weakened physically by much confinement and the constraint of cumbrous clothing; and not even his dedication to the Holy Virgin prevented him from growing up the most ardent of the admirers of Voltaire. His earliest instructors, as happened to most of the sceptical philosophers, were the Jesuits, then within a few years of their fall. That these adroit men, armed with all the arts and traditions which their order had acquired in three centuries, and with the training of the nation almost exclusively in their hands, should still have been unable to shield their persons from proscription and their creed from hatred, is a remarkable and satisfactory instance how little it avails ecclesiastical bodies to have a monopoly of official education, if the spirit of their teaching be out of harmony with those most potent agencies which we sum up as the spirit of the time. The Jesuits were the great official teachers of France for the first half of the eighteenth century. In 1764 the order was thrust forth from the country, and they left behind them an army of the bitterest enemies that Christianity has ever had. To do them justice, they were destroyed by weapons which they had themselves supplied. The intelligence which they had so honourably developed and sharpened turned inevitably against the incurable faults in their own system. They were admirable teachers of mathematics. Condorcet, instructed by the Jesuits at Rheims, was able, when he was only fifteen years old, to go through such performances in analysis as to win especial applause from illustrious judges like D'Alembert and Clairaut. It was impossible, however, for Jesuits, as it has ever been for all enemies of movement, to constrain within prescribed limits the activity which has once been effectively stirred. Mathematics has always been in the eyes of the Church a harmless branch of knowledge, but the mental energy that mathematics first touched is sure to turn itself by-and-by to more complex and dangerous subjects in the scientific hierarchy. Condorcet's curiosity was very speedily drawn to problems beyond those which geometry and algebra pretend to solve. "For thirty years," he wrote in 1790, "I have hardly ever passed a single day without meditating on the political sciences." Thus, when only seventeen, when the ardour of even the choicest spirits is usually most purely intellectual, moral and social feeling was rising in Condorcet to that supremacy which it afterwards attained in him to so admirable a degree. He wrote essays on integral calculus, but he was already beginning to reflect upon the laws of human societies and the conditions of moral obligation. At the root of Condorcet's nature was a profound sensibility of constitution. One of his biographers explains his early enthusiasm for virtue and human welfare as the conclusion of a kind of syllogism. It is possible that the syllogism was only the later shape into which (1) Euvres de Condorect. (12 vols. 1847-9.) ix. 489.

an instinctive impulse threw itself by way of rational entrenchment. This sensibility caused Condorcet to abandon the barbarous pleasures of the chase, which had at first powerfully attracted him.1 To derive delight from what inflicts pain on any sentient creature revolted his conscience and offended his reason, because he perceived that the character which does not shrink from associating its own joy with the anguish of another, is either found or left mortally blunted to the finest impressions of humanity. It was this same sensibility, fortified by reason, which drove him while almost still at school to reflect, as he confided to Turgot he had done, on the moral ideas of virtue and justice.

It is thus assured that from the beginning Condorcet was unable to satisfy himself with the mere knowledge of the specialist, but felt the necessity of placing social aims at the head and front of his life, and of subordinating to them all other pursuits. That he values knowledge only as a means to social action is one of the highest titles to our esteem that any philosopher can have. Such a temper of mind has penetrated no man more fully than Condorcet, though there are other thinkers to whom time and chance have been more favourable in making that temper permanently productive. There is a fine significance in his words, after the dismissal of the great and virtuous Turgot from office:-"We have had a delightful dream, but it was too brief. Now I mean to apply myself to geometry. It is terribly cold to be for the future labouring only for the gloriole, after flattering oneself for a while that one was working for the public weal." It is true that a geometer, too, works for the public weal; but the process is tardier, and we may well pardon an impatience that sprung of reasoned zeal for the happiness of mankind. There is something much more attractive about Condorcet's undisguised disappointment at having to exchange active public labour for geometrical problems, than in the affected satisfaction conventionally professed by statesmen when driven from place to their books. His correspondence shows that, even when his mind seemed to be most concentrated upon his special studies, he was incessantly on the alert for every new idea, book, transaction, that was likely to stimulate the love of virtue in individuals, or to increase the strength of justice in society. It would have been, in one sense, more fortunate for him to have cared less for high social interests, if we remember the contention of his latter days and the catastrophe which brought them to so frightful a close. But Condorcet was not one of those natures who can think it happiness to look passively out from the tranquil literary watch-tower upon the mortal struggles of a society in a state of revolution. In measuring other men of science -as his two volumes of Eloges abundantly show-one cannot (1) Euvres, i. 220.

(2) i. 220.

help being struck by the eagerness with which he seizes on any trait of zeal for social improvement, of anxiety that the lives and characters of our fellows should be better worth having. He was himself too absolutely possessed by this social spirit to have flinched from his career, even if he had foreseen the martyrdom which was to consummate it. "You are very happy," he once wrote to Turgot, "in your passion for the public good and your power to satisfy it; it is a great consolation, and of an order very superior to that of study."

In 1769, at the age of six-and-twenty, Condorcet became connected with the Academy, to the mortification of his relations, who hardly pardoned him for not being a captain of cavalry, as his father had been before him. About the same time or a little later, he performed a pilgrimage of a kind that could hardly help making a mark upon a character so deeply impressible. In company with D'Alembert, he went to Ferney and saw Voltaire. To the position of Voltaire in Europe in 1770 there has never been any other man's position in any age wholly comparable. It is true that there had been one or two of the great popes, and a great ecclesiastic like St. Bernard, who had exercised a spiritual authority, pretty universally submitted to, or even spontaneously invoked, throughout western Europe. But these were the representatives of a powerful organisation and an accepted system. Voltaire filled a place before men's eyes in the eighteenth century as conspicuous and as authoritative as that of St. Bernard in the twelfth. The difference was that Voltaire's place was absolutely unofficial in its origin, and indebted to no system nor organisation for its maintenance. Again, there have been others, like Bacon or Descartes, destined to make a far more permanent contribution to the ideas which have extended the powers and elevated the happiness of men; but these great spirits for the most part laboured for the generation that followed them, and won comparatively slight recognition from their own age. Voltaire, during his life, enjoyed to the full not only the admiration that belongs to the poet, but something of the veneration that is paid to the thinker, and even something of the glory usually reserved for captains and conquerors of renown. No other man before or since ever hit so exactly the mark of his time on every side, so precisely met the conditions of fame for the moment, nor so thoroughly dazzled and reigned over the foremost men and women who were his contemporaries. Wherever else intellectual fame has approached the fame of Voltaire, it has been posthumous. With him it was immediate and splendid. Into the secret of this extraordinary circumstance we need not here particularly inquire. He was an unsurpassed master of the art of literary expression in a country where that art is more (1) Euvres, i. 201. See Turgot's wise reply, p. 202.

highly prized than anywhere else; he was the most brilliant of wits among a people whose relish for wit is a supreme passion; he won the admiration of the lighter souls by his plays, of the learned by his interest in science, of the men of letters by his never-ceasing flow of essays, criticisms, and articles, not one of which lacks vigour and freshness and sparkle; he was the most active, bitter, and telling foe of what was then the most justly abhorred of all institutions— the Church. Add to these remarkable titles to honour and popularity that he was no mere declaimer against oppression and injustice in the abstract, but the strenuous, persevering, and absolutely indefatigable champion of every victim of oppression or injustice whose case was once brought under his eye.1

It is not difficult to perceive the fascination which Voltaire, with this character and this unrivalled splendour of public position, would have for a man like Condorcet. He conceived the warmest attachment to Voltaire, and Voltaire in turn the highest respect for him. Their correspondence (1770-1778) is perhaps as interesting as any letters of that period that we possess: Voltaire always bright, playful, and affectionate; Condorcet more declamatory and less graceful, but full of reverence and loyalty for his "dear and illustrious" master, and of his own peculiar eagerness for good causes and animosity against the defenders of evil cnes. Condorcet was younger than the Patriarch of Ferney by nearly half a century, but this did not prevent him from loyal remonstrances on more than one occasion against conduct on Voltaire's part in this matter or that, which he held to be unworthy of his character and reputation. He went so far as actually to decline to print in the Mercure a letter in which the writer in some fit of spleen placed Montesquieu below D'Aguesseau. There was perhaps as much moral courage in doing this as in defying the Men of the Mountain in the days of the Terror. It dispels some false impressions of Voltaire's supposed intolerance of criticism, to find him thanking Condorcet for one of these friendly protests. "One sees things ill," he writes, "when one sees them from too far off. After all, we ought never to blush to go to school if we are as old as Methuselah. I repeat my acknowledgments to you.' Condorcet did not conceive that, either to be blind to a man's errors. or to compromise them, was to prove yourself his friend. There is an integrity of friendship as in public concerns, and Condorcet adhered to it as manfully in one as in the other. Throughout his intercourse with intimate friends there is that happy and frank play of direct personal allusion which is as distinct from flattery when it is about another, as it is from egotism when it refers to the writer himself.

(1) On the state of opinion in France about the Newtonian principles before Voltaire, see Condorcet's Letter to La Harpe, i. 289. Also his "Life of Voltaire," Œuvres, iv. 40. (2) Euvres, i. xli.

Perhaps we see him most characteristically in his correspondence with Turgot. Turgot was as much less vivacious than Condorcet, as Condorcet was less vivacious than Voltaire. They belonged to quite distinct types of character, but this may be a condition of the most perfect forms of sympathy. Each gives support where the other is most conscious of needing it. Turgot was one of those serene, capacious, and sure intelligences whose aspirations do not become low nor narrow by being watchfully held under the control of reason; whose ideas are no less vigorous or exuberant because they move in a steady and ordered train; and who, in their most fervent reactions against abuses or crimes, resist that vehement temptation to excess which is the besetting infirmity of generous natures. Condorcet was very different from this. Whatever he wished, he wished unrestrainedly. As with most men of the epoch, the habit of making allowances was not his. We observe, let it be confessed, something thcological in his hatred of theologians. Even in his letters the distant groundswell of repressed passion sounds in the ear, and at every mention of false opinion or evil doing a sombre and angry shadow seems to fall upon the page. Both he and Turgot clung to the doctrine of the infinite perfectibility of human nature and the correspondingly infinite augmentation of human happiness; but Condorcet's ever-smouldering impetuosity would be content with nothing less than the arrival of at least a considerable instalment of this infinite quantity now and instantly. He went so far as to insist that by-and-by men would acquire the art of prolonging their lives for several generations, instead of being confined within the fatal span of threescore years and ten. He was impatient of any frittering away of life in scruples, tremors, and hesitations. "For the most part," he once wrote to Turgot, "people abounding in scruple are not fit for great things: a Christian will throw away in subduing the darts of the flesh the time which he might have employed on things of use to mankind; or he will lack courage to rise against a tyrant for fear of his judgment being too hastily formed, &c."l Turgot's reply may illustrate the difference between the two men :— “No virtue, in whatever sense you take the word, dispenses with justice; and I think no more of the people who do great things—as you say at the expense of justice, than of poets who fancy they produce great beauties of imagination without regularity (justesse). I know that excessive exactitude tends slightly to deaden the fire alike of composition and of action; but there is a mean in everything. It has never been a question in our controversy of a Capucin who throws away his time in quenching the darts of the flesh (though, by the way, in the total of time thrown away the term that

(1) Euvres, i. 228.