xes with more equality, and because it
cannot become general even for males without the aid of the mother of
the family.[79]

Among other improvements under our third head will be the attainment of
greater perfection in language, leading at once to increased accuracy
and increased concision. Laws and institutions, following the progress
of knowledge, will be constantly undergoing modifications tending to
identify individual with collective interests. Wars will grow less
frequent with the extinction of those ideas of hereditary and dynastic
rights, that have occasioned so many bloody contests. The art of
learning will be facilitated by the institution of a Universal Language;
and the art of teaching by resort to Technical Methods, or systems which
unite in orderly arrangement a great number of different objects, so
that their relations are perceived at a single glance.[80]

Finally, progress in medicine, the use of more wholesome food and
healthy houses, the diminution of the two most active causes of
deterioration, namely, misery and excessive wealth, must prolong the
average duration of life, as well as raise the tone of health while it
lasts. The force of transmissable diseases will be gradually weakened,
until their quality of transmission vanishes. May we then not hope for
the arrival of a time when death will cease to be anything but the
effect either of extraordinary accidents, or of the destruction, ever
slower and slower, of the vital forces? May we not believe that the
duration of the middle interval between birth and this destruction has
no assignable term? Man will never become immortal, but is it a mere
chimera to hold that the term fixed to his years is slowly and
perpetually receding further and further from the moment at which his
existence begins?[81]

* * * * *

The rapidity and the necessary incompleteness with which Condorcet threw
out in isolated hints his ideas of the future state of society, impart
to his conception a certain mechanical aspect, which conveys an
incorrect impression of his notion of the sources whence social change
must flow. His admirable and most careful remarks upon the moral
training of children prove him to have been as far removed as possible
from any of those theories of the formation of character which merely
prescribe the imposition of moulds and casts from without, instead of
carefully tending the many spontaneous and sensitive processes of growt