SOURCE: Frazer, James George. Condorcet on the Progress of the Human Mind: The Zaharoff Lecture for 1933, 23 p. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933.

In this lecture, Frazer asserts the importance and value of Condorcet's philosophy.

Of all the philosophers and economists of the eighteenth century who by their writings and personal influence prepared the minds of men for the French Revolution and cast the mould into which the burning lava of that tremendous eruption finally ran and solidified, Condorcet alone survived to reap in death the fruit—the bitter fruit—of which he had sowed the seeds by his life. He lived to witness the whole of the great drama from its overture in the assembling of the States General and the fall of the Bastille in 1789 to its culmination in the Reign of Terror in 1794. He was not a mere spectator of it; as a member at first of the...