In the following generation, it would be pointed out that he fell into a manifest contradiction when he praised the relative perfection reached in some European countries in the eighteenth century, and at the same time condemned as eminently retrograde all the doctrines and institutions which had been previously in control.

[Footnote: Comte.
Cours de philosophie positive, iv.

228.] This error is closely connected with the other error, previously noticed, of conceiving man abstracted from his social environment and exercising his reason in vacuo.
5.
The study of the history of civilisation has, in Condorcet's eyes, two uses.

It enables us to establish the fact of Progress, and it should enable us to determine its direction in the future, and thereby to accelerate the rate of progression.
By the facts of history and the arguments they suggest, he undertakes to show that nature has set no term to the process of improving human faculties, and that the advance towards perfection is limited only by the duration of the globe.

The movement may vary in velocity, but it will never be retrograde so long as the earth occupies its present place in the cosmic system and the general laws of this system do not produce some catastrophe or change which would deprive the human race of the faculties and resources which it has hitherto possessed.