68]

There are one or two detached remarks suggested by Condorcet's picture,
which it may be worth while to make. He is fully alive, for example, to
the importance to mankind of the appearance among them of one of those
men of creative genius, like Archimedes or like Newton, whose lives
constitute an epoch in human history. Their very existence he saw to be
among the greatest benefits conferred on the race by Nature. He hardly
seems to have been struck, on the other hand, with the appalling and
incessant waste of these benefits that goes on; with the number of men
of Newtonian capacity who are undoubtedly born into the world only to
chronicle small beer; with the hosts of high and worthy souls who labour
and flit away like shadows, perishing in the accomplishment of minor and
subordinate ends. We may suspect that the notion of all this
immeasurable profusion of priceless treasures, its position as one of
the laws of the condition of man on the globe, would be unspeakably hard
of endurance to one holding Condorcet's peculiar form of optimism.

Again, if we had space, it would be worth while to examine some of the
acute and ingenious hints which Condorcet throws out by the way. It
would be interesting to consider, as he suggests, the influence upon
the progress of the human mind of the change from writing on such
subjects as science, philosophy, and jurisprudence in Latin, to the
usual language of each country. That change rendered the sciences more
popular, but it increased the trouble of the scientific men in following
the general march of knowledge. It caused a book to be read in one
country by more men of inferior competence, but less read throughout
Europe by men of superior light. And though it relieves men who have no
leisure for extensive study from the trouble of learning Latin, it
imposes upon profounder persons the necessity of learning a variety of
modern languages.[69] Again, ground is broken for the most important
reflection, in the remark that men preserve the prejudices of their
childhood, their country, and their age, long after they have recognised
all the truths necessary to destroy them.[70] Perhaps most instructive
and most tranquillising of all is this, that the progress of physical
knowledge is constantly destroying in silence erroneous opinions which
had never seemed to be attacked.[71] And in reading history, how much
ignorance and misinterpretation would have been avoided, if the student
had but