Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
of Europe, and they abandoned themselves to their insatiable thirst for
blood and gold. The bones of five million men covered those unfortunate
lands where the Portuguese and the Spaniards brought their greed, their
superstitions and their wrath. They will lie there to the end of time as
a mute witness against the doctrine of the political utility of religion; a
doctrine which even to this day finds its apologists among us.
The undoing of these evils will not come though a cessation of Europe's
global aspirations, but rather by bringing the colonizing motive into har-
mony with the universal aspirations of nature itself. These “discoveries will
have repaid humanity what they have cost it,” Condorcet goes on to say,
only when
Europe renounces her oppressive and avaricious system of monopoly;
only when she remembers that men of all races are equally brothers by
the wish of nature and have not been created to feed the vanity and greed
of a few privileged nations; only when she calls upon all people to share
her independence, freedom and knowledge, which she will do once she is
alive to her own true interests.
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The fact that the evils brought on by colonization are to be corrected by a
global crusade of a different kind signals the extent to which Condorcet's
historical narrative imitates the Christian one he impugns in these pas-
sages. As an attribute of history created in the image of a religious univer-
salism that assumed the benevolence of those who acted in harmony with
the purposes of a transcendent Creator, the historical reasoning at work in
this secular analogue necessarily involves similar missionary expectations.
Reason so conceived could never be a mere instrument of knowledge; its
realization in human affairs must also destine the welfare of all peoples.
Apocalypse
Condorcet's confidence that science was the revelation of a universal pat-
tern also meant that the advent of modern science represented a fundamen-
tal rebirth of history, the onset of its final epoch. This new age had begun
with science in the same sense in which its sacred model had begun with
Christ, and this meant that all of previous history had been an age of dark-
ness. Prior to modernity, events had unfolded according to the pattern that
became known with science's full flowering, but it was a pattern that had
remained unseen and unrecognized.
