he time. The Jesuits were the great official instructors 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 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.

At any rate, 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.'[1] 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 an instinctive impulse threw itself by way of rational
entrenchment. His sensibility caused Condorcet to abandon the barbarous
pleasures of the chase, which had at first powerfully attracted him.[2]
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 associati