nkind. 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 gre