86 Some Account of the Lift and JVritlngs of Condorcet. 



finds data for assigning by calculation the probability of every 

 cause of which the aggregate facts may be the result. Condorcet 

 embraced with ardour this kind of speculation, which offered food 

 for his passion for the interests of society; and he brought to his 

 aid the mathematics, the cultivation of which he had Ccirried 

 too far not to experience the necessity of always resorting to 

 them. Such were the origin and object of several memoirs which 

 he read to the Academy of Sciences, and of his " Essay on the 

 Probability of the Decisions given by Plurality of Voices," which 

 comprehends the judgements and elections, the form of the 

 tribunals, and the minutiae of all deliberative assemblies. The 

 questions treated in this work are of incontrovertible importance: 

 their connexion is very methodical ; perhaps the solutions are 

 not sufficiently profound, and geometricians might desire more 

 elegant methods of calculation 3 but the preliminary discourse, 

 which is the analysis of the eritire work, is at the same time an 

 excellent treatise on philosophy. While upon this subject, let 

 us not omit the plan of his Social Mathematics, a table equally 

 complete as it is luminous of the titles of all the chapters of a 

 work embracing in the greatest detail the application of the 

 mathematics to the universality of the objects of social oeco- 

 nomy. The execution of this plan would from its utility do 

 honour to the accurate inquirer who should take charge of it, 

 particularly if he knew how to add perspicuity to precision, and 

 disdained the trappings of analysis wherever they ivere not 

 strictly necessary. 



Faithful to the views of utility which guided him in all his 

 writings, Condorcet took for the subject of his discourse at his 

 reception into the Academy in 17>^2, the advantages which the 

 union of the moral and physical sciences might produce to so- 

 ciety. Keeping pace with the spirit of the age in which he 

 lived, he took part in the revolution: those who knew him best, 

 never imagined that he embarked in it from motives of ambi- 

 tion ; for they knew that, under the ancient regime, he was 

 strongly attached to his personal independence ; but if the per- 

 spective of the ameliorations which philosophy ought to produce 

 on society warmed so many honourable minds in the early period 

 of the revolution, could that effect be wanting in a man who 

 concealed under a calm exterior an energy of mind so striking 

 that his friends compared him to a volcn?io covered with snow P 

 His work on the Provincial Assemblies, published in 1788, had 

 in view to pave the way for those reforms of which the admini- 

 stration of the kingdom appeared to him to be then susceptible : 

 f peedily the rapid succession of events and the conflict of opi- 

 nions made him sensible of the possibility of carrying these re- 

 forms further. He attached himself at first to the constitution 



of 



