificial construction of hypothetical
utopias. Conviction was as indispensable as hope; and distinct grounds
for the faith that was in him, as essential as the faith itself. The
result of this fact of mental constitution, the intellectual conditions
of the time being what they were, was the rise in his mind of the great
and central conception of there being a law in the succession of social
states, to be ascertained by an examination of the collective phenomena
of past history. The merit of this admirable effort, and of the work in
which it found expression, is very easily underrated, because the effort
was insufficient and merely preparatory, while modern thought has
already carried us far beyond it, and at least into sight of the more
complete truths to which this effort only pointed the way. Let us
remember, however, that it did point the way distinctly and
unmistakably. A very brief survey of the state of history as a subject
of systematic study enables us to appreciate with precision what service
it was that Condorcet rendered; for it carries us back from the present
comparatively advanced condition of the science of society to a time
before his memorable attempt, when conceptions now become so familiar
were not in existence, and when even the most instructed students of
human affairs no more felt the need of a scientific theory of the manner
in which social effects follow social causes, than the least instructed
portion of the literary public feels such a need in our own time. It is
difficult after a subject has been separated from the nebulous mass of
unclassified knowledge, after it has taken independent shape, and begun
to move in lines of its own, to realise the process by which all this
was effected, or the way in which before all this the facts concerned
presented themselves to the thinker's mind. That we should overcome the
difficulty is one of the conditions of our being able to do justice to
the great army of the precursors.
Two movements of thought went on in France during the middle of the
eighteenth century, which have been comparatively little dwelt upon by
historians; their main anxiety has been to justify the foregone
conclusion, so gratifying alike to the partisans of the social reaction
and 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 highest
degree, and their influence undeniably constructive, if we consider that
it was from their union into a common channel, a work fully accomplished
first in the mind of Condorcet, that the notion of the scientific
treatment of history and society took its earliest start.
The first of the two movements, and that which has been most
unaccountably neglected, consisted in the remarkable attempts of Quesnay
and his immediate followers to withdraw the organisation of society from
the sphere of empiricism, and to substitute for the vulgar conception
of arbitrary and artificial institutions as the sole foundation of this
organisation, the idea that there is a certain Natural Order, conformity
to which in all social arrangements is the essential condition of their
being advantageous to the members of the social union. Natural Order in
the minds of this school was no metaphysical figment evolved from
uninstructed consciousness, but a set of circumstances to be discovered
by continuous and methodical observation. It consisted of physical law
and moral law. Physical law is the regulated course of every physical
circumstance 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 human
race. This order is the base of the most perfect government, and the
fundamental rule of all positive laws; for positive laws are only such
laws as are required to keep up and maintain the natural order that is
evidently most advantageous to the race.[42]
Towards the close of the reign of Lewis XIV. the frightful
impoverishment of the realm attracted the attention of one or two
enlightened observers, and among them of Boisguillebert and Vauban. They
had exposed, the former of them with especial force and amplitude, the
absurdity of the general system of administration, which seemed to have
been devised for the express purpose of paralysing both agriculture and
commerce, and exhausting all the sources of the national wealth.[43]
But these speculations had been mainly of a fiscal kind, and pointed not
much further than to a readjustment of taxation and an improvement in
the modes of its collection. The disciples of the New Science, as it was
called, the Physiocrats, or believers in the supremacy of Natural Order,
went much beyond this, and in theory sought to lay open the whole ground
of the fabric of society. Practically they dealt with scarcely any but
the economic circumstances of societies, though some of them mix up with
their reasonings upon commerce and agriculture crude and incomplete
hints upon forms of government and other questions that belong not to
the economical but to the political side of social science.[44]
Quesnay's famous _Maxims_ open with a declaration in favour of the unity
of the sovereign authority, and against the system of counterbalancing
forces in government. Almost immediately he passes on to the ground of
political economy, and elaborates the conditions of material prosperity
in an agricultural realm. With the correctness of the definitions and
principles of economic science as laid down by these writers, we have
here nothing to do. Their peculiar distinction in the present connection
is the grasp which they had of the principle of there being a natural,
and therefore a scientific, order in the conditions of a society; that
order being natural in the sense that they attached to the term, which
from the circumstances of the case is most beneficial to the race. From
this point of view they approach some of the problems of what is now
classified as social statics; and they assume, without any consciousness
of another aspect being possible, that the society which they are
discussing 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 of
the completely constituted science of society, with laws of movement as
well as laws of equilibrium, with definite methods of interpreting past
and predicting future states. They could account for and describe the
genesis of the social union, as Plato and Aristotle had in different
ways been able to do many centuries before; and they could prescribe
some of the conditions of its being maintained in vigour and
compactness. Some of them could even see in a vague way the
interdependence of peoples and the community of the real interests of
different nations, each nation, as De la Rivière expressed it, being
only a province of the vast kingdom of nature, a branch from the same
trunk as the rest.[45] What they could not see was the great fact of
social evolution; and here too, in the succession of social states,
there has been a natural and observable order. In a word, they tried to
understand society without the aid of history. Consequently they laid
down the truths which they discovered as absolute and fixed, when they
were no more than conditional and relative.
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
Lacedæmonians 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 causæque 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 (+sômatoeidês+).' 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.