conclusions should by any means obstruct the access of a single ray of
fertilising light. This religious scrupulosity, which made him abhor all
interference with the freedom and openness of the understanding as the
worst kind of sacrilege, was Condorcet's eminent distinction. If, as
some think, the world will gradually transform its fear or love of
unknowable gods into a devout reverence for those who have stirred in
men a sense of the dignity of their own nature and of its large and
multitudinous possibilities, then will his name not fail of deep and
perpetual recollection.

FOOTNOTES:

[73] _Ib._ p. 223.

[74] _Ib._ p. 206.

[75] _Oeuv._ pp. 239-244.

[76] _Oeuv._ pp. 244-251.

[77] _Oeuv._ pp. 257, 258.

[78] Condorcet had already assailed the prejudices that keep women in
subjection in an excellent tract, published in 1790; _Sur l'Admission
des Femmes au Droit de Cite._ _Oeuv._ x. 121-130.

[79] _Oeuv._ p. 264. The rest of the passage is not perfectly
intelligible to me, so I give it as it stands. '_Cet hommage trop
tardif, rendu enfin a l'equite et au bon sens, ne tarirait-il pas une
source trop feconde d'injustices, de cruautes et de crimes, en faisant
disparaitre une opposition si dangereuse entre le penchant naturel le
plus vif, le plus difficile a reprimer, et les devoirs de l'homme ou les
interets de la societe? Ne produirait-il pas, enfin, des moeurs
nationales douces et pures, formees non de privations orgueilleuses,
d'apparences hypocrites, de reserves imposees par la crainte de la honte
ou les terreurs religieuses, mais d'habitudes librement contractees,
inspirees par la nature, avouees par la raison?_' Can these habitudes be
the habitudes of Free Love, or what are they? Condorcet, we know,
thought the indissolubility of marriage a monstrously bad thing, but the
grounds which he gives for his thinking so would certainly lead to the
infinite dissolubility of society. See a truly astounding passage in the
_Fragment on the Tenth Epoch_, vi. 523-526. See also some curious words
in a letter to Turgot, i. 221, 222.

[80] _Oeuv._ pp. 269-272.

[81] _Oeuv._ pp. 272-275. Also p. 618.

[82] See _Fragment de l'Histoire de la Xe Epoque._ '_Il ne faut pas
leur dire, mais les accoutumer a croire, a trouver au dedans
a'eux-memes, que la bonte et la justice sont necessaires au bonheur,
comme une respiration facile et libre l'est a la sante._' Of books for
the young: '_Il faut qu'ils n'excedent jamais l'ete