CONDORCET’S most famous work, his essay on “The Future Progress of the Human Mind” (“Esquisse d’un Tableau Historique des Progrès de l’Esprit Humain”) was written when he was an outlaw, condemned to the guillotine. It is characteristic of his genius that the dominant tone of his last and greatest work is one of triumphant assurance that no amount of crime and folly can check the growth of intellect and the evolution of higher civilization.

  Born at Ribemont, September 17th, 1743, from an ancient family, Condorcet was educated at the Jesuit College in Rheims and the College of Navarre in Paris. He became a brilliant mathematician, and at the age of twenty-two wrote a treatise on Integral Calculus which won him the admiration of the greatest mathematician of his day. He was the friend of D’Alembert and Turgot and was one of the makers of the celebrated French Encyclopædia. At the beginning of the French Revolution, he was a bold champion of liberty, and this boldness did not desert him when the Girondists were overthrown and sent to the scaffold by the Jacobins. Proscribed and outlawed, he was welcomed to a refuge in the house of Madame Vernet, a lady who knew him only by reputation. Remembering how greatly she was endangered by her hospitality, he attempted to take leave of her, but she refused to permit it, and in order to distract his mind from the subject, he was persuaded to write the essay on “The Future Progress of the Mind.” Finally convinced, that it was his duty to relieve Madame Vernet of the danger of harboring him, he left her house secretly and, disguised as a carpenter, made his way to the village of Clamart where he was suspected and arrested. A copy of Horace found in his pocket decided his fate and he was imprisoned at Bourg-la-Reine, to await orders from Paris. Next morning (March 28th, 1794) he was found dead in his cell. He was a man of great intellect and high purpose, and the progress achieved since he lived is indebted to him in many ways. In his political standards, he was far above the civilization of the eighteenth century, as in his hopes he was above the nineteenth.