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Untitled Article
futurity . With a low conception of the moral perfectibility of man , with a false estimate of the sources of happiness , and applying to all objects a narrow standard of excellence , he seemed incapable of passing out of the contracted circle of his own ideas , to sympathise with men of other days and with different forms of social life . A national spirit in manners or in literature he was wholly incompetent to appreciate . Into all his speculations he carried with him the fastidiousness of a Parisian criticism . Wherever he turned his eye , he seemed to meet only the grotesqueness of folly , and the diversified aspects of human weakness and wickedness . But let us not be unjust to his memory . Let us think of the effect that must necessarily have been produced on a spirit , so exquisitely acute and susceptible as his , by the degradation , the hollowness , and the tyranny , with which he saw himself encircled at home . Let us remember the part assigned him in the moral drama of the eighteenth century , as the scourge of superstition and hypocrisy . He judged of all mankind by the selfish and corrupted beings with whom his own circumstances brought him into immediate contact ; and henee he regarded the whole world as one vast pantomime of folly and vice . Yet his nature was not wanting in gentleness and humanity . There are occasional glimpses of moral beauty and tenderness in his works , betraying the existence of feelings , which , had he lived in a better age , and been exposed to more kindly influences , might have warmed into a genial piety and nourished a spirit of uniform and consistent benevolence . Had he written nothing else , his memorable remark on history would alone have entitled him to the grateful remembrance of posterity : C ' est au genre humain qu'il eiXt fallu faire attention dans l'histoire ; c ^ est Ik que chaque ecrivain eut du dire , homo sum . ' *
Condorcet was a spirit of another temper ; more exact , profound , and conscientious , and of a more intense and concentrated benevolence . He mourned over the miseries , and he assailed the superstitions and vices of mankind , but with a constant view to devise the means of remedy . Agreeing with Voltaire in many of his general principles , he was not content , like him , to walk amidst a world of ruins ; but with a genius less versatile and comprehensive than his predecessor , and determined , by the force of circumstances , to seek at once for some practical results , he solaced the hours of an anxious concealment in framing the image of a futurity , which had never crossed the vision of the less earnest and disinterested philosopher of Ferney . But it is precisely in this part of his work that we discover the vital defect of Condorcet ' s system . He proposes to accomplish the most stupendous changes in the moral and social condition of mankind ; while , at the same time , by annihilating religious principle *
* JEasai sur les MceurSj chap . 84 .
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£ 80 The Philosophy of the History of Mankind
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1832, page 230, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1810/page/14/
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