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 scruple,
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.'[7] 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. 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 capuchin 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 expresses the time lost in satisfying these lusts is
most likely far greater); no more is it a question of a fool who is
afraid of rising against tyrants for fear of forming a rash
judgment.'[8]

This ability to conceive a mean case between two extremes was not among
Condorcet's gifts. His mind dwelt too much in the region of excess,
alike when he measured the possibilities of the good, and coloured the
motives and the situation of those whom he counted the bad. A Christian
was one who wasted his days in merely resisting the flesh; anybody who
declined to rise against a tyrant was the victim of a slavish
scrupulosity. He rather sympathises with a scientific traveller, to whom
the especial charm of natural history resides in the buffets which, at
each step that it takes, it inflicts upon Moses.[9] Well, this temper
is not the richest nor the highest, but it often exists in alliance with
rich and high qualities. It was so with Condorcet. And we are
particularly bound to remember that with him a harsh and impatient
humour was not, as is so often the case, the veil for an indolent
reluctance to form painstaking judgments. Few workers ha