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Updated: May 7, 2025
On asking if M. Thomas Froment were there, Pierre was led by an old workman to a little shed, where he found the young fellow in the linen jacket of a mechanician, his hands black with filings. He was adjusting some piece of mechanism, and nobody would have suspected him to be a former pupil of the Lycee Condorcet, one of the three clever Froments who had there rendered the name famous.
In another way, Comte's system may be criticised for failing to cover the ground, if it is regarded as a philosophy of history. In accordance with "the happy artifice of Condorcet," he assumes that the growth of European civilisation is the only history that matters, and discards entirely the civilisations, for instance, of India and China.
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.
In the Gironde were Brissot, Petion, Condorcet, Vergniaud, &c. The five hundred other members of the Assembly that is, the great majority constituted what was known as the Plain. This latter formed a floating mass, silent, undecided, and timid; ready to follow every impulse and to be carried away by the excitement of the moment.
Though Burke here, no doubt, found a true base for the philosophy of order, yet perhaps Condorcet or Barnave might have justly asked him whether, when we thus realise the strong and immovable foundations which are laid in our character before we are born, there could be any occasion, as a matter of fact, for that vehement alarm which moved Burke lest a few lawyers, by a score of parchment decrees, should overthrow the venerated sentiments of Europe about justice and about property?
His assertion that "a fanaticism composed of superstition and ignorance has been the sickness of all the centuries," still holds too great an extent of truth. His denial of miracles, the supernatural efficacy of prayer, and the immortality of the soul earned for him the undying enmity of the clergy. Condorcet, another deist, was the successor of Voltaire in the Encyclopædic warfare.
This is no long period; yet revolutionary reputations have hitherto scarcely survived as many months, and the puerile enthusiasm which is adopted, not felt, has been usually succeeded by a violence and revenge equally irrational. It has lately been discovered that Condorcet is dead, and that he perished in a manner singularly awful.
M. Picavet's laborious researches into the activities of this school of thinkers has helped us to understand the transition from the age of Condorcet to the age of Comte. M. Picavet has grouped around them, along with many obscurer names, the great scientific men of the time, like Laplace, Bichat, Lamarck, as all in the direct line of eighteenth century thought.
In the demonstration of his laws by the actual course of civilisation, Comte adopts what he calls "the happy artifice of Condorcet," and treats the successive peoples who pass on the torch as if they were a single people running the race. This is "a rational fiction," for a people's true successors are those who pursue its efforts.
The last question which Mr Condorcet proposes for examination is the organic perfectibility of man.
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