t's purpose was not to justify nature, as it had been with
Kant, but to search in the past for rational grounds of a belief in the
unbounded splendour of men's future destinies. His view of the character
of the relations among the circumstances of the social union, either at
a given moment or in a succession of periods, was both accurate and
far-sighted. When he came actually to execute his own great idea, and to
specify the manner in which those relations arose and operated, he
instantly diverged from the right path. Progress in his mind is
exclusively produced by improvement in intelligence. It is the necessary
result of man's activity in the face of that disproportion ever existing
between what he knows and what he desires and feels the necessity to
know.[58] Hence the most fatal of the errors of Condorcet's sketch. He
measures only the contributions made by nations and eras to what we
know; leaving out of sight their failures and successes in the
elevation of moral standards and ideals, and in the purification of
human passions.

Now even if we hold the intellectual principle only to be progressive,
and the moral elements to be fixed, being coloured and shaped and
quickened by the surrounding intellectual conditions, still, inasmuch as
the manner of this shaping and colouring is continually changing and
leading to the most important transformations of human activity and
sentiment, it must obviously be a radical deficiency in any picture of
social progress to leave out the development of ethics, whether it be a
derivative or an independent and spontaneous development. One seeks in
vain in Condorcet's sketch for any account of the natural history of
western morals, or for any sign of consciousness on his part that the
difference in ethical discipline and feeling between the most ferocious
of primitive tribes and the most enlightened eighteenth-century
Frenchmen, was a result of evolution that needed historical explanation,
quite as much as the difference between the astrolatry of one age and
the astronomy of another. We find no recognition of the propriety of
recounting the various steps of that long process by which, to use
Kant's pregnant phrase, the relations born of pathological necessity
were metamorphosed into those of moral union. The grave and lofty
feeling, for example, which inspired the last words of the
_Tableau_--whence came it? Of what long-drawn chain of causes in the
past was it the last effect? It is