Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
age, in other words, had a relationship to the age of modern science that is
analogous to that traditionally given by Christians to the history recorded
in the Hebrew Scriptures. Just as Christians read the Old Testament from
the standpoint of the incarnation, and thus would not characteristically
regard as particularly relevant the vast rabbinical commentaries that came
into existence in coincidence with the formation of this canon, Condorcet
has little use for interpretations provided by any of the historians who may
have lived in the periods he discusses. Thus, despite his professed devotion
to empiricism, his mind is not particularly exercised by factual concerns.
He makes no effort, for instance, to reconcile his interpretations of Greco-
Roman history with the testimony of contemporaneous historians like
Herodotus, Tacitus, or Livy. In fact, he freely contradicts them. Their testi-
mony has been rendered irrelevant by the scientific apocalypse. The advent
of science had made known the true structure of history, the fact that his-
tory was forever progressing toward science, and so the perspective of the
Enlightenment superseded every past understanding of human affairs.
As scientific thought now began to take hold as the governing prin-
ciple by which social relationships were being reinvented in accordance with
the ideals of the French Revolution, Europe was merely bringing into this
societal arena the natural principles of development that accounted for the
growth of the individual. If “progress is subject to the same general laws
that can be observed in the development of the faculties of the individual,”
then the higher development of scientific figures like Galileo and Descartes
anticipates the future of human development and recapitulates its past. The
phylogenesis of global liberty and prosperity was destined to recapitulate
the scientific ontogenesis of the individual person. Condorcet acknowledges
that this sounds like mere “metaphysics,” but he escapes this problem by
promising his readers that this relationship will be fully borne out by a sci-
entific examination of the “record of change . . . based on the observation of
human societies throughout different stages of their development.”
51
In supposing to describe the laws governing history, Condorcet's
Esquisse
is clearly a precursor to the better-known philosophies of history
that would soon appear in the systems of Comte, Hegel, and Marx—what
Karl Popper would later call “historicism.”
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For each of these scientific his-
toricists, the pattern of history was found in some principle or law revealed
only in modernity. If this pattern was faithfully followed, it would lead from
the present dawn of enlightenment into the full daylight of reason. Like
these other modern historicists, Condorcet is thus more concerned with
teleology than with factual fidelity. The purpose of his “observations upon
