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Before I left England, I had read the book of which you speak. I must confess that it appeared to me exceedingly illogical. Godwin's and Condorcet's extravagancies were not worth confuting; and yet I thought that the Essay on 'Population' had not confuted them.
Out of the tinker's bag he had drawn a translation of Condorcet's "Progress of Man" and another of Rousseau's "Social Contract."
Emile, IV. 181, 182. In this letter he asks also, with the same magnanimous security as the Savoyard Vicar, "of what concern the destiny of the wicked can be to him." Emile, IV. 241, 242. Emile, IV. 243. Condorcet's Progrès de l'Esprit Humain . Oeuv., vi. 276.
But she has anticipated all their main positions, and formulated the ideal which the modern movement is struggling to complete. Her book is dated in every chapter. It is as much a page torn from the journals of the French Revolution as Paine's Rights of Man or Condorcet's Sketch. And yet it seems, as they do not, a modern book.
The second edition, three years later, shows the influence of Condorcet's Sketch, which had appeared in the meantime. Godwin says that his original idea was to produce a work on political science to supersede Montesquieu. The note of Montesquieu's political philosophy was respect for social institutions.
In this connection there is a passage in Condorcet's "Des Progrès de l'esprit humain" which looks as if written as a warning to our age: "the religious zeal shown by philosophers and great men was only a political devotion; and every religion which allows itself to be defended as a belief that may usefully be left to the people, can only hope for an agony more or less prolonged."
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