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This story form requires the reconstruction of Socrates as science's suf-
fering servant. By more rigorous accounts, science seems to have had little
importance in this philosopher's life. Although it is believed that Socrates
was interested in scientific pursuits in his youth, these were abandoned in
favor of his philosophical quest for self-understanding and moral purpose.
The scientific disillusionment of the mature Socrates, as W. K. C. Guthrie
interprets the accounts left by his disciples Xenophon and Plato, grew from
his recognition of “its irrelevance to human problems and its neglect of
final causes.” 55 Philosophy, not science, had proved to be the higher path.
But the epochal principle that Condorcet wished to put in place could not
abide this more mainstream view. Once it was supposed that the rational-
ity that had surfaced in Socrates' philosophy was the very same principle of
progress that was destined to give way to scientific dominance, the continu-
ity of the story would be undermined if Socrates was not driven by scien-
tific aspirations. Fact needed to follow form. Thus it is not surprising that
Condorcet's martyr would seem more like the imaginary Socrates of Aristo-
phanes' comic farce, The Clouds , than like the philosopher we see in Plato's
Apology. But even Aristophanes' depiction is at odds with Condorcet's. The
Esquisse follows the playwright in making Socrates out to be a religious
skeptic whose school was a center for geophysics, astronomy, geometry, and
geography, but not in throwing him in with the Sophists—Condorcet had
already aligned these ancient skeptics with the priests as fellow dissemblers
and enemies of science. 56
The view of this Greek philosopher taken by a majority of philoso-
phers and historians, the Socrates who articulated the broader philosophi-
cal principles of induction and definition, simply would not do. Condorcet
needed him to be a kind of proto-positivist who eschewed philosophical
and religious speculation in order to follow the straight and narrow path
of a more grounded truth. “All that Socrates wanted to do,” Condorcet
asserts—undoubtedly giving ancient meanings of the term “nature” a Whig-
gishly modern spin—“was to warn men to confine themselves to those things
that nature has placed within their reach, to make sure of every step before
attempting a new one, and to study what lay around them before embarking
for strange and unfamiliar lands.” 57
If this summary of Socrates' philosophy sounds more like a description
of the Cartesian worldview, this is because modern science is the apocalypse
of Condorcet's history. If it was modern science that made manifest the true
principle of historical evolution, Condorcet needed to suppose that its spirit
had been present all through the past. Its modern appearance was merely
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