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 se