ey
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