adds that the surgeon described death as due to
apoplexy. See Musset-Pathay's _J. J. Rousseau_, ii. 42.

[40] Dupont de Nemours. _Les Physiocrates_, i. 326.

[41] _Progres de l'Esprit Humain._ _Oeuv._ vi. 276.

IV.

The shape of Condorcet's ideas upon history arose from the twofold
necessity which his character imposed upon him, at once of appeasing his
aspirations on behalf of mankind, and of satisfying a disciplined and
scientific intelligence. He was of too robust an understanding to find
adequate gratification in the artificial construction of hypothetical
utopias. Conviction was as indispensable as hope; and distinct grounds
for the faith that was in him, as essential as the faith itself. The
result of this fact of mental constitution, the intellectual conditions
of the time being what they were, was the rise in his mind of the great
and central conception of there being a law in the succession of social
states, to be ascertained by an examination of the collective phenomena
of past history. The merit of this admirable effort, and of the work in
which it found expression, is very easily underrated, because the effort
was insufficient and merely preparatory, while modern thought has
already carried us far beyond it, and at least into sight of the more
complete truths to which this effort only pointed the way. Let us
remember, however, that it did point the way distinctly and
unmistakably. A very brief survey of the state of history as a subject
of systematic study enables us to appreciate with precision what service
it was that Condorcet rendered; for it carries us back from the present
comparatively advanced condition of the science of society to a time
before his memorable attempt, when conceptions now become so familiar
were not in existence, and when even the most instructed students of
human affairs no more felt the need of a scientific theory of the manner
in which social effects follow social causes, than the least instructed
portion of the literary public feels such a need in our own time. It is
difficult after a subject has been separated from the nebulous mass of
unclassified knowledge, after it has taken independent shape, and begun
to move in lines of its own, to realise the process by which all this
was effected, or the way in which before all this the facts concerned
presented themselves to the thinker's mind. That we should overcome the
difficulty is one of the conditions of our being able