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would carry forward Condorcet's attitude of scientism, and with it his
urgent demand that all epistemic appeals find their grounding in nature.
But, more importantly, they also followed him in appealing to notions of
history that imitated the more traditional narrative that organized Bacon's
efforts to situate science in the Christian story. The historical consciousness
of this older religious worldview persisted even amidst the anticlericalism
of these scientistic movements because it continued to play a key role in
sustaining a public rationale for constituents whose worldviews also had an
important share in enlightenment.
To use Geertz' language again, we might say that in the historical think-
ing that carried over from Bacon's thought into Condorcet's, the powerfully
coercive “ought” of science continued to grow out of some comprehensive
factual “is.” For Bacon this “is” had been the providential certainty estab-
lished by revelation that history was orchestrated by a transcendent Creator.
By continuously accentuating the fact that the knowledge of nature was also
the knowledge of God, science became an “ought,” a Christian vocation
made virtuous by its participation in the broader drama of salvation history.
Once written into this historical narrative, the advent of science also took
on apocalyptic significance as a prophetic moment. The analogizing power
of this displaced “ought” persisted in Condorcet's
Esquisse
in a notion of
progress that now attributed the earlier religious faith in history to nature
or reason—or perhaps to a natural world that had become incarnate in the
realm of thought. By taking over this older role, progress also took over its
meaning as a transcendent good, and by this same analogy science contin-
ued to enjoy a similar priestly and prophetic role as the agent of progress.
This interplay of religious and secularist ideas reflects Condorcet's
debts to one of the more moderate philosophers of the Enlightenment, the
economist and onetime candidate for holy orders, Anne Robert Jacques
Turgot (1727-1781), whose own progressivist theory of history was explic-
itly tied to Christianity.
11
Although Turgot was no less committed than his
younger protégé to building a scientific society based on secular principles,
his friendly attitude toward Christianity brought “Progress and Providence”
so close together in his writing as to inspire the historian Charles Frankel to
suggest that he should perhaps be regarded as “a rebel against the dominant
empiricism, the growing naturalism, and the struggling secularism of his
age.” Turgot is for Frankel a transitional figure like Bacon, whose “philoso-
phy marks a stage in the secularization of the idea of Providence.”
12
This
feature of Turgot's contribution to the Enlightenment has prompted Frank
Manuel to regard him as the “true initiator of the rationalist prophetic
