h
within.[82] Nobody has shown a finer appreciation of the delicacy of
the material out of which character is to be made, and of the
susceptibility of its elementary structure; nor of the fact that
education consists in such a discipline of the primitive impulses as
shall lead men to do right, not by the constraint of mechanical external
sanctions, but by an instant, spontaneous, and almost inarticulate
repugnance to cowardice, cruelty, apathy, self-indulgence, and the other
great roots and centres of wrong-doing. It was to a society composed of
men and women whose characters had been shaped on this principle, that
Condorcet looked for the realisation of his exalted hopes for
humanity.[83]

With machinery and organisation, in truth, Condorcet did not greatly
concern himself; probably too little rather than too much. The central
idea of all his aspirations was to procure the emancipation of reason,
free and ample room for its exercise, and improved competence among men
in the use of it. The subjugation of the modern intelligence beneath the
disembodied fancies of the grotesque and sombre imagination of the
Middle Ages, did not offend him more than the idea of any fixed
organisation of the spiritual power, or any final and settled and
universally accepted solution of belief and order would have done. With
De Maistre and Comte the problem was the organised and systematic
reconstruction of an anarchic society. With Condorcet it was how to
persuade men to exert the individual reason methodically and
independently, not without co-operation, but without anything like
official or other subordination.

His cardinal belief and precept was, as with Socrates, that the +bios
anexetastos+ is not to be lived by man. As we have seen, the freedom of
the reason was so dear to him, that he counted it an abuse for a parent
to instil his own convictions into the defenceless minds of his young
children. This was the natural outcome of Condorcet's mode of viewing
history as the record of intellectual emancipation, while to Comte its
deepest interest was as a record of moral and emotional cultivation. If
we value in one type of thinker the intellectual conscientiousness,
which refrains from perplexing men by propounding problems unless the
solution can be set forth also, perhaps we owe no less honour in the
thinker of another type to that intellectual self-denial which makes him
very careful lest the too rigid projection of his own specific