ficial to all. Nations
and men, he thinks, are equal, if equally free, and are all tending to
equality because all tending to freedom. As to indefinite
perfectibility, he nowhere denies that progress is conditioned both by
the constitution of humanity and the character of its surroundings. But
he affirms that these conditions are compatible with endless progress,
and that the human mind can assign no fixed limits to its own
advancement in knowledge and virtue, or even to the prolongation of
bodily life. This theory explains the importance he attached to popular
education, to which he looked for all sure progress.

The book is pervaded by a spirit of excessive hopefulness, and contains
numerous errors of detail, which are fully accounted for by the
circumstances in which it was written. Its value lies entirely in its
general ideas. Its chief defects spring from its author's narrow and
fanatical aversion to all philosophy which did not attempt to explain
the world exclusively on mechanical and sensational principles, to all
religion whatever, and especially to Christianity and Christian
institutions, and to monarchy. His ethical position, however, gives
emphasis to the sympathetic impulses and social feelings, and had
considerable influence upon Auguste Comte.

Madame de Condorcet (b. 1764), who was some twenty years younger than
her husband, was rendered penniless by his proscription, and compelled
to support not only herself and her four years old daughter but her
younger sister, Charlotte de Grouchy. After the end of the Jacobin
Terror she published an excellent translation of Adam Smith's _Theory of
Moral Sentiments_; in 1798 a work of her own, _Lettres sur la
sympathie_; and in 1799 her husband's _Eloges des academiciens_. Later
she co-operated with Cabanis, who had married her sister, and with Garat
in publishing the complete works of Condorcet (1801-1804). She adhered
to the last to the political views of her husband, and under the
Consulate and Empire her _salon_ became a meeting-place of those opposed
to the autocratic regime. She died at Paris on the 8th of September
1822. Her daughter was married, in 1807, to General O'Connor.

A _Biographie de Condorcet_, by M. F. Arago, is prefixed to A.
Condorcet-O'Connor's edition of Condorcet's works, in 12 volumes
(1847-1849). There is an able essay on Condorcet in Lord Morley of
Blackburn's _Critical Miscellanies_. On Condorcet as an historical
philosopher s