I.
The authority which the advanced thinkers of France gained among the
middle classes during the third quarter of the eighteenth century was
promoted by the influence of fashion. The new ideas of philosophers,
rationalists, and men of science had interested the nobles and higher
classes of society for two generations, and were a common subject of
discussion in the most distinguished salons. Voltaire's intimacy with
Frederick the Great, the relations of d'Alembert and Diderot with the
Empress Catherine, conferred on these men of letters, and on the ideas
for which they stood, a prestige which carried great weight with the
bourgeoisie. Humbler people, too, were as amenable as the great to
the seduction of theories which supplied simple keys to the universe
[Footnote: Taine said of the Contrat Social that it reduces political
science to the strict application of an elementary axiom which renders
all study unnecessary (La Revolution, vol. i. c. iv. Sec. iii.).] and
assumed that everybody was capable of judging for himself on the most
difficult problems. As well as the Encyclopaedia, the works of nearly
all the leading thinkers were written for the general public not merely
for philosophers. The policy of the Government in suppressing these
dangerous publications did not hinder their diffusion, and gave them
the attraction of forbidden fruit. In 1770 the avocat general (Seguier)
acknowledged the futility of the policy. "The philosophers," he said,
"have with one hand sought to shake the throne, with the other to upset
the altars. Their purpose was to change public opinion on civil and
religious institutions, and the revolution has, so to speak, been
effected. History and poetry, romances and even dictionaries, have
been infected with the poison of incredulity. Their writings are hardly
published in the capital before they inundate the provinces like
a torrent. The contagion has spread into workshops and cottages."
[Footnote: Rocquain, L'Esprit revolutionnaire avant la Revolution, p.
278.]
The contagion spread, but the official who wrote these words did not see
that it was successful because it was opportune, and that the minds
of men were prepared to receive the seed of revolutionary ideas by the
unspeakable corruption of the Government and the Church. As Voltaire
remarked about the same time, France was becoming Encyclopaedist, and
Europe too.
2.
The influence of the subversive and rationalistic thinkers in bringing
about the events of 1789 has been variously estimated by historians.
The truth probably lies in the succinct statement of Acton that "the
confluence of French theory with American example caused the Revolution
to break out" when it did. The theorists aimed at reform, not at
political revolution; and it was the stimulus of the Declaration
of Rights of 1774 and the subsequent victory of the Colonies that
precipitated the convulsion, at a time when the country had a better
prospect of improvement than it ever had before 1774, when Louis XVI.
came to the throne. But the theories had prepared France for radical
changes, and they guided the phases of the Revolution. The leaders had
all the optimism of the Encyclopaedists; yet the most powerful single
force was Rousseau, who, though he denied Progress and blasphemed
civilisation, had promulgated the doctrine of the sovereignty of the
people, giving it an attractive appearance of mathematical precision;
and to this doctrine the revolutionaries attached their optimistic
hopes. [Footnote: It is interesting to observe how Robespierre, to whom
the doctrines of Rousseau were oracles, could break out into admiration
of the progress of civilised man, as he did in the opening passage of
his speech of 7th May 1794. proposing the decree for the worship of
the Supreme Being (see the text in Stephen, Orators of the French
Revolution, ii. 391-92).] The theory of equality seemed no longer merely
speculative; for the American constitution was founded on democratic
equality, whereas the English constitution, which before had seemed
the nearest approximation to the ideal of freedom, was founded on
inequality. The philosophical polemic of the masters was waged with
weapons of violence by the disciples. Chaumette and Hebert, the
followers of d'Holbach, were destroyed by the disciples of Rousseau. In
the name of the creed of the Vicaire Savoyard the Jacobin Club shattered
the bust of Helvetius. Mably and Morelly had their disciples in Babeuf
and the socialists.
A naive confidence that the political upheaval meant regeneration and
inaugurated a reign of justice and happiness pervaded France in the
first period of the Revolution, and found a striking expression in the
ceremonies of the universal "Federation" in the Champ-de-Mars on 14th
July 1790. The festival was theatrical enough, decreed and arranged by
the Constituent Assembly, but the enthusiasm and optimism of the people
who gathered to swear loyalty to the new Constitution were genuine and
spontaneous. Consciously or subconsciously they were under the influence
of the doctrine of Progress which leaders of opinion had for several
decades been insinuating into the public mind. It did not occur to them
that their oaths and fraternal embraces did not change their minds
or hearts, and that, as Taine remarked, they remained what ages of
political subjection and one age of political literature had made them.
The assumption that new social machinery could alter human nature and
create a heaven upon earth was to be swiftly and terribly confuted.
Post uarios casus et tot discrimina rerum
uenimus in Latium,
but Latium was to be the scene of sanguinary struggles.
Another allied and fundamental fallacy, into which all the philosophers
and Rousseau had more or less fallen, was reflected and exposed by the
Revolution. They had considered man in vacuo. They had not seen that
the whole development of a society is an enormous force which cannot be
talked or legislated away; they had ignored the power of social memory
and historical traditions, and misvalued the strength of the links which
bind generations together. So the Revolutionaries imagined that they
could break abruptly with the past, and that a new method of government,
constructed on mathematical lines, a constitution (to use words of
Burke) "ready made and ready armed, mature in its birth, a perfect
goddess of wisdom and of war, hammered by our blacksmith midwives out
of the brain of Jupiter himself," would create a condition of idyllic
felicity in France, and that the arrival of the millennium depended only
on the adoption of the same principles by other nations. The illusions
created by the Declaration of the Rights of Man on the 4th of August
died slowly under the shadow of the Terror; but though the hopes of
those who believed in the speedy regeneration of the world were belied,
some of the thoughtful did not lose heart. There was one at least who
did not waver in his faith that the movement was a giant's step on
the path of man towards ultimate felicity, however far he had still to
travel. Condorcet, one of the younger Encyclopaedists, spent the last
months of his life, under the menace of the guillotine, in projecting a
history of human Progress.
3.
Condorcet was the friend and biographer of Turgot, and it was not
unfitting that he should resume the design of a history of civilisation,
in the light of the idea of Progress, for which Turgot had only left
luminous suggestions. He did not execute the plan, but he completed an
elaborate sketch in which the controlling ideas of the scheme are fully
set forth. His principles are to be found almost entirely in Turgot. But
they have a new significance for Condorcet. He has given them wings. He
has emphasised, and made deductions. Turgot wrote in the calm spirit
of an inquirer. Condorcet spoke with the verve of a prophet. He was
prophesying under the shadow of death. It is amazing that the optimistic
Sketch of a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind
should have been composed when he was hiding from Robespierre in 1793.
[Footnote: Published in 1795.]
Condorcet was penetrated with the spirit of the Encyclopaedists, of whom
he had been one, and his attitude to Christianity was that of Voltaire
and Diderot. Turgot had treated the received religion respectfully. He
had acknowledged Providence, and, though the place which he assigned to
Providence was that of a sort of honorary President of the development
of civilisation who might disappear without affecting the proceedings,
there was a real difference between his views and those of his friend as
to the role of Christianity and the civilisation of the Middle Ages.
A more important difference between the two thinkers is connected with
the different circumstances in which they wrote. Turgot did not believe
in the necessity of violent changes; he thought that steady reforms
under the existing regime would do wonders for France. Before
the Revolution Condorcet had agreed, but he was swept away by its
enthusiasm. The victory of liberty in America and the increasing volume
of the movement against slavery--one of the causes which most deeply
stirred his heart--had heightened his natural optimism and confirmed his
faith in the dogma of Progress. He felt the exhilaration of the belief
that he was living through "one of the greatest revolutions of the human
race," and he deliberately designed his book to be opportune to a crisis
of mankind, at which "a picture of revolutions of the past will be the
best guide."
Feeling that he is personally doomed, he consoles himself with brooding
on the time, however remote, when the sun will shine "on an earth of
none but freemen, with no master save reason; for tyrants and
slaves, priests and their stupid or hypocritical tools, will all have
disappeared." He is not satisfied with affirming generally the certainty
of an indefinite progress in enlightenment and social welfare. He
sets himself to think out its nature, to forecast its direction, and
determine its goal, and insists, as his predecessors had never done, on
the prospects of the distant future.
4.
His ambitious design is, in his own words, to show "the successive
changes in human society, the influence which each instant exerts on
the succeeding instant, and thus, in its successive modifications,
the advance of the human species towards truth or happiness." Taken
literally, this is an impossible design, and to put it forward as a
practical proposition is as if a man were to declare his intention of
writing a minute diary of the life of Julius Caesar from his birth to
his death. By stating his purpose in such terms, Condorcet reveals that
he had no notion of the limitations which confine our knowledge of the
past, and that even if he had conceived a more modest and practicable
programme he would have been incapable of executing it. His formula,
however, is worth remembering. For the unattainable ideal which it
expresses reminds us how many periods and passages of human experience
must always remain books with seven seals.
Condorcet distinguished ten periods of civilisation, of which the tenth
lies in the future, but he has not justified his divisions and his
epochs are not co-ordinate in importance. Yet his arrangement of the map
of history is remarkable as an attempt to mark its sections not by great
political changes but by important steps in knowledge. The first three
periods--the formation of primitive societies, followed by the pastoral
age, and the agricultural age--conclude with the invention of alphabetic
writing in Greece. The fourth is the history of Greek thought, to the
definite division of the sciences in the time of Aristotle. In the fifth
knowledge progresses and suffers obscuration under Roman rule, and the
sixth is the dark age which continues to the time of the Crusades. The
significance of the seventh period is to prepare the human mind for the
revolution which would be achieved by the invention of printing, with
which the eighth period opens. Some of the best pages of the book
develop the vast consequences of this invention. The scientific
revolution effected by Descartes begins a new period, which is now
closed by the creation of the French Republic.
The idea of the progress of knowledge had created the idea of social
Progress and remained its foundation. It was therefore logical and
inevitable that Condorcet should take advance in knowledge as the clew
to the march of the human race. The history of civilisation is the
history of enlightenment. Turgot had justified this axiom by formulating
the cohesion of all modes of social activity. Condorcet insists on "the
indissoluble union" between intellectual progress and that of liberty,
virtue, and the respect for natural rights, and on the effect of science
in the destruction of prejudice. All errors in politics and ethics have
sprung, he asserts, from false ideas which are closely connected with
errors in physics and ignorance of the laws of nature. And in the new
doctrine of Progress he sees an instrument of enlightenment which is to
give "the last blow to the tottering edifice of prejudices."
It would not be useful to analyse Condorcet's sketch or dwell on his
obsolete errors and the defects of his historical knowledge. His
slight picture of the Middle Ages reflects the familiar view of all
the eighteenth century philosophers. The only contribution to social
amelioration which he can discover in a period of nearly a millennium
is the abolition of domestic slavery. And so this period appears as
an interruption of the onward march. His inability to appreciate the
historical role of the Roman Empire exhibits more surprising ignorance
and prejudice. But these particular defects are largely due to a
fundamental error which runs through his whole book and was inherent in
the social speculations of the Encyclopaedists. Condorcet, like all his
circle, ignored the preponderant part which institutions have played in
social development. So far as he considered them at all, he saw in
them obstacles to the free play of human reason; not the spontaneous
expression of a society corresponding to its needs or embodying its
ideals, but rather machinery deliberately contrived for oppressing the
masses and keeping them in chains. He did not see that if the Progress
in which he believed is a reality, its possibility depends on the
institutions and traditions which give to societies their stability. In
the following generation, it would be pointed out that he fell into a
manifest contradiction when he praised the relative perfection reached
in some European countries in the eighteenth century, and at the
same time condemned as eminently retrograde all the doctrines and
institutions which had been previously in control. [Footnote: Comte.
Cours de philosophie positive, iv. 228.] This error is closely connected
with the other error, previously noticed, of conceiving man abstracted
from his social environment and exercising his reason in vacuo.
5.
The study of the history of civilisation has, in Condorcet's eyes, two
uses. It enables us to establish the fact of Progress, and it should
enable us to determine its direction in the future, and thereby to
accelerate the rate of progression.
By the facts of history and the arguments they suggest, he undertakes
to show that nature has set no term to the process of improving human
faculties, and that the advance towards perfection is limited only by
the duration of the globe. The movement may vary in velocity, but it
will never be retrograde so long as the earth occupies its present place
in the cosmic system and the general laws of this system do not produce
some catastrophe or change which would deprive the human race of the
faculties and resources which it has hitherto possessed. There will be
no relapse into barbarism. The guarantees against this danger are the
discovery of true methods in the physical sciences, their application to
the needs of men, the lines of communication which have been established
among them, the great number of those who study them, and finally
the art of printing. And if we are sure of the continuous progress of
enlightenment, we may be sure of the continuous improvement of social
conditions.
It is possible to foresee events, if the general laws of social
phenomena are known, and these laws can be inferred from the history
of the past. By this statement Condorcet justifies his bold attempt to
sketch his tenth period of human history which lies in the future; and
announces the idea which was in the next generation to be worked out by
Comte. But he cannot be said to have deduced himself any law of social
development. His forecast of the future is based on the ideas and
tendencies of his own age. [Footnote: It is interesting to notice
that the ablest of medieval Arabic historians, Ibn Khaldun (fourteenth
century), had claimed that if history is scientifically studied future
events may be predicted.]
Apart from scientific discoveries and the general diffusion of a
knowledge of the laws of nature on which moral improvement depends,
he includes in his prophetic vision the cessation of war and the
realisation of the less familiar idea of the equality of the sexes. If
he were alive to-day, he could point with triumph to the fact that of
these far-reaching projects one is being accomplished in some of the
most progressive countries and the other is looked upon as an attainable
aim by statesmen who are not visionaries. The equality of the sexes was
only a logical inference from the general doctrine of equality to which
Condorcet's social theory is reducible. For him the goal of political
progress is equality; equality is to be the aim of social effort--the
ideal of the Revolution.
For it is the multitude of men that must be considered--the mass of
workers, not the minority who live on their labours. Hitherto they have
been neglected by the historian as well as by the statesman. The true
history of humanity is not the history of some men. The human race is
formed by the mass of families who subsist almost entirely on the fruits
of their own work, and this mass is the proper subject of history, not
great men.
You may establish social equality by means of laws and institutions,
yet the equality actually enjoyed may be very incomplete. Condorcet
recognises this and attributes it to three principal causes: inequality
in wealth; inequality in position between the man whose means of
subsistence are assured and can be transmitted to his family and the man
whose means depend on his work and are limited by the term of his own
life [Footnote: He looked forward to the mitigation of this inequality
by the development of life insurance which was then coming to the
front.]; and inequality in education. He did not propose any radical
methods for dealing with these difficulties, which he thought would
diminish in time, without, however, entirely disappearing. He was too
deeply imbued with the views of the Economists to be seduced by the
theories of Rousseau, Mably, Babeuf, and others, into advocating
communism or the abolition of private property.
Besides equality among the individuals composing a civilised society,
Condorcet contemplated equality among all the peoples of the earth,--a
uniform civilisation throughout the world, and the obliteration of the
distinction between advanced and retrograde races. The backward peoples,
he prophesied, will climb up to the condition of France and the United
States of America, for no people is condemned never to exercise its
reason. If the dogma of the perfectibility of human nature, unguarded by
any restrictions, is granted, this is a logical inference, and we
have already seen that it was one of the ideas current among the
philosophers.
Condorcet does not hesitate to add to his picture adventurous
conjectures on the improvement of man's physical organisation, and a
considerable prolongation of his life by the advance of medical science.
We need only note this. More interesting is the prediction that, even
if the compass of the human being's cerebral powers is inalterable,
the range, precision, and rapidity of his mental operations will be
augmented by the invention of new instruments and methods.
The design of writing a history of human civilisation was premature, and
to have produced a survey of any durable value would have required
the equipment of a Gibbon. Condorcet was not even as well equipped as
Voltaire. [Footnote: But as he wrote without books the Sketch was a
marvellous tour de force.] The significance of his Sketch lies in this,
that towards the close of an intellectual movement it concentrated
attention on the most important, though hitherto not the most prominent,
idea which that movement had disseminated, and as it were officially
announced human Progress as the leading problem that claimed the
interest of mankind. With him Progress was associated intimately with
particular eighteenth century doctrines, but these were not essential
to it. It was a living idea; it survived the compromising theories which
began to fall into discredit after the Revolution, and was explored from
new points of view. Condorcet, however, wedded though his mind was to
the untenable views of human nature current in his epoch and his circle,
did not share the tendency of leading philosophers to regard history
as an unprofitable record of folly and crime which it would be well to
obliterate or forget. He recognised the interpretation of history as
the key to human development, and this principle controlled subsequent
speculations on Progress in France.
6.
Cabanis, the physician, was Condorcet's literary executor, and a no less
ardent believer in human perfectibility. Looking at life and man from
his own special point of view, he saw in the study of the physical
organism the key to the intellectual and moral improvement of the race.
It is by knowledge of the relations between his physical states and
moral states that man can attain happiness, through the enlargement of
his faculties and the multiplication of enjoyments, and that he will
be able to grasp, as it were, the infinite in his brief existence by
realising the certainty of indefinite progress. His doctrine was
a logical extension of the theories of Locke and Condillac. If our
knowledge is wholly derived from sensations, our sensations depend on
our sensory organs, and mind becomes a function of the nervous system.
The events of the Revolution quenched in him as little as in Condorcet
the sanguine confidence that it was the opening of a new era for science
and art, and thereby for the general Progress of man. "The present is
one of those great periods of history to which posterity will often
look back" with gratitude. [Footnote: Picavet, Les Ideologues, p. 203.
Cabanis was born in 1757 and died in 1808.] He took an active part in
the coup d'etat of the 18th of Brumaire (1799) which was to lead to the
despotism of Napoleon. He imagined that it would terminate oppression,
and was as enthusiastic for it as he and Condorcet had been for the
Revolution ten years before. "You philosophers," he wrote, [Footnote:
Ib. p. 224.] "whose studies are directed to the improvement and
happiness of the race, you no longer embrace vain shadows. Having
watched, in alternating moods of hope and sadness, the great spectacle
of our Revolution, you now see with joy the termination of its last act;
you will see with rapture this new era, so long promised to the French
people, at last open, in which all the benefits of nature, all the
creations of genius, all the fruits of time, labour, and experience will
be utilised, an era of glory and prosperity in which the dreams of your
philanthropic enthusiasm should end by being realised."
It was an over-sanguine and characteristic greeting of the eighteenth to
the nineteenth century. Cabanis was one of the most important of those
thinkers who, living into the new period, took care that the ideas of
their own generation should not be overwhelmed in the rising flood of
reaction.