Universal or Cosmo-Political History 226

Condorcet fuses the conceptions of the two previous
sets of thinkers 229

Account of his _Tableau des Progres_ 230

Omits to consider history of moral improvement 233

And misinterprets the religious element 234

His view of Mahometanism 238

Of Protestantism 240

And of philosophic propagandism 241

Various acute remarks in his sketch 243

His boundless hopes for the future 244

Three directions which our anticipations may take:--
(1) International equality 246
(2) Internal equality 247
(3) Substantial perfecting of nature and society 248

Natural view of the formation of character 252

Central idea of all his aspirations 253

CONDORCET.

Of the illustrious thinkers and writers who for two generations had been
actively scattering the seed of revolution in France, only Condorcet
survived to behold the first bitter ingathering of the harvest. Those
who had sown the wind were no more; he only was left to see the reaping
of the whirlwind, and to be swiftly and cruelly swept away by it.
Voltaire and Diderot, Rousseau and Helvetius, had vanished, but
Condorcet both assisted at the Encyclopaedia and sat in the Convention;
the one eminent man of those who had tended the tree, who also came in
due season to partake of its fruit; at once a precursor, and a sharer in
the fulfilment. In neither character has he attracted the goodwill of
any of those considerable sections and schools into which criticism of
the Revolution has been mainly divided. As a thinker he is roughly
classed as an Economist, and as a practical politician he figured first
in the Legislative Assembly, and then in the Convention. Now, as a rule,
the political parties that have most admired the Convention have had
least sympathy with the Economists, and the historians who are most
favourable to Turgot and his followers, are usually most hostile to the
actions and associations of the great revolutionary chamber successively
swayed by a Vergniaud, a Danton, a Robespierre. Between the two,
Condorce