Chapter 7

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.

Transcribers' Notes:

Minor printer errors (omitted or incorrect punctuation) have been amended without note. Other errors have been amended and are listed below.

List of Amendments:

Page 201: colleages amended to colleagues; "... among his colleagues in the deputation ..."

Page 240: added missing footnote anchor [66] to paragraph ending "... ceased to be altogether exact."

End of Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3), by John Morley