Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
tradition,” who did more than the “wit of Voltaire” or the “mechanistic
materialism of La Mettrie in deflecting Western consciousness from a reli-
gious to a utilitarian earthly morality.”
13
Outwardly at least, Condorcet shared none of his older colleague's lin-
gering affection for Europe's faith traditions; nevertheless he adopted the
basic outline of Turgot's Baconian vision of historical progress.
14
It was
Bacon, Turgot professed, who had “traced out for posterity the road” that
enlightenment must follow, and the
philosophe
mapped this road in his 1750
lecture at the Sorbonne, “On the Advantages that the Establishment of
Christianity Has Brought for the Human Race.”
15
Here Turgot argued that
progress could not have come to European civilization without the tran-
scendent moral influence of religion: “What else could have been able to
combat and vanquish the alliance of interest and prejudice? The Christian
religion alone has succeeded. It alone has brought to light the rights of
humanity.”
16
Since religion rooted human rights in the eternal rather than
the temporal, Turgot believed that the powers ruling over human affairs
could never have just a secular legitimation. The vices of prejudice and
self-interest could only have a temporary hold, whereas the power of moral
improvement was unstoppable because it had a teleological basis:
Universal history embraces the consideration of the successive stages in
the progress of the human species, and the specific causes that have con-
tributed to it; the formation and mixing of nations; the origins, the revo-
lutions of governments; the progress of languages, of physics, of morals,
of manners, of the sciences and arts; the revolutions which have made
Empires succeed Empires, nations follow on nations, religions on reli-
gions; the human species, always the same through these upheavals, and
constantly advancing towards its perfection.
17
The role of Christianity in ensuring progress was destined to disappear in
Condorcet's appropriation of this historical vision, but not the Christian
meaning that Turgot had given it. Even though Condorcet would denounce
religion as the very essence of “interest and prejudice” responsible for social
inequality and for blocking the way of progress, he continued to follow
Turgot in assuming that a transcendent (or perhaps now immanent) moral
imperative was at work in universal history to gradually and imperceptibly
subvert evil. Whereas Turgot still pointed heavenward to providence as the
cause accounting for history's upward march, Condorcet merely credited
progress more entirely to nature.
