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Untitled Article
he takes from the world the only power , which can effectually sway the passions and appetites of men , and propel all their energies to the steady and unceasing pursuit of good . He discovers a most extraordinary acquaintance with the mere machinery of society ; it is all laid out , with the greatest exactness , in his pages , complicated and vast : but when we ask , how is
this apparatus to be kept in constant motion , and look for the central spring , it is not there . He seems not to consider that man has a moral as well as an intellectual nature , and that the illumination of the one does not , of necessity , involve the improvement of the other . All the perfection , which he anticipates , in the sciences and arts—all his benevolent schemes for checking the most fertile sources of human poverty and wretchedness—the
most complete fulfilment of all his most sanguine expectations from an association of philosophers , formed after a suggestion of Bacon's , for the sole purpose of advancing science and discovering truth — could not make man a different moral being from what he now is , could not equalise his original differences of capacity and temperament , could not exclude those alternations of hope and fear , that dread of annihilation , that longing
for the vast and infinite , which will ever be found among the most powerful springs of human action and sentiment . And then , according to these views , what a dismal retrospect the world affords i Through the ages which have elapsed since the creation ,, men seem to have lived wholly in vain . Never yet has the purpose of existence been fulfilled . All the past has been spent in the perversion of energies , which men knew not how to use , and in fruitless struggles after a happiness , which they were
destined never to attain . The past and the present generations of mankind have no object in themselves ; they are valuable and interesting only as they tend to some imaginary state of perfection , which is to arise after thousands of ages . The individual is sacrificed to the species , the reality to the abstraction : and the best of men , under unmerited wrongs and sufferings , can only console themselves with the bright visions of a distant futurity , which it shall never be their happiness to behold . * f *
A philosopher , of another order than the former twp , was Herder . With a heart full of tenderness , and exquisitely alive to the most delicate influences of beauty and truth , he looked into
* See more especially his Fragment sur VAtlqintidc . f In the following beautiful passage , Condorcet seems almost unconsciously to express that longing after immortality , which , amid all his scepticism , still fondly clung to his heart . i Cette contemplation' ( he is anticipating the future perfection of mankind ) est pour le philosophe un asyle oil le souvenir de ses persecutions ne peut le poursuivre ; ou , vivant par la pensee avec 1 'homme r £ tabli dans les droits comme dans la dignity de sa nature , il oublie celui que I ' iividit 6 , la crainte ou l ' envie tourmentent et corrompent 3 c ' est la qu'il existe ve > itablement avec ses semblablesj dans un &lysee que sa raison a su se cr 6 er , et que son amour pour l * humanit € embellit des p lus puree jouissances , '—JE * ywi «« e ; p . 300 .
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Thephilosophy of the History of Mankind . £ 81
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1832, page 231, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1810/page/15/
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