ies, and the analogies of savage life. In
the first epoch, men are united into hordes of hunters and fishers, who
acknowledge in some degree public authority and the claims of family
relationship, and who make use of an articulate language. In the second
epoch--the pastoral state--property is introduced, and along with it
inequality of conditions, and even slavery, but also leisure to
cultivate intelligence, to invent some of the simpler arts, and to
acquire some of the more elementary truths of science. In the third
epoch--the agricultural state--as leisure and wealth are greater, labour
better distributed and applied, and the means of communication increased
and extended, progress is still more rapid. With the invention of
alphabetic writing the conjectural part of history closes, and the more
or less authenticated part commences. The fourth and fifth epochs are
represented as corresponding to Greece and Rome. The middle ages are
divided into two epochs, the former of which terminates with the
Crusades, and the latter with the invention of printing. The eighth
epoch extends from the invention of printing to the revolution in the
method of philosophic thinking accomplished by Descartes. And the ninth
epoch begins with that great intellectual revolution, and ends with the
great political and moral revolution of 1789, and is illustrious,
according to Condorcet, through the discovery of the true system of the
physical universe by Newton, of human nature by Locke and Condillac, and
of society by Turgot, Richard Price and Rousseau. There is an epoch of
the future--a tenth epoch,--and the most original part of Condorcet's
treatise is that which is devoted to it. After insisting that general
laws regulative of the past warrant general inferences as to the future,
he argues that the three tendencies which the entire history of the past
shows will be characteristic features of the future are:--(1) the
destruction of inequality between nations; (2) the destruction of
inequality between classes; and (3) the improvement of individuals, the
indefinite perfectibility of human nature itself--intellectually,
morally and physically. These propositions have been much misunderstood.
The equality to which he represents nations and individuals as tending
is not absolute equality, but equality of freedom and of rights. It is
that equality which would make the inequality of the natural advantages
and faculties of each community and person bene