the spirit
unsatisfied as when these crystal walls did first environ its
infinitude.

The defects, the nobility, and the beauty of the ideal of the Third Age
are conspicuous in the great last work of Condorcet. As Mirabeau, the
intellectual Catiline of his age, is the protagonist of Rebellion, that
principle which has drawn the deepest utterances from the world-soul,
from Job to Prometheus and Farinata, so Condorcet, whose countenance in
its high and gentle benevolence seems the very expression of that
_bienfaisance_ which the Abbe de Saint-Pierre made fashionable, may be
styled the high-priest of Girondinism, and he carries his faith beyond
the grave, hallowing the altar of Freedom with his blood. In over a
hundred pamphlets during the four years of his life as a Revolutionist,
Condorcet disseminates his ideas--fortnightly pamphlets, many of them
even now worth reading, lighting up now this, now that aspect of his
faith--kingship, slavery, the destiny of man, two Houses, assignats,
education of the people, finance, the rights of man, economics, free
trade, the rights of women, the Progress of the Human Mind. It is in
this last, written with the shadow of death upon him, that the central
thought of his system is developed. He may have derived it from
Turgot,[5] his master, and the subject of one of his noblest
biographies, but he gave it a consecration of his own, and later
writers have done little more than elaborate, vary, or reduce to
scientific rule and line his living thought. Where they most are
faithful, there his followers are greatest.

In the theory of evolution Condorcet's principles appear to find
scientific expression and warrant, but it is pathetic to observe the
speculative science of a modern systematizer advancing through volume
after volume with the cumbrous but massive force of a traction-engine,
only to find rest at last in a vision of Utopia some centuries hence,
tedious as the Paradise of mediaeval poets or the fabulous Edens of
earlier times.

Indeed, the conception of the infinite perfectibility of man, and of an
eternal progress, carried its own doom in the familiar observation that
there where progress can be traced, there the divine is least immanent.
A distinguished statesman and writer, and a believer in evolution,
recently avowed his perplexity that an age like the present, which has
invented steam, electricity, and the kinematograph, should in painting
and poetry not surpass the R