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associated with science will seem to manifest such a unified perspective.
This explains why Condorcet treats so many figures from the past in such a
curiously unhistorical way. If the Socrates of the
Esquisse
sounds more like
Descartes than like the character depicted in Plato's dialogues, it is because
Condorcet has made him into a type for those present champions of prog-
ress who advance humanity's continuous effort to “perfect its own powers
of reasoning and to trace everything back to origins.”
39
He does something
similar with the Stoics and Epicureans. In many respects the Stoics are the
familiar philosophers of old, who “saw virtue and happiness as consisting
in the possession of a soul that was equally insensible to joy and pain, that
was freed from every passion, that was superior to all fears and weaknesses
and that knew no true good but virtue and no real evil but remorse.” But
Condorcet's Stoics also manifest a rather modern-sounding will to power
in their belief “that Man had the power to raise himself to this height if
he had a strong and inflexible will to do so, and that then, independent of
fate, always master of himself, he would be equally impervious to vice and
miser y.”
40
What is lost here is what Reinhold Niebuhr describes as the “air
of melancholy” that hung over Greek life.
41
This is because Stoic resignation
has become something else, an ethic of epistemic naturalism more like the
disciplining skepticism of Descartes that was now seen, not as mere fidelity
to reason, but also as fidelity to history—a purposeful and ever-expanding
directive for the future. Likewise, the Epicurean virtue which “consists in
following one's natural inclinations” by “knowing how to purify them and
direct them,” becomes in Condorcet's hands the manifestation of a general-
ized moral posture that was putting humanity on “the road that leads to
both happiness and virtue.” Like modern natural philosophers, the Stoics
and Epicureans had rejected “philosophy that claimed to rise above nature”
in favor of one “that only wished to obey her.” And this shared receptive-
ness to nature led both philosophies, despite their “contrary principles,”
to the singular truth that the “resemblance between the moral precepts of
all religions and all philosophical sects suffices to prove that their truth is
something independent of the dogmas of these various religions and the
principles of these different sects; that it is to the moral constitution of man
that we must look for the foundations of his duties and the origins of his
ideas of justice and virtue.”
42
A vital complement to this unified view of history is sustained by what
Frye calls the “dialectical structure” of character development in such
romantic narratives. Every character in such a story will be either for or
against the quest, “idealized as simply gallant or pure” if they support it and
