on that occasion he wrote: "We have had a delightful dream, but it was too brief. Now I mean to apply myself to geometry. It is terribly cold to be for the future laboring only for the 'gloriole' after flattering oneself for a while that one was working for the public weal."

He had no other opportunity of participating in the work of government until the outbreak of the Revolution. But meantime he pursued arduous studies in all departments of knowledge that could be brought to bear on human affairs, and his activity in the public interest manifested itself in pamphleteering and in journalism (he published and edited at least one newspaper). From 1777 he also acted as permanent secretary of the Academy, and during that time wrote a considerable number of Eloges which have achieved classic rank. Condorcet's own criticism of Franklin's works might well be applied to Condorcet's Eloges: "One might vainly look therein for a line that may raise the suspicion that it was written for his own glory."

He was, needless to say, a contributor to the later volumes of the Encyclopédie.

The outbreak of the Revolution gave Condorcet the opportunity of satiating to the full his desire for political activity in the cause of social reform. Between 1789 and his proscription in 1793 he filled numerous places and offices. He was first of all member for the municipality of Paris; then representative of the Parisians in the legislative assembly; later, secretary of the legislative assembly, and then president of that body; and finally served as a member of the Convention. For the Convention he drafted a constitution, but it was rejected. His criticism of the constitution actually adopted, his proposal to banish instead of executing the king, and his moderateness generally, brought him into suspicion among the extremists. He was at length proscribed and he fled. So far, however, from being embittered by this ill-usage on the part of those whom he had an ardent desire to serve, he is said to have fully conformed in his own conduct to the exalted ideal he set up for a public man in his Eloge de l'hôpital, written sixteen years before. This public rebuff was, in fact, to him only an occasion for social service in other forms.

The story of his flight, his occupation during his refuge, and the final tragedy of his death, though well known, cannot be retold too often. In his article on Condorcet in the Encyclopædia Britannica Professor Flint gives the following account:

Friends had found him a resting-place in the house of a Madame Vernet. Without even requesting to know his name, this truly heroic woman, as soon as she was assured that he was an honest and virtuous man, said: "Let him come, and lose not a moment, for while we talk he may be seized." When the execution of the Girondists showed him that his presence exposed his protectress to a terrible danger, he resolved to seek a refuge elsewhere. "I am outlawed," he said; and if I am discovered, you will meet the same sad end as myself. I must not stay."

Madame Vernet's reply deserves to be immortal, and should be given in her own words: "The Convention, Sir, has the right to put you outside the law; it has not the power to put you outside humanity! You will remain."

From that time she had his movements watched, lest he should attempt to quit her house. It was partly to turn his mind from the idea of attempting this, by occupying it otherwise, that his wife and some of his friends, with the co-operaton of Madame Vernet, prevailed on him to engage in the composition of the work by which he is best known—the Esquisse d'un tableau historique de progrès de l'esprit humain. Certain circumstances having led him to believe that the house of Madame Vernet was suspected and watched by his enemies, he, by a fatally successful artifice, baffled the vigilance of his generous friend and escaped. Disappointed in finding even a night's shelter at the château of one whom he had befriended, he had to hide for three days and nights in the thickets and stone-quarries of Clamart. On the evening of April 7, 1794, . . . with garments torn, with wounded leg, with famished looks, he entered a tavern in the village named, and called for an omelette. 'How many eggs in your omelette?" "A dozen." 'What is your trade?" 'A carpenter." Carpenters have not hands like these, and do not ask for a dozen eggs in an omelette." When his papers were demanded, he had none to show; when his person was searched, a Horace was found on him. The villagers seized him, bound him, haled him forthwith on bleeding feet toward Bourg-la-Reine; he fainted by the way, was set on a horse offered in pity by a passing peasant, and, at the journey's end, was cast into the cold, damp prison-cell. When the jailers looked in on the morning, his body lay dead on the floor.

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The Sketch composed amid such an intensity of tragedy, written, as Professor Flint well says, "almost under the executioner's ax" contains Condorcet's permanent contribution to theoretical sociology.

In order to see how the leading lines of approach to sociology converge in Condorcet's Sketch, it is necessary to examine these lines of approach somewhat more fully.

The characteristic questions of the objective or geographical school of sociology are: (1) What sort of a place is it that a people inhabits-as to soil, climate, flora, fauna, etc.? (2) How do the people get their living by utilizing the resources of the territory they inhabit? (3) What types of character, what varieties of personality, what sort of social relations, can be observed among the people, and what causal relations can be established between these types of character, these social relations, on the one hand, and, on the other, the occupations of the people and their geographical surroundings?

I do not mean to say that these particular questions were asked in exactly this way by Hippocrates, by Aristotle, by Bodin, by Montesquieu, or by Buckle. They certainly were not. It is a commonplace of the history of science that to devise the proper way to put a question takes at least as long a time and as many contributing minds as to answer it. It is only in our own times, in the contemporary school of Le Play, that geographical sociology has reached the particular formulation of its own characteristic questions indicated above, and this, in its turn, is of course destined to further modifications as sociological experience expands and develops.

It is characteristic of the subjective, or psychological, to reverse the procedure of the geographical: to begin by asking about the individuals that compose a society-What is their inner life? By what aims and aspirations are they actuated? What thoughts and feelings govern their lives? These are the first questions, and then is asked: How does the inner life express itself in habit and custom, in laws and institutions, in religion and science, in literature and in art?

Stated in this way, it is sufficiently obvious and needs no demonstration that there is not only no irreconcilable antagonism between these two great schools of sociology—objective, determinist, or geographical, and the subjective, psychological, or libertarian- but that, in fact, the one is the necessary comple

ment of the other. These two approaches are just opposite sides of a hill that has to be traversed on the way to sociology. It is true that the large generalizations of individual thinkers representative of the two schools often get themselves expressed in formula which suggest hopeless antinomies. It is true in sociology, as in philosophy, that everyone is either a Platonist or an Aristotelian. But it is equally true that everyone, by taking sufficient pains, may be both. The Hegelian formula of subjective sociology" man is the product of spirit”—has its theological version in, "man is the work of God," and its poetic form, “an honest man's the noblest work of God." It is easy to turn the argument around, as Feuerbach and many other objective sociologists have done, and demonstrate the conclusion that God is a product of man in which the humorist sees a scientific justification for saying: "an honest god's the noblest work of man."

There is no reason why we should not utilize all these timesaving and illuminating formulæ, provided we try quantitatively to determine the proportion of truth they contain; or, in other words, provided that we recognize the experience which any sociological formula summarizes is partial, incomplete, and relevant to a more or less arbitrary point of view. The real harm comes from using such provisional formulæ to justify lower as against higher personal desires, and narrow individual as against larger social action. It was Feuerbach also who said, "man is what he eats;" which, within increasingly definable limits, is a true and useful sociological generalization. And it is none the less so because that pathological variety of applied sociologist, the gourmand, may use it to justify him in seeking God where he would most like to find him—in a pudding-bowl.

In Condorcet's Sketch the historical line of approach to sociology unites with the utopist line of approach. It is not, of course, merely that the two phases are put together in one book-the historic constituting the first part, and the utopist the second. It is not merely that a continuous line of human development is demonstrated as evolving from the past through the present into the future. This had been done at least as far back as the fifth century A. D.-in the De Civitate of St. Augustine; and in a

vague and general way it is a thought that precedes St. Augustine's time by many centuries. It is, indeed, worked out with some fulness and in very different ways in Polybius, in Lucretius, and in others. What gives a permanent place to the Sketch in the literature of sociology is that there, for the first time, the historic approach makes a scientific junction with the utopist. The historical sociologist looks to the past; the utopist sociologist looks to the future. When these met, as in St. Augustine, it was on grounds of religion. If they could be said to have met at all in other cases, it would have been on grounds of ethics (Plato's Republic), of politics (Campanella's City of the Sun, Harrington's Oceana), or in poetic conceptions (as in Moore's Utopia).

In Condorcet's Sketch the historic unites with the utopist approach on the common ground of science. There are three master-ideas underlying the Sketch. The first relates to the present, the second to the past, and the third to the future. The fundamental position is the postulation of the sciences as giving us a system of verifiable knowledge of contemporary sociological phenomena. The questions, What is man? What is society? What are their structures and functions? How do they work? — these questions have to derive their answers from science. And that is tantamount to saying that the answers have to be derived from those sciences and other studies out of which the objective and the subjective sociologies are built up. The structures and functions thus revealed have to be accounted for as to their origin and development in terms of causation. And here is the place of history. In other words, the sciences having yielded through the schools of objective and subjective sociology—such answers as they can to the questions what and how of man and of society, then history must address itself to the whence of man and society, and this it must do without recourse to the hypotheses of theology and metaphysics, since these are, in a strict scientific sense, unverifiable.

The present having been scientifically analyzed and described, and the genesis of its social elements being historically traced backward into the past, there still remains the most important part of the conception of becoming-the future. The what, the