very. 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 m