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Taking Condorcet's project as their basis, and modifying it in the direction which the Jacobin orators had pointed to in debate, they achieved their task in a few days, and they laid their proposals before the Convention on June 10. The reporter was Hérault de Séchelles; but the most constant speaker in the ensuing debate was Robespierre.
Amongst these were Condorcet's 'Eloge of Haller, Sir Joshua Reynolds' 'Discourses, the writings of Bacon, and 'Burnet's Account of Sir Matthew Hale. The perusal of the last-mentioned book the portrait of a prodigy of labour Horner says, filled him with enthusiasm.
Paine was a man of one idea in politics; a federal republic, on the American plan, was the only system of government he believed in, and the only one he wished to see established in France. Lafayette belonged to this school. So did Condorcet, Petion, Buzot, and others of less note. Under Paine's direction they formed a republican club, which met at Condorcet's house.
If he were alive to-day, he could point with triumph to the fact that of these far-reaching projects one is being accomplished in some of the most progressive countries and the other is looked upon as an attainable aim by statesmen who are not visionaries. The equality of the sexes was only a logical inference from the general doctrine of equality to which Condorcet's social theory is reducible.
Apart however from M. Renan, Condorcet's words merely assert the duty of setting to work to help on the change from false to true opinions with prudence, and this every sensible man admits.
Condorcet had suggested that the value of history lies in affording data for foreseeing the future. Saint-Simon raised this suggestion to a dogma. But prevision was impossible on Condorcet's unscientific method. In order to foretell, the law of the movement must be discovered, and Condorcet had not found or even sought a law.
The doctrine taken up in this unqualified fashion by some of his disciples, and preached by them with the utmost fervour as the one secret of prosperity, shocked both the conservative and orthodox whose prejudices were trampled upon, and such Radicals as inherited Godwin's or Condorcet's theory of perfectibility.
C. A. Young, Manual of Astronomy, p. 571, and Prof. Condorcet's biography of his master is one of the noblest works of its class in French literature. Turgot's was one of those minds that like Chamfort's or Villiers de L'Isle Adam's scatter bounteously the ideas which others use or misuse.
He recognised the interpretation of history as the key to human development, and this principle controlled subsequent speculations on Progress in France. Cabanis, the physician, was Condorcet's literary executor, and a no less ardent believer in human perfectibility.
And that the superior power of population it repressed, and the actual population kept equal to the means of subsistence, by misery and vice? Mr Wallace Error of supposing that the difficulty arising from population is at a great distance Mr Condorcet's sketch of the progress of the human mind Period when the oscillation, mentioned by Mr Condorcet, ought to be applied to the human race.
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