Marquis de Condorcet (Marie Jean
Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, (1743 – 1794) was a mathematician,
philosopher and political scientist from France. He belonged to the Age of
Enlightenment and played a major part in the French revolution. He was an advocate
for free public education, equal rights for women and for people of all races.
It is no wonder that his ideas were not accepted universally at his time.
His book on A Historical Review of
Progress of the Human Mind (published in 1802) is a classic and it reviews the
progress of civilization up to his time. The style is simple and the logic is clear. The first two paragraphs alone are worth reading many times. Here they are:
“Man
is born with the faculty of receiving' sensations. In those which he receives,
he is capable of perceiving and of distinguishing the simple sensations of
which they are composed. He can retain, recognise, combine them. He can preserve
or recall them to his memory; he can compare their different combinations ; he
can ascertain what they possess in common, and what characterises each :
lastly, he can affix signs to all these objects, the better to know them, and
the more easily to form from them new combinations.
This
faculty is developed in him by the action of external objects, ……… It is also
exercised by communication with other similarly organized individuals
………………………. and the development of this faculty already in their possession of a language for the communication of their
wants, and a small number of moral ideas, from which are deduced their common
rules of conduct, living in families, conforming themselves to general customs
that serve instead of laws, and….”
The following are a few more quotes from
that book.
He calls errors of civilization as those
based on prejudices. These prejudices are established because “men retain the errors of their infancy,
their country, the age in which they live, long after truths necessary to the
removal of these errors are acknowledged”.
His list of prejudices include “conversion of enmity and cruelty towards an
enemy as a virtue, consignment of women to a life of slavery or obedience,
assumption of familial role of wars and battles against the other groups and
the development of superstitions”.
“Superstitions,
prejudices and authority are the three blocks to reason and proper knowledge of
the world we live in”.
Commenting on the fact that many
institutions support morality of the people by giving false explanation and
pretense, he asks how we can trust a system that operates on the principle
that “men of enlightened mind have a
right to deceive the people, provided they impose only useful truths”.
One of his concluding statements is: “… the
exertions of the last ages have done much for the progress of the human mind,
but little for the perfection of the human species; much for the glory of man,
somewhat for his liberty but scarcely anything for his happiness”.
