Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind

Was the faction of Brissot, Condorcet, and company less sanguinary than that of Robespierre? His fugitive pieces were as erroneous and as fatal in one extreme as the writings of Hobbes and Filmer in the other. Sublimely inattentive to himself! Panegyric, how art thou prostituted?

No man was ever more perfectly under the absolute dominion of party passions.

Condorcet, proscribed by a sanguinary faction, formed the idea of addressing to his fellow-citizens a summary of his principles and of his conduct in public affairs. He set down a few lines in execution of this project: but when he recollected, as he was obliged to do, thirty years of labour directed to the public service, and the multitude of fugitive pieces in which, since the revolution, he had uniformly attacked every institution inimical to liberty, he rejected the idea of a useless justification. Free as he was from the dominion of the passions, he could not consent to stain the purity of his mind by recollecting his persecutors; perpetually and sublimely inattentive to himself, he determined to consecrate the short space that remained between him and death to a work of general