conspicuously made visible. The character of
Condorcet, unlike so many of his contemporaries, offers nothing to the
theatrical instinct. None the less on this account should we be willing
to weigh the contributions which he made to the stock of science and
social speculation, and recognise the fine elevation of his sentiments,
his noble solicitude for human wellbeing, his eager and resolute belief
in its indefinite expansion, and the devotion which sealed his faith by
a destiny that was as tragical as any in those bloody and most tragical
days.

I.

Until the outbreak of the Revolution, the circumstances of Condorcet's
life were as little externally disturbed or specially remarkable as
those of any other geometer and thinker of the time. He was born at a
small town in Picardy, in the year 1743. His father was a cavalry
officer, but as he died when his son was only three years old, he could
have exerted no influence upon the future philosopher, save such as
comes of transmission through blood and tissue. Condillac was his uncle,
but there is no record of any intercourse between them. His mother was a
devout and trembling soul, who dedicated her child to the Holy Virgin,
and for eight years or more made him wear the dress of a little girl, by
way of sheltering him against the temptations and unbelief of a vile
world. So long as women are held by opinion and usage in a state of
educational and political subjection, which prevents the growth of a
large intelligence made healthy and energetic by knowledge and by
activity, we may expect pious extravagances of this kind. Condorcet was
weakened physically by much confinement and the constraint of cumbrous
clothing; and not even his dedication to the Holy Virgin prevented him
from growing up the most ardent of the admirers of Voltaire. His
earliest instructors, as happened to most of the sceptical philosophers,
were the Jesuits, then within a few years of their fall. That these
adroit men, armed with all the arts and traditions which their order had
acquired in three centuries, and with the training of the nation almost
exclusively in their hands, should still have been unable to shield
their persons from proscription and their creed from hatred, is a
remarkable instance how little it avails ecclesiastical bodies to have a
monopoly of official education, if the spirit of their teaching be out
of harmony with those most potent agencies which we sum up as the spirit
of t