d in the hands of castes and official churches, which
systematically and of their very constitution bury justice under the
sterile accumulations of a fixed superstition.

Condorcet's principles were deeply coloured by ideas drawn from two
sources. He was a Voltairean in the intensity of his antipathies to the
Church, and in the depth and energy of his humanity. But while Voltaire
flourished, the destructive movement only reached theology, and
Voltaire, though he had more to do than anybody else with the original
impulse, joined in no attack upon the State. It was from the economical
writers and from Montesquieu that Condorcet learned to look upon
societies with a scientific eye, to perceive the influence of
institutions upon men, and that there are laws, susceptible of
modification in practice, which regulate their growth. It was natural,
therefore, that he should join with eagerness in the reforming movement
which set in with such irrestrainable velocity after the death of Lewis
XV. He was bitter and destructive with the bitterness of Voltaire; he
was hopeful for the future with the faith of Turgot; and he was urgent,
heated, impetuous, with a heavy vehemence all his own. In a word, he was
the incarnation of the revolutionary spirit, as the revolutionary spirit
existed in geometers and Encyclopaedists; at once too reasonable and too
little reasonable; too precise and scientific and too vague; too
rigorously logical on the one hand and too abundantly passionate on the
other. Perhaps there is no more fatal combination in politics than the
deductive method worked by passion. When applied to the delicate and
complex affairs of society, such machinery with such motive force is of
ruinous potency.

Condorcet's peculiarities of political antipathy and preference can
hardly be better illustrated than by his view of the two great
revolutions in English history. The first was religious, and therefore
he hated it; the second was accompanied by much argument, and had no
religion about it, and therefore he extolled it. It is scientific
knowledge, he said, which explains why efforts after liberty in
unenlightened centuries are so fleeting, and so deeply stained by
bloodshed. 'Compare these with the happy efforts of America and France;
observe even in the same century, but at different epochs, the two
revolutions of England fanatical and England enlightened. We see on the
one side contemporaries of Prynne and Knox, while crying out