Until the outbreak of the Revolution, the circumstances of Condorcet’s life were as little externally disturbed or specially remarkable as those of any other geometer and thinker of the time. He was born at a small town in Picardy, in the year 1743. His father was a cavalry officer, but as he died when his son was only three years old, he could have exerted no influence upon the future philosopher, save such as comes of transmission through blood and tissue. Condillac was his uncle, but there is no record of any intercourse between them. His mother was a devout and trembling soul, who dedicated her child to the Holy Virgin, and for eight years or more made him wear the dress of a little girl, by way of sheltering him against the temptations and unbelief of a vile world. So long as women are held by opinion and usage in a state of educational and political subjection, which prevents the growth of a large intelligence made healthy and energetic by knowledge and by activity, we may expect pious extravagances of this kind. Condorcet was weakened physically by much confinement and the constraint of cumbrous clothing; and not even his dedication to the Holy Virgin prevented him from growing up the most ardent of the admirers of Voltaire. His earliest instructors, as happened to most of the sceptical philosophers, were the Jesuits, then within a few years of their fall. That these adroit men, armed with all the arts and traditions which their order had acquired in three centuries, and with the training of the nation almost exclusively in their hands, should still have been unable to shield their persons from proscription and their creed from hatred, is a remarkable instance how little it avails ecclesiastical bodies to have a monopoly of official education, if the spirit of their teaching be out of harmony with those most potent agencies which we sum up as the spirit of the time. The Jesuits were the great official instructors of France for the first half of the eighteenth century. In 1764 the order was thrust forth from the country, and they left behind them an army of the bitterest enemies that Christianity has ever had. To do them justice, they were destroyed by weapons which they had themselves supplied. The intelligence which they had developed and sharpened, turned inevitably against the incurable faults in their own system. They were admirable teachers of mathematics. Condorcet, instructed by the Jesuits at Rheims, was able when he was only fifteen years old to go through such performances in analysis as to win especial applause from illustrious judges like D’Alembert and Clairaut. It was impossible, however, for Jesuits, as it has ever been for all enemies of movement, to constrain within prescribed limits the activity which has once been effectively stirred. Mathematics has always been in the eyes of the Church a harmless branch of knowledge, but the mental energy that mathematics first touched is sure to turn itself by and by to more complex and dangerous subjects in the scientific hierarchy.
At any rate, Condorcet’s curiosity was very speedily drawn to problems beyond those which geometry and algebra pretend to solve. ‘For thirty years,’ he wrote in 1790, ‘I have hardly ever passed a single day without meditating on the political sciences.’[1] Thus, when only seventeen, when the ardour of even the choicest spirits is usually most purely intellectual, moral and social feeling was rising in Condorcet to that supremacy which it afterwards attained in him to so admirable a degree. He wrote essays on integral calculus, but he was already beginning to reflect upon the laws of human societies and the conditions of moral obligation. At the root of Condorcet’s nature was a profound sensibility of constitution. One of his biographers explains his early enthusiasm for virtue and human welfare as the conclusion of a kind of syllogism. It is possible that the syllogism was only the later shape into which an instinctive impulse threw itself by way of rational entrenchment. His sensibility caused Condorcet to abandon the barbarous pleasures of the chase, which had at first powerfully attracted him.[2] To derive delight from what inflicts pain on any sentient creature revolted his conscience and offended his reason, because he perceived that the character which does not shrink from associating its own joy with the anguish of another, is either found or left mortally blunted to the finest impressions of humanity.
It is thus assured that from the beginning Condorcet was unable to satisfy himself with the mere knowledge of the specialist, but felt the necessity of placing social aims at the head and front of his life, and of subordinating to them all other pursuits. That he values knowledge only as a means to social action, is one of the highest titles to our esteem that any philosopher can have. Such a temper of mind has penetrated no man more fully than Condorcet, though there are other thinkers to whom time and chance have been more favourable in making that temper permanently productive. There is a fine significance in his words, after the dismissal of the great and virtuous Turgot from office: ‘We have had a delightful dream, but it was too brief. Now I mean to apply myself to geometry. It is terribly cold to be for the future labouring only for the gloriole, after flattering oneself for a while that one was working for the public weal.’ It is true that a geometer, too, works for the public weal; but the process is tardier, and we may well pardon an impatience that sprung of reasoned zeal for the happiness of mankind. There is something much more attractive about Condorcet’s undisguised disappointment at having to exchange active public labour for geometrical problems, than in the affected satisfaction conventionally professed by statesmen when driven from place to their books. His correspondence shows that, even when his mind seemed to be most concentrated upon his special studies, he was incessantly on the alert for every new idea, book, transaction, that was likely to stimulate the love of virtue in individuals, or to increase the strength of justice in society. It would have been in one sense more fortunate for him to have cared less for high social interests, if we remember the contention of his latter days and the catastrophe which brought them to a frightful close. But Condorcet was not one of those natures who can think it happiness to look passively out from the tranquil literary watch-tower upon the mortal struggles of a society in revolution. In measuring other men of science—as his two volumes of Éloges abundantly show—one cannot help being struck by the eagerness with which he seizes on any trait of zeal for social improvement, any signal of anxiety that the lives and characters of our fellows should be better worth having. He was himself too absolutely possessed by this social spirit to have flinched from his career, even if he had foreseen the martyrdom which was to consummate it. ‘You are very happy,’ he once wrote to Turgot, ‘in your passion for the public good and your power to satisfy it; it is a great consolation, and of an order very superior to that of study.’[3]
In 1769, at the age of six-and-twenty, Condorcet became connected with the Academy, to the mortification of his relations, who hardly pardoned him for not being a captain of horse as his father had been before him. About the same time, or a little later, he performed a pilgrimage of a kind that could hardly help making a mark upon a character so deeply impressible. In company with D’Alembert he went to Ferney and saw Voltaire.[4] To the position of Voltaire in Europe in 1770 there has never been any other man’s position in any age wholly comparable. It is true that there had been one or two of the great popes, and a great ecclesiastic like St. Bernard, who had exercised a spiritual authority, pretty universally submitted to, or even spontaneously invoked, throughout western Europe. But these were the representatives of a powerful organisation and an accepted system. Voltaire filled a place before men’s eyes in the eighteenth century as conspicuous and as authoritative as that of St. Bernard in the twelfth. The difference was that Voltaire’s place was absolutely unofficial in its origin, and indebted to no system nor organisation for its maintenance. Again, there have been others, like Bacon or Descartes, destined to make a far more permanent contribution to the ideas which have extended the powers and elevated the happiness of men; but these great spirits for the most part laboured for the generation that followed them, and won comparatively slight recognition from their own age. Voltaire during his life enjoyed to the full not only the admiration that belongs to the poet, but something of the veneration that is paid to the thinker, and even something of the glory usually reserved for captains and conquerors of renown. No other man before or since ever hit so exactly the mark of his time on every side, so precisely met the conditions of fame for the moment, nor so thoroughly dazzled and reigned over the foremost men and women who were his contemporaries. Wherever else intellectual fame has approached the fame of Voltaire, it has been posthumous. With him it was immediate and splendid. Into the secret of this extraordinary circumstance we need not here particularly inquire. He was an unsurpassed master of the art of literary expression in a country where that art is more highly prized than anywhere else; he was the most brilliant of wits among a people whose relish for wit is a supreme passion; he won the admiration of the lighter souls by his plays, of the learned by his interest in science, of the men of letters by his never-ceasing flow of essays, criticisms, and articles, not one of which lacks vigour and freshness and sparkle; he was the most active, bitter, and telling foe of what was then the most justly abhorred of all institutions—the Church. Add to these remarkable titles to honour and popularity that he was no mere declaimer against oppression and injustice in the abstract, but the strenuous, persevering, and absolutely indefatigable champion of every victim of oppression or injustice whose case was once brought under his eye.
It is not difficult to perceive the fascination which Voltaire, with this character and this unrivalled splendour of public position, would have for a man like Condorcet. He conceived the warmest attachment to Voltaire, and Voltaire in turn the highest respect for him. Their correspondence (1770-1778) is perhaps as interesting as any letters of that period that we possess: Voltaire is always bright, playful, and affectionate; Condorcet more declamatory and less graceful, but full of reverence and loyalty for his ‘dear and illustrious’ master, and of his own peculiar eagerness for good causes and animosity against the defenders of evil ones. Condorcet was younger than the patriarch of Ferney by nearly half a century, but this did not prevent him from loyal remonstrances on more than one occasion against conduct on Voltaire’s part in this matter or that, which he held to be unworthy of his character and reputation. He went so far as actually to decline to print in the Mercure a letter in which the writer in some fit of spleen placed Montesquieu below D’Aguesseau. ‘My attachment,’ he says, ‘bids me say what will be best for you, and not what might please you most. If I loved you less, I should not have the courage to thwart you. I am aware of your grievances against Montesquieu; it is worthy of you to forget them.’ There was perhaps as much moral courage in doing this as in defying the Men of the Mountain in the days of the Terror. It dispels some false impressions of Voltaire’s supposed intolerance of criticism, to find him thanking Condorcet for one of these friendly protests. He showed himself worthy of such courageous conduct. ‘One sees things ill,’ he writes, ‘when one sees them from too far off. After all, we ought never to blush to go to school if we are as old as Methuselah. I repeat my acknowledgments to you.’[5] Condorcet did not conceive that either to be blind to a man’s errors or to compromise them is to prove yourself his friend. There is an integrity of friendship as in public concerns, and he adhered to it as manfully in one as in the other. Throughout his intercourse with intimate friends there is that happy and frank play of direct personal allusion, which is as distinct from flattery when it is about another, as it is from egoism when it refers to the writer himself.
Perhaps we see him most characteristically in his correspondence with Turgot. What Turgot loved in Condorcet was his ‘simplicity of character.’[6] Turgot was almost as much less vivacious than Condorcet, as Condorcet was less vivacious than Voltaire. They belonged to quite distinct types of character, but this may be a condition of the most perfect forms of sympathy. Each gives support where the other is most conscious of needing it. Turgot was one of those serene, capacious, and sure intelligences whose aspirations do not become low nor narrow by being watchfully held under the control of reason; whose ideas are no less vigorous or exuberant because they move in a steady and ordered train; and who, in their most fervent reactions against abuses or crimes, resist that vehement temptation to excess which is the besetting infirmity of generous natures. Condorcet was very different from this. Whatever he wished he wished unrestrainedly. As with most men of the epoch, the habit of making allowances was not his. We observe something theological in his hatred of theologians. Even in his letters the distant ground-swell of repressed passion sounds in the ear, and at every mention of false opinion or evil-doing a sombre and angry shadow seems to fall upon the page. Both he and Turgot clung to the doctrine of the infinite perfectibility of human nature, and the correspondingly infinite augmentation of human happiness; but Condorcet’s ever-smouldering impetuosity would be content with nothing less than the arrival of at least a considerable instalment of this infinite quantity now and instantly. He went so far as to insist that by and by men would acquire the art of prolonging their lives for several generations, instead of being confined within the fatal span of threescore years and ten. He was impatient of any frittering away of life in scruple, tremors, and hesitations. ‘For the most part,’ he once wrote to Turgot, ‘people abounding in scruple are not fit for great things: a Christian will throw away in subduing the darts of the flesh the time which he might have employed on things of use to mankind; or he will lack courage to rise against a tyrant for fear of his judgment being too hastily formed.’[7] Turgot’s reply may illustrate the difference between the two men: ‘No virtue, in whatever sense you take the word, dispenses with justice; and I think no more of the people who do great things—as you say—at the expense of justice, than of poets who fancy they produce great beauties of imagination without regularity. I know that excessive exactitude tends slightly to deaden the fire alike of composition and of action; but there is a mean in everything. It has never been a question in our controversy of a capuchin who throws away his time in quenching the darts of the flesh (though by the way, in the total of time thrown away the term that expresses the time lost in satisfying these lusts is most likely far greater); no more is it a question of a fool who is afraid of rising against tyrants for fear of forming a rash judgment.’[8]
This ability to conceive a mean case between two extremes was not among Condorcet’s gifts. His mind dwelt too much in the region of excess, alike when he measured the possibilities of the good, and coloured the motives and the situation of those whom he counted the bad. A Christian was one who wasted his days in merely resisting the flesh; anybody who declined to rise against a tyrant was the victim of a slavish scrupulosity. He rather sympathises with a scientific traveller, to whom the especial charm of natural history resides in the buffets which, at each step that it takes, it inflicts upon Moses.[9] Well, this temper is not the richest nor the highest, but it often exists in alliance with rich and high qualities. It was so with Condorcet. And we are particularly bound to remember that with him a harsh and impatient humour was not, as is so often the case, the veil for an indolent reluctance to form painstaking judgments. Few workers have been so conscientious as he was, in the labour that he bestowed upon subjects which he held to be worthy of deliberate scrutiny and consideration. His defect was in finding too few of such subjects, and in having too many foregone conclusions. Turgot and Montesquieu are perhaps the only two eminent men in France during this part of the century, of whom the same defect might not be alleged. Again, Condorcet’s impatience of underlying temperament did not prevent him from filling his compositions with solid, sober, and profound reflections, the products of grave and sustained meditation upon an experience, much of which must have been severely trying and repugnant to a man of his constitution. While recognising this trait, then, let us not overstate either it or its consequences.
The main currents of opinion and circumstance in France, when Condorcet came to take his place among her workers, are now well understood. The third quarter of the century was just closing. Lewis xv. died in 1774; and though his death was of little intrinsic consequence, except as the removal of every corrupt heart is of consequence, it is justly taken to mark the date of the beginning of the French Revolution. It was the accidental shifting of position which served to disclose that the existing system was smitten with a mortal paralysis. It is often said that what destroyed the French kingdom was despotism. A sounder explanation discovers the causes less in despotism than in anarchy—anarchy in every department where it could be most ruinous. No substantial reconstruction was possible, because all the evils came from the sinister interests of the nobles, the clergy, or the financiers; and these classes, informally bound together against the common weal, were too strong for either the sovereign or the ablest minister to thrust them aside. The material condition of France was one of supreme embarrassment and disorder, only curable by remedies which the political and social condition of the country made it impossible to employ.
This would explain why a change of some sort was inevitable. But why was the change which actually took place in that direction rather than another? Why did not France sink under her economical disorders, as greater empires than France had done? Why, instead of sinking and falling asunder, did the French people advance with a singleness of impulse unknown before in their history to their own deliverance? How was it that they overthrew the system that was crushing them, and purged themselves with fire and sword of those who administered and maintained it, defying the hopes of the nation; and then successfully encountered the giant’s task of beating back reactionary Europe with one arm, and reconstructing the fabric of their own society with the other? The answer to this question is found in the moral and spiritual condition of France. A generation aroused by the great social ideas of the eighteenth century, looking round to survey its own social state, found itself in the midst of the ruin and disorder of the disintegrated system of the twelfth century. The life was gone out of the ancient organisation of Catholicism and Feudalism, and it seemed as if nothing but corruption remained. What enabled the leaders of the nation to discern the horror and despair of this anarchic dissolution of the worn-out old, and what inspired them with hope and energy when they thought of the possible new, was the spiritual preparation that had been in swift progress since the third decade of the century. The forms and methods of this preparation were various, as the temperaments that came beneath its influence. But the school of Voltaire, the school of Rousseau, and the schools of Quesnay and Montesquieu, different as they were at the roots, all alike energetically familiarised the public mind with a firm belief in human reason, and the idea of the natural rights of man. They impregnated it with a growing enthusiasm for social justice. It is true that we find Voltaire complaining towards the close of his days, of the century being satiated and weary, un siÈcle dÉgoutÉ, not knowing well what it wanted. ‘The public,’ he said, ‘has been eighty years at table, and now it drinks a little bad cognac at the end of its meal.’[10] In literature and art this was true; going deeper than these, the public was eager and sensitive with a freshness far more vital and more fruitful than it had known eighty years back. Sitting down with a keen appetite for taste, erudition, and literary knowledge, men had now risen up from a dazzling and palling board, with a new hunger and thirst after social righteousness. This was the noble faith that saved France, by this sign she was victorious. A people once saturated with a passionate conception of justice is not likely to fall into a Byzantine stage. That destiny only awaits nations where the spiritual power is rigorously confined in the hands of castes and official churches, which systematically and of their very constitution bury justice under the sterile accumulations of a fixed superstition.
Condorcet’s principles were deeply coloured by ideas drawn from two sources. He was a Voltairean in the intensity of his antipathies to the Church, and in the depth and energy of his humanity. But while Voltaire flourished, the destructive movement only reached theology, and Voltaire, though he had more to do than anybody else with the original impulse, joined in no attack upon the State. It was from the economical writers and from Montesquieu that Condorcet learned to look upon societies with a scientific eye, to perceive the influence of institutions upon men, and that there are laws, susceptible of modification in practice, which regulate their growth. It was natural, therefore, that he should join with eagerness in the reforming movement which set in with such irrestrainable velocity after the death of Lewis xv. He was bitter and destructive with the bitterness of Voltaire; he was hopeful for the future with the faith of Turgot; and he was urgent, heated, impetuous, with a heavy vehemence all his own. In a word, he was the incarnation of the revolutionary spirit, as the revolutionary spirit existed in geometers and EncyclopÆdists; at once too reasonable and too little reasonable; too precise and scientific and too vague; too rigorously logical on the one hand and too abundantly passionate on the other. Perhaps there is no more fatal combination in politics than the deductive method worked by passion. When applied to the delicate and complex affairs of society, such machinery with such motive force is of ruinous potency.
Condorcet’s peculiarities of political antipathy and preference can hardly be better illustrated than by his view of the two great revolutions in English history. The first was religious, and therefore he hated it; the second was accompanied by much argument, and had no religion about it, and therefore he extolled it. It is scientific knowledge, he said, which explains why efforts after liberty in unenlightened centuries are so fleeting, and so deeply stained by bloodshed. ‘Compare these with the happy efforts of America and France; observe even in the same century, but at different epochs, the two revolutions of England fanatical and England enlightened. We see on the one side contemporaries of Prynne and Knox, while crying out that they are fighting for heaven and liberty, cover their unhappy country with blood in order to cement the tyranny of the hypocrite Cromwell; on the other, the contemporaries of Boyle and Newton establish with pacific wisdom the freest constitution in the world.’[11] It is not wonderful that his own revolution was misunderstood by one who thus loved English Whigs, but hated English Republicans; who could forgive an aristocratic faction grasping power for their order, but who could not sympathise with a nation rising and smiting its oppressor, where they smote in the name of the Lord and of Gideon, nor with a ruler who used his power with noble simplicity in the interests of his people, and established in the heart of the nation a respect for itself such as she has never known since, simply because this ruler knew nothing about principes or the Rights of Man. However, Nemesis comes. By and by Condorcet found himself writing a piece to show that our Revolution of 1688 was very inferior in lawfulness to the French Revolution of the Tenth of August.[12]
