r fellows should be better
worth having. He was himself too absolutely possessed by this social
spirit to have flinched from his career, even if he had foreseen the
martyrdom which was to consummate it. 'You are very happy,' he once
wrote to Turgot, 'in your passion for the public good and your power to
satisfy it; it is a great consolation, and of an order very superior to
that of study.'[3]

In 1769, at the age of six-and-twenty, Condorcet became connected with
the Academy, to the mortification of his relations, who hardly pardoned
him for not being a captain of horse as his father had been before him.
About the same time, or a little later, he performed a pilgrimage of a
kind that could hardly help making a mark upon a character so deeply
impressible. In company with D'Alembert he went to Ferney and saw
Voltaire.[4] To the position of Voltaire in Europe in 1770 there has
never been any other man's position in any age wholly comparable. It is
true that there had been one or two of the great popes, and a great
ecclesiastic like St. Bernard, who had exercised a spiritual authority,
pretty universally submitted to, or even spontaneously invoked,
throughout western Europe. But these were the representatives of a
powerful organisation and an accepted system. Voltaire filled a place
before men's eyes in the eighteenth century as conspicuous and as
authoritative as that of St. Bernard in the twelfth. The difference was
that Voltaire's place was absolutely unofficial in its origin, and
indebted to no system nor organisation for its maintenance. Again, there
have been others, like Bacon or Descartes, destined to make a far more
permanent contribution to the ideas which have extended the powers and
elevated the happiness of men; but these great spirits for the most part
laboured for the generation that followed them, and won comparatively
slight recognition from their own age. Voltaire during his life enjoyed
to the full not only the admiration that belongs to the poet, but
something of the veneration that is paid to the thinker, and even
something of the glory usually reserved for captains and conquerors of
renown. No other man before or since ever hit so exactly the mark of his
time on every side, so precisely met the conditions of fame for the
moment, nor so thoroughly dazzled and reigned over the foremost men and
women who were his contemporaries. Wherever else intellectual fame has
approached the fame of Voltaire, it has b