allowance were made for this cause of obscurity in Mr. Maurice's writings, there would not be much obscurity left to account for.

It is common with Mr. Maurice only to hint his theology—to suggest to his readers by hypothetical or interrogative forms to draw the conclusions which he desires to commend. But in this volume he states with much plainness and reiteration the theological basis of all that he teaches. The relations from which he holds morality to be derived are the work of the Creator. The Universal Family is that founded by the Son of God on the Will of the Father. The professor warms into the preacher as he expounds and vindicates the morality of the Gospel and of the New Testament. His theological belief may be looked for everywhere. He observes that "we may trace a consistency in the thoughts of men who have exercised any considerable influence in the world, to whatever subject they have been directed.' So we may see Mr. Maurice's faith in the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, in all his interpretations of history, and in those sequences of experience which he is fond of attributing to communities and to individuals. The question for the reader to consider is whether the key offered really fits the lock.

In the present notice I make no attempt to estimate the rank or place which this volume will occupy in the library of moral science. But I may say that it appears to me as full of characteristic earnestness and power and subtlety as any of Mr. Maurice's writings. It is exceedingly rich, as any reader must acknowledge, in pregnant ethical and historical reflections. Mr. Maurice joins in the remarkable homage paid by all recent serious inquirers to M. Comte (though he does not drop the partially ironic manner with which he habitually speaks of contemporaries from whom he differs), and especially in the grateful recognition of the high aim and nobleness of his social conceptions which has been drawn from large-minded Anglican Christians. On the whole, this work may be taken as an adequate exposition of the most forward-looking Christian morality.

The volume is beautifully printed; but there is here and there a misprint overlooked, as that of "unity" for "units," on p. 401 (first line); and an unlucky one of "Bain's" for "Bacon's," on p. 380.

J. LLEWELYN DAVIES.

ERRATUM.-In Mr. Blind's article on "The Condition of France," which appeared in December last, a passage on p. 661 was printed thus:-"There are shallow talkers who would fain persuade us that the sword is the sovereign and exclusive remedy in all cases of a crying State evil. If they looked to the vicious circle in which a nation that has once been got down on its knees is placed, even they might perhaps judge more leniently of acts of resistance that do not bear the accustomed constitutional ticket." Instead of "sword" read "word."

THE

FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW.

No. XXXVIII. NEW SERIES.-FEBRUARY 1, 1870.

CONDORCET.
(Conclusion.)

AN eminent man, who escaped by one accident from the hatchets of the Septembriseurs, and by another from the guillotine of the Terror, while in hiding and in momentary expectation of capture and death, wrote thus in condemnation of suicide, "the one crime which leaves no possibility of return to virtue." "Even at this incomprehensible moment "the spring of 1793-"when morality, enlightenment, energetic love of country, only render death at the prison-wicket or on the scaffold more inevitable; when it might be allowable to choose among the ways of leaving a life that can no longer be preserved, and to rob tigers in human form of the accursed pleasure of dragging you forth and drinking your blood; yes, on the fatal tumbril itself, with nothing free but voice, I could still cry, Take care, to a child that comes too near the wheel: perhaps he may owe his life to me, perhaps the country shall one day owe its salvation to him."1

More than one career in those days, famous or obscure, was marked by this noble tenacity to lofty public ideas even in the final moments of existence; its general acceptance as a binding duty, exorcising the mournful and insignificant egotisms that haunt and wearily fret and make waste the remnants of so many lives, will produce the profoundest of all possible improvements in men's knowledge of the sublime art of the happiness of their kind. The closing words of Condorcet's last composition show the solace which perscverance in taking thought for mankind brought to him in the depths of personal calamity. He had concluded his survey of the past history of the race, and had drawn what seemed in his eyes a moderate and reasonable picture of its future. "How this picture," (1) Dupont de Nemours. Les Physiocrates, i. 326.

VOL. VII. N.S.

K

he exclaims, with the knell of his own doom sounding full in the ear while he wrote, "this picture of the human race freed from all its fetters, withdrawn from the empire of chance, as from that of the enemies of progress, and walking with firm and assured step in the way of truth, of virtue, and happiness, presents to the philosopher a sight that consoles him for the errors, the crimes, the injustice, with which the earth is yet stained, and of which he is not seldom the victim! It is in the contemplation of this picture that he receives the reward of his efforts for the progress of reason, for the defence of liberty. He ventures to link them with the eternal chain of the destinies of man: it is there he finds the true recompense of virtue, the pleasure of having done a lasting good, that fate can no longer undo by any disastrous compensation that shall restore prejudice and bondage. This contemplation is for him a refuge into which the recollection of his persecutors can never follow him; in which living in thought with man reinstated in the rights and the dignity of his nature, he forgets man tormented and corrupted by greed, by base fear, by envy; it is here that he truly abides with his fellows, in an elysium that his reason has known how to create for itself, and that his love for humanity adorns with all purest delights.'

991

It has long been the fashion among the followers of that reaction which Coleridge led and Mr. Carlyle has spread and popularised, to dwell exclusively on the coldness and hardness, the excess of scepticism and the defect of enthusiasm, that is supposed to have characterised the eighteenth century. Because the official religion of the century both in England and France was lifeless and mechanical, it has been taken for granted that the level of thought and feeling was a low one universally; as if the highest moods of every era necessarily clothed themselves in religious forms. The truth is that, working in such natures as Condorcet's, the principles of the eighteenth century, its homage to reason and rational methods, its exaltation to the highest place of the happiness of men, not excluding their material well-being, its passion for justice and law, its large illumination, engendered a fervour as truly spiritual as that of Catholicism or of Calvinism at their best, while its sentiment was infinitely less interested and personal. The passage just quoted is as little mechanical, as little material, as the most rapturous ejaculations of the Christian saints and confessors; and, read in connection with the circumstances of its composition, may show that the eighteenth century was able at any rate to inspire its sons with a faith that could rob death of its sting and the grave of its victory, as effectually as if it had rested on a mystery instead of on reason, and been supported by the sanctions of eternal pain and eternal bliss, instead of moving from a confident devotion to humanity.

(1) Progrès de l'Esprit Humain. Œuvres, vi. 276.

V.

The shape of Condorcet's ideas upon history arose from the twofold necessity which the structure of his character imposed upon him, at once of appeasing his aspirations on behalf of mankind, and of satisfying a disciplined and scientific intelligence. He was of too robust an understanding to find adequate gratification in the artificial construction of hypothetical Utopias. Conviction was as indispensable as hope; and distinct grounds for the faith that was in him as essential as the faith itself. The result of this fact of mental constitution, the intellectual conditions of the time being what they were, was the rise in his mind of the great and central conception of there being a law in the succession of social states, to be ascertained by an examination of the collective phenomena of past history. The merit of this admirable effort, and of the work in which it found expression, is very easily underrated, because the effort was insufficient and merely preparatory, while modern thought has already carried us far beyond it and at least into sight of the complete truths to which this effort only pointed the way. Let us remember, however, that it pointed the way distinctly and unmistakably. A very brief survey of the state of history as a subject of systematic study enables us to appreciate with precision what service it was that Condorcet rendered; for it carries us back from the present comparatively advanced condition of the science of society to a time before his memorable attempt, when conceptions now become so familiar were not in existence, and when even the most instructed students of human affairs no more felt the need of a scientific theory of the manner in which social effects follow social causes, than the least instructed portion of the literary public feels such a need in our own time. It is difficult after a subject has been separated from the nebulous mass of unclassified knowledge, has taken independent shape, and begun to move in lines of its own, to realise the process by which all this was effected, or the way in which before all this the facts concerned presented themselves to the thinker's mind. That we should overcome the difficulty is one of the conditions of our being able to do justice to the great army of the precursors.

Two movements of thought went on in France during the middle of the eighteenth century which have been comparatively little dwelt upon by historians, whose main anxiety has been to justify the foregone conclusion, so gratifying alike to the partisans of the social reaction and to the disciples of modern transcendentalism in its many disguises, that the eighteenth century was almost exclusively negative, critical, and destructive. Each of these two currents was positive in the highest degree, and their influence undeniably constructive, if we consider that it was from their union into a common channel, a work fully accomplished first in the mind of Condorcet,

that the notion of the scientific treatment of history and society took its earliest start.

The first of the two movements, and that which has been most unaccountably neglected, consisted in the remarkable attempts of Quesnay and his immediate followers to withdraw the organisation of society from the sphere of empiricism, and to substitute for the vulgar conception of arbitrary and artificial institutions as the sole foundation of this organisation, the idea that there is a certain Natural Order, conformity to which in all social arrangements is the essential condition of their being advantageous to the members of the social union. Natural Order in the minds of this school was no metaphysical figment evolved from pure consciousness, but a set of circumstances to be discovered by continuous and methodical observation. It consisted of physical law and moral law. The first was the regulated course of every physical circumstance in the order evidently most advantageous to the human race. The second was the rule of every human action of the moral order, conformed to the physical order evidently most advantageous to the human race. This order is the base of the most perfect government, and the fundamental rule of all positive laws; for positive laws are only the laws required to keep up and maintain the natural order that is evidently most advantageous to the race.1

Towards the close of the reign of Louis XIV. the frightful impoverishment of the realm attracted the attention of one or two enlightened observers, and among them of Boisguillebert and Vauban. They had exposed, the former of them with especial force and amplitude, the absurdity of the general system of administration, which seemed to have been devised for the express purpose of paralysing both agriculture and commerce, and exhausting all the sources of the national wealth. But these speculations had been mainly of a fiscal kind, and pointed not much further than to a readjustment of taxation and an improvement in the modes of its collection. The disciples of the New Science, as it was called, the Physiocrats or believers in the supremacy of Natural Order, went much beyond this, and in theory sought to lay open the whole ground of the fabric of society. Practically, they dealt with scarcely any but the economic circumstances of societies, though some of them mix up with their reasonings upon commerce and agriculture crude and incomplete hints upon forms of government and other questions that belong not to the economical but to the political side of social science.3 Quesnay's famous Maxims open with a declaration in (1) Quesnay; Droit Naturel, c. 5. Les Physiocrates, i. 52.

(2) Economistes Financiers du 18ième Siècle. Vauban's Projet d'une Dime Royale (p. 33), and Boisguillebert's Factum de la France, &c. (p. 248 et seqq.)

(3) De la Rivière, for instance, very notably. Cf. his Ordre Naturel des Sociétés Politiques. Physiocrates, ii. 469, 636, &c. See also Baudeau on the superiority of the Economic Monarchy. Ibid., pp. 783-791.