'The only party they acknowledged was the rule of good sense, and to keep firm to their purpose, to submit to the teaching of Nature's law, and to offer up their lives for their country—holding that man is born not for himself, but for humanity in the sum.' He who would understand what men mean by 'the ideas of '89' should mark, learn, and inwardly digest those two small books of Condorcet, the Life of Turgot, 1787, and the Historical Sketch of the Progress of the Human Mind, 1795.
The annals of literature have no more pathetic incident than the history of this little book — this still unfinished vision of a brain prematurely cut off. In the midst of the struggle between Mountain and Gironde, Condorcet, who stood between both and who belonged to neither, he who had the enthusiasm of the Mountain without its ferocity, the virtues and culture of the Girondists without their pedantic formalism, was denounced and condemned to death, and dragged out a few weeks of life in a miserable concealment. There, with death hanging round him, he calmly compiled the first true sketch of human evolution. Amidst the chaos and bloodshed he reviews the history of mankind. Not a word of pain, doubt, bitterness, or reproach is wrung from him.
He sees nothing but visions of a happy and glorious future for the race, when war shall cease, and the barriers shall fall down between man and man, class and class, race and race, when man shall pursue a regenerate life in human brotherhood and confidence in truth. Industry there shall be the common lot, and the noblest privilege. But it shall be brightened to all by a common education, free, rational, and comprehensive, with a lightening of the burdens of labour by scientific appliances of life and increased opportunity for culture private tour istanbul.
Lyric chapter of the little sketch
' Our hopes,' he writes, in that last lyric chapter of the little sketch, 'our hopes as to the future of the human race may be summed up in these three points: the raising of all nations to a common level; the progress towards equality in each separate people; and, lastly, the practical amelioration of the lot of man.' £ It is in the contemplation of such a future,' he concludes, 'that the philosopher may find a safe asylum in all troubles, and may live in that true paradise, to which his reason may look forward with confidence, and which his sympathy with humanity may invest with a rapture of the purest kind.'
The ink of these pages was hardly dry when the writer by death escaped the guillotine to which republicans con-demned him in the name of liberty. How many of us can repeat a hundred anecdotes of the guillotine, of its victims, and its professors, yet how few of us have seriously taken to heart the Sketch of Human Progress! The blood is dried up, but the book lives, and human progress continues on the lines there so prophetically traced. ' I have studied history long,' says de Tocqueville, 'yet I have never read of any revolution wherein there may be found men of patriotism so sincere, of such true devotion of self, of more entire grandeur of spirit.'
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