Post uarios casus et tot discrimina rerum uenimus in Latium,

but Latium was to be the scene of sanguinary struggles.

Another allied and fundamental fallacy, into which all the philosophers and Rousseau had more or less fallen, was reflected and exposed by the Revolution.  They had considered man in vacuo.  They had not seen that the whole development of a society is an enormous force which cannot be talked or legislated away; they had ignored the power of social memory and historical traditions, and misvalued the strength of the links which bind generations together.  So the Revolutionaries imagined that they could break abruptly with the past, and that a new method of government, constructed on mathematical lines, a constitution (to use words of Burke) “ready made and ready armed, mature in its birth, a perfect goddess of wisdom and of war, hammered by our blacksmith midwives out of the brain of Jupiter himself,” would create a condition of idyllic felicity in France, and that the arrival of the millennium depended only on the adoption of the same principles by other nations.  The illusions created by the Declaration of the Rights of Man on the 4th of August died slowly under the shadow of the Terror; but though the hopes of those who believed in the speedy regeneration of the world were belied, some of the thoughtful did not lose heart.  There was one at least who did not waver in his faith that the movement was a giant’s step on the path of man towards ultimate felicity, however far he had still to travel.  Condorcet, one of the younger Encyclopaedists, spent the last months of his life, under the menace of the guillotine, in projecting a history of human Progress.

3.

Condorcet was the friend and biographer of Turgot, and it was not unfitting that he should resume the design of a history of civilisation, in the light of the idea of Progress, for which Turgot had only left luminous suggestions.  He did not execute the plan, but he completed an elaborate sketch in which the controlling ideas of the scheme are fully set forth.  His principles are to be found almost entirely in Turgot.  But they have a new significance for Condorcet.  He has given them wings.  He has emphasised, and made deductions.  Turgot wrote in the calm spirit of an inquirer.  Condorcet spoke with the verve of a prophet.  He was prophesying under the shadow of death.  It is amazing that the optimistic Sketch of a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind should have been composed when he was hiding from Robespierre in 1793. [Footnote:  Published in 1795.]

Condorcet was penetrated with the spirit of the Encyclopaedists, of whom he had been one, and his attitude to Christianity was that of Voltaire and Diderot.  Turgot had treated the received religion respectfully.  He had acknowledged Providence, and, though the place which he assigned to Providence was that of a sort of honorary President of the development of civilisation who might disappear without affecting the proceedings, there was a real difference between his views and those of his friend as to the role of Christianity and the civilisation of the Middle Ages.