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 Progrès 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'être
trompés?_--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 progrès total finalement accompli ne peut être sans doute
que le résultat général de l'accumulation spontanée des divers progrès
partiels successivement réalisés 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, '_où
l'on s'est même 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 nécessité
de mentir pour désavouer un ouvrage est une extrémité qui répugne
également à la conscience et à la noblesse du caractère; mais le crime
est pour les hommes injustes qui rendent ce désaveu nécessaire à la
sûreté de celui qu'ils y forcent. Si vous avez érigé en crime ce qui
n'en est pas un, si vous avez porté 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
méritez de perdre celui qu'a chaque homme d'entendre la vérité 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 à lui en faire un; mais
le tort suppose un droit, et personne n'a celui de cherche, à 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 réel_) 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 Cité._ _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 à l'équité et au bon sens, ne tarirait-il pas une
source trop féconde d'injustices, de cruautés et de crimes, en faisant
disparaître une opposition si dangereuse entre le penchant naturel le
plus vif, le plus difficile à réprimer, et les devoirs de l'homme ou les
intérêts de la société? Ne produirait-il pas, enfin, des moeurs
nationales douces et pures, formées non de privations orgueilleuses,
d'apparences hypocrites, de réserves imposées par la crainte de la honte
ou les terreurs religieuses, mais d'habitudes librement contractées,
inspirées par la nature, avouées 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 à croire, à trouver au dedans
a'eux-mêmes, que la bonté et la justice sont nécessaires au bonheur,
comme une respiration facile et libre l'est à la santé._' Of books for
the young: '_Il faut qu'ils n'excédent jamais l'étendue ou la
délicatesse de la sensibilité._' '_Il faut renoncer à l'idée de parler
aux enfans de ce que ni leur esprit ni leur âme ne peuvent encore
comprendre; ne pas leur faire admirer une constitution et réciter par
coeur les droits politiques de l'homme quand ils ont à peine une idée
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 développement des facultés
humaines pendant la faiblesse de l'enfance_,' he said admirably, '_mais
n'abusons pas de cette faiblesse pour les mouler au gré de nos opinions
de nos intérêts, 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: