y public ideas even in the final moments of
existence. Its general acceptance as a binding duty, exorcising the
mournful and insignificant egotisms that haunt and wearily fret and make
waste the remnants of so many lives, will produce the profoundest of all
possible improvements in men's knowledge of the sublime art of the
happiness of their kind. The closing words of Condorcet's last
composition show the solace which perseverance in taking thought for
mankind brought to him in the depths of personal calamity. He had
concluded his survey of the past history of the race, and had drawn what
seemed in his eyes a moderate and reasonable picture of its future. 'How
this picture,' he exclaims, with the knell of his own doom sounding full
in the ear while he wrote, 'this picture of the human race freed from
all its fetters, withdrawn from the empire of chance, as from that of
the enemies of progress, and walking with firm and assured step in the
way of truth, of virtue, and happiness, presents to the philosopher a
sight that consoles him for the errors, the crimes, the injustice, with
which the earth is yet stained, and of which he is not seldom the
victim! It is in the contemplation of this picture that he receives the
reward of his efforts for the progress of reason, for the defence of
liberty. He ventures to link them with the eternal chain of the
destinies of man: it is there that he finds the true recompense of
virtue, the pleasure of having done a lasting good. Fate can no longer
undo it by any disastrous compensation that shall restore prejudice and
bondage. This contemplation is for him a refuge, into which the
recollection of his persecutors can never follow him; in which, living
in thought with man reinstated in the rights and the dignity of his
nature, he forgets man tormented and corrupted by greed, by base fear,
by envy; it is here that he truly abides with his fellows, in an elysium
that his reason has known how to create for itself, and that his love
for humanity adorns with all purest delights.'[41]

It has long been the fashion among the followers of that reaction which
Coleridge led and Carlyle has spread and popularised, to dwell
exclusively on the coldness and hardness, the excess of scepticism and
the defect of enthusiasm, that are supposed to have characterised the
eighteenth century. Because the official religion of the century both in
England and France was lifeless and mechanical, it has been taken for