_ CHAPTER VI
We have now seen something of Condorcet's ideas of the past, and of his conception of what he was perhaps the first to call the Science of Man. Let us turn to his hopes for the future, and one or two of the details to which his study of the science of man conducted him. It is well to perceive at the outset that Condorcet's views of the Tenth Epoch, as he counts the period extending from the French Revolution to the era of the indefinite perfection of man, were in truth not the result of any scientific processes whatever, properly so called. He saw, and this is his merit, that such processes were applicable to the affairs of society; and that, as he put it, all political and moral errors rest upon error in philosophy, which in turn is bound up with erroneous methods in physical science.[73] But in the execution of his plan he does not succeed in showing the nature of the relations of these connected forces; still less does he practise the scientific duty, for illustrating which he gives such well-deserved glory to Newton,[74] of not only accounting for phenomena, but also of measuring the
quantity of forces. His conception, therefore, of future progress, however near conjecture may possibly have brought him to the truth, is yet no more than conjecture. The root of it is found in nothing more precise, definite, or quantified than a general notion gathered from history, that some portions of the race had made perceptible advances in freedom and enlightenment, and that we might therefore confidently expect still further advances to be made in the same direction with an accelerated rapidity, and with certain advantageous effects upon the happiness of the whole mass of the human race. In short, the end of the speculation is a confirmed and heightened conviction of the indefinite perfectibility of the species, with certain foreshadowings of the direction which this perfectibility would ultimately follow. The same rebellion against the disorder and misery of the century, which drove some thinkers and politicians into fierce yearnings for an imaginary state of nature, and others into an extravagant admiration for the ancient republics, caused a third school, and Condorcet among them, to turn their eyes with equally boundless confidence and yearning towards an imaginary future. It was at all events the least desperate error of the three.
Our expectations for the future, Condorcet held, may be reduced to these three points: the destruction of inequality among nations; the progress of equality among the people of any given nation; and, finally the substantial perfecting (
perfectionnement reel) of man.
I. With reference to the first of these great aspirations, it will be brought about by the abandonment by European peoples of their commercial monopolies, their treacherous practices, their mischievous and extravagant proselytising, and their sanguinary contempt for those of another colour or another creed. Vast countries, now a prey to barbarism and violence, will present in one region numerous populations only waiting to receive the means and instruments of civilisation from us, and as soon as they find brothers in the Europeans, will joyfully become their friends and pupils; and in another region, nations enslaved under the yoke of despots or conquerors, crying aloud for so many ages for liberators. In yet other regions, it is true, there are tribes almost savage, cut off by the harshness of their climate from a perfected civilisation, or else conquering hordes, ignorant of every law but violence and every trade but brigandage. The progress of these last two descriptions of people will naturally be more tardy, and attended by more storm and convulsion. It is possible even, that reduced in number, in proportion as they see themselves repulsed by civilised nations, they will end by insensibly disappearing.[75] It is perhaps a little hard to expect Esquimaux or the barbaric marauders of the sandy expanses of Central Asia insensibly to disappear, lest by their cheerless presence they should destroy the unity and harmony of the transformation scene in the great drama of Perfectibility.
II. The principal causes of the inequality that unfortunately exists among the people of the same community are three in number:--inequality in wealth; inequality of condition between the man whose means of subsistence are both assured and transmissible, and him for whom these means depend upon the duration of his working life; thirdly, inequality of instruction. How are we to establish a continual tendency in these three sources of inequality to diminish in activity and power? To lessen, though not to demolish, inequalities in wealth, it will be necessary for all artificial restrictions and exclusive advantages to be removed from fiscal or other legal arrangements, by which property is either acquired or accumulated: and among social changes tending in this direction will be the banishment by public opinion of an avaricious or mercenary spirit from marriage. Again, inequality between permanent and precarious incomes will be radically modified by the development of the application of the calculation of probabilities to life. The extension of annuities and insurance will not only benefit many individuals, but will benefit society at large by putting an end to that periodical ruin of a large number of families, which is such an ever-renewing source of misery and degradation. Another means to the same end will be found in discovering, by the same doctrine of probabilities, some other equally solid base for credit instead of a large capital, and for rendering the progress of industry and the activity of commerce more independent of the existence of great capitalists. Something approaching to equality of instruction, even for those who can only spare a few of their early years for study, and in after times only a few hours of leisure, will become more attainable by improved selection of subjects, and improved methods of teaching them. The dwellers in one country will cease to be distinguished by the use of a rude or of a refined dialect; and this, it may be said in passing, has actually been the result of the school system in the United States. One portion of them will no longer be dependent upon any other for guidance in the smallest affairs. We cannot obliterate nor ignore natural differences of capacity, but after public instruction has been properly developed, 'the difference will be between men of superior enlightenment, and men of an upright character who feel the value of light without being dazzled by it; between talent or genius, and that good sense which knows how to appreciate and to enjoy both. Even if this difference were greater than has been said, if we compare the force and extent of faculty, it would become none the less insensible, if we compare their respective effects upon the relations of men among themselves, upon all that affects their independence and their happiness.'[76]
III. What are the changes that we may expect from the substantial perfecting of human nature and society? If, before making this forecast, we reflect with what feeble means the race has arrived at its present knowledge of useful and important truths, we shall not fear the reproach of temerity in our anticipations for a time when the force of all these means shall have been indefinitely increased. The progress of agricultural science will make the same land more productive, and the same labour more efficient. Nay, who shall predict what the art of converting elementary substances into food for our use may one day become? The constant tendency of population to advance to the limits of the means of subsistence thus amplified, will be checked by a rising consciousness in men, that if they have obligations in respect of creatures still unborn, these obligations consist in giving them, not existence but happiness, in adding to the wellbeing of the family, and not cumbering the earth with useless and unfortunate beings. This changed view upon population will partly follow from the substitution of rational ideas for those prejudices which have penetrated morals with an austerity that is corrupting and degrading.[77] The movement will be further aided by one of the most important steps in human progress--the destruction, namely, of the prejudices that have established inequality of rights between the two sexes, and which are so mischievous even to the sex that seems to be most favoured.[78] We seek in vain for any justification of such an inequality in difference of physical organisation, in force of intelligence, or in moral sensibility. It has no other origin than abuse of strength, and it is to no purpose that attempts are made to excuse it by sophisms. The destruction of the usages springing from this custom will render common those domestic virtues which are the foundation of all others, and will encourage education as well as make it more general, both because instruction would be imparted to both sexes with more equality, and because it cannot become general even for males without the aid of the mother of the family.[79]
Among other improvements under our third head will be the attainment of greater perfection in language, leading at once to increased accuracy and increased concision. Laws and institutions, following the progress of knowledge, will be constantly undergoing modifications tending to identify individual with collective interests. Wars will grow less frequent with the extinction of those ideas of hereditary and dynastic rights, that have occasioned so many bloody contests. The art of learning will be facilitated by the institution of a Universal Language; and the art of teaching by resort to Technical Methods, or systems which unite in orderly arrangement a great number of different objects, so that their relations are perceived at a single glance.[80]
Finally, progress in medicine, the use of more wholesome food and healthy houses, the diminution of the two most active causes of deterioration, namely, misery and excessive wealth, must prolong the average duration of life, as well as raise the tone of health while it lasts. The force of transmissable diseases will be gradually weakened, until their quality of transmission vanishes. May we then not hope for the arrival of a time when death will cease to be anything but the effect either of extraordinary accidents, or of the destruction, ever slower and slower, of the vital forces? May we not believe that the duration of the middle interval between birth and this destruction has no assignable term? Man will never become immortal, but is it a mere chimera to hold that the term fixed to his years is slowly and perpetually receding further and further from the moment at which his existence begins?[81]
* * * * *
The rapidity and the necessary incompleteness with which Condorcet threw out in isolated hints his ideas of the future state of society, impart to his conception a certain mechanical aspect, which conveys an incorrect impression of his notion of the sources whence social change must flow. His admirable and most careful remarks upon the moral training of children prove him to have been as far removed as possible from any of those theories of the formation of character which merely prescribe the imposition of moulds and casts from without, instead of carefully tending the many spontaneous and sensitive processes of growth within.[82] Nobody has shown a finer appreciation of the delicacy of the material out of which character is to be made, and of the susceptibility of its elementary structure; nor of the fact that education consists in such a discipline of the primitive impulses as shall lead men to do right, not by the constraint of mechanical external sanctions, but by an instant, spontaneous, and almost inarticulate repugnance to cowardice, cruelty, apathy, self-indulgence, and the other great roots and centres of wrong-doing. It was to a society composed of men and women whose characters had been shaped on this principle, that Condorcet looked for the realisation of his exalted hopes for humanity.[83]
With machinery and organisation, in truth, Condorcet did not greatly concern himself; probably too little rather than too much. The central idea of all his aspirations was to procure the emancipation of reason, free and ample room for its exercise, and improved competence among men in the use of it. The subjugation of the modern intelligence beneath the disembodied fancies of the grotesque and sombre imagination of the Middle Ages, did not offend him more than the idea of any fixed organisation of the spiritual power, or any final and settled and universally accepted solution of belief and order would have done. With De Maistre and Comte the problem was the organised and systematic reconstruction of an anarchic society. With Condorcet it was how to persuade men to exert the individual reason methodically and independently, not without co-operation, but without anything like official or other subordination.
His cardinal belief and precept was, as with Socrates, that the +bios anexetastos+ is not to be lived by man. As we have seen, the freedom of the reason was so dear to him, that he counted it an abuse for a parent to instil his own convictions into the defenceless minds of his young children. This was the natural outcome of Condorcet's mode of viewing history as the record of intellectual emancipation, while to Comte its deepest interest was as a record of moral and emotional cultivation. If we value in one type of thinker the intellectual conscientiousness, which refrains from perplexing men by propounding problems unless the solution can be set forth also, perhaps we owe no less honour in the thinker of another type to that intellectual self-denial which makes him very careful lest the too rigid projection of his own specific conclusions should by any means obstruct the access of a single ray of fertilising light. This religious scrupulosity, which made him abhor all interference with the freedom and openness of the understanding as the worst kind of sacrilege, was Condorcet's eminent distinction. If, as some think, the world will gradually transform its fear or love of unknowable gods into a devout reverence for those who have stirred in men a sense of the dignity of their own nature and of its large and multitudinous possibilities, then will his name not fail of deep and perpetual recollection.
FOOTNOTES:
[73]
Ib. p. 223.
[74]
Ib. p. 206.
[75]
Oeuv. pp. 239-244.
[76]
Oeuv. pp. 244-251.
[77]
Oeuv. pp. 257, 258.
[78] Condorcet had already assailed the prejudices that keep women in subjection in an excellent tract, published in 1790;
Sur l'Admission des Femmes au Droit de Cite. Oeuv. x. 121-130.
[79]
Oeuv. p. 264. The rest of the passage is not perfectly intelligible to me, so I give it as it stands. '
Cet hommage trop tardif, rendu enfin a l'equite et au bon sens, ne tarirait-il pas une source trop feconde d'injustices, de cruautes et de crimes, en faisant disparaitre une opposition si dangereuse entre le penchant naturel le plus vif, le plus difficile a reprimer, et les devoirs de l'homme ou les interets de la societe? Ne produirait-il pas, enfin, des moeurs nationales douces et pures, formees non de privations orgueilleuses, d'apparences hypocrites, de reserves imposees par la crainte de la honte ou les terreurs religieuses, mais d'habitudes librement contractees, inspirees par la nature, avouees par la raison? ' Can these habitudes be the habitudes of Free Love, or what are they? Condorcet, we know, thought the indissolubility of marriage a monstrously bad thing, but the grounds which he gives for his thinking so would certainly lead to the infinite dissolubility of society. See a truly astounding passage in the
Fragment on the Tenth Epoch, vi. 523-526. See also some curious words in a letter to Turgot, i. 221, 222.
[80]
Oeuv. pp. 269-272.
[81]
Oeuv. pp. 272-275. Also p. 618.
[82] See
Fragment de l'Histoire de la Xe Epoque. '
Il ne faut pas leur dire, mais les accoutumer a croire, a trouver au dedans a'eux-memes, que la bonte et la justice sont necessaires au bonheur, comme une respiration facile et libre l'est a la sante.' Of books for the young: '
Il faut qu'ils n'excedent jamais l'etendue ou la delicatesse de la sensibilite.' '
Il faut renoncer a l'idee de parler aux enfans de ce que ni leur esprit ni leur ame ne peuvent encore comprendre; ne pas leur faire admirer une constitution et reciter par coeur les droits politiques de l'homme quand ils ont a peine une idee nette de leurs relations avec leur famille et leurs camarades.'
Still more objectionable, we may be sure, would he have found the practice of drilling little children by the hearth or at the school-desk in creeds, catechisms, and the like repositories of mysteries baleful to the growing intelligence. '
Aidons le developpement des facultes humaines pendant la faiblesse de l'enfance,' he said admirably, '
mais n'abusons pas de cette faiblesse pour les mouler au gre de nos opinions de nos interets, ou de notre orgueil.'--
Oeuv. vi. 543-554.
Cf. also v. 363-365, where there are some deserved strictures on the malpractice of teaching children as truth what the parents themselves believe to be superstition or even falsehood.
The reader may remember the speech of the Patriarch, in Lessing's play, against the Jew:
Der mit Gewalt ein armes Christenkind
Dem Bunde seiner Tauf' entreisst! Denn ist
Nicht alles, was man Kindern thut, Gewalt?
Zu sagen: ausgenommen, was die Kirch',
An Kindern thut. [83] His
Memoires sur l'Instruction Publique, written in 1791-1792, and printed in the seventh volume of the works, are still very well worth turning to.
[THE END]
John Morley's essay: Condorcet
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