[The Idea of Progress by J. B. Bury]@TWC D-Link book
The Idea of Progress

CHAPTER XI
20/24

He was too deeply imbued with the views of the Economists to be seduced by the theories of Rousseau, Mably, Babeuf, and others, into advocating communism or the abolition of private property.
Besides equality among the individuals composing a civilised society, Condorcet contemplated equality among all the peoples of the earth,--a uniform civilisation throughout the world, and the obliteration of the distinction between advanced and retrograde races.

The backward peoples, he prophesied, will climb up to the condition of France and the United States of America, for no people is condemned never to exercise its reason.

If the dogma of the perfectibility of human nature, unguarded by any restrictions, is granted, this is a logical inference, and we have already seen that it was one of the ideas current among the philosophers.
Condorcet does not hesitate to add to his picture adventurous conjectures on the improvement of man's physical organisation, and a considerable prolongation of his life by the advance of medical science.
We need only note this.

More interesting is the prediction that, even if the compass of the human being's cerebral powers is inalterable, the range, precision, and rapidity of his mental operations will be augmented by the invention of new instruments and methods.
The design of writing a history of human civilisation was premature, and to have produced a survey of any durable value would have required the equipment of a Gibbon.

Condorcet was not even as well equipped as Voltaire.


<<Back  Index  Next>>

D-Link book Top

TWC mobile books