not enough to refer us generally to
previous advances in knowledge and intellectual emancipation, because
even supposing the successive modifications of our moral sensibilities
to be fundamentally due to the progress of intellectual enlightenment,
we still want to know in the first place something about the influences
which harness one process to the other, and in the second place,
something about the particular directions which these modifications of
moral constitution have taken.

If this is one very radical omission in Condorcet's scheme, his angry
and vehement aversion for the various religions of the world (with
perhaps one exception) is a sin of commission still more damaging to its
completeness. That he should detest the corrupt and oppressive forms of
religion of his own century was neither surprising nor blamable. An
unfavourable view of the influences upon human development of the
Christian belief, even in its least corrupt forms, was not by any means
untenable. Nay, he was at liberty to go further than this, and to depict
religion as a natural infirmity of the human mind in its immature
stages, just as there are specific disorders incident in childhood to
the human body. Even on this theory, he was bound to handle it with the
same calmness which he would have expected to find in a pathological
treatise by a physician. Who would write of the sweating sickness with
indignation, or describe zymotic diseases with resentment? Condorcet's
pertinacious anger against theology is just as irrational as this would
be, from the scientific point of view which he pretends to have assumed.
Theology, in fact, was partly avenged of her assailants, for she had in
the struggle contrived to infect them with the bitter contagion of her
own traditional spirit.

From the earliest times to the latest it is all one story according to
Condorcet. He can speak with respect of philosophies even when, as in
the case of the Scotch school of the last century, he dislikes and
condemns them.[59] Of religion his contempt and hatred only vary
slightly in degree. Barbarous tribes have sorcerers, trading on the
gross superstitions of their dupes: so in other guise and with different
names have civilised nations to-day. As other arts progressed,
superstition, too, became less rude; priestly families kept all
knowledge in their own hands, and thus preserved their hypocritical and
tyrannical assumptions from detection. They disclosed nothing to the