and visible ground of personal observation and narration, but always in the air, in the empty space of pure generalities.  Condillac declares that the arithmetical method is adapted to psychology and that the elements of our ideas can be defined by a process analogous “to the rule of three.”  Sieyès holds history in profound contempt, and believes that he had “perfected the science of politics"[40] at one stroke, through an effort of the brain, in the style of Descartes, who thus discovers analytic geometry.  Destutt de Tracy, in undertaking to comment on Montesquieu, finds that the great historian has too servilely confined himself to history, and attempts to do the work over again by organizing society as it should be, instead of studying society as it is. — Never were such systematic and superficial institutions built up with such a moderate extract of human nature.[41] Condillac, employing sensation, animates a statue, and then, by a process of pure reasoning, following up its effects, as he supposes, on smell, taste, hearing, sight and touch, fashions a complete human soul.  Rousseau, by means of a contract, founds political association, and, with this given idea, pulls down the constitution, government and laws of every balanced social system.  In a book which serves as the philosophical testament of the century,[42] Condorcet declares that this method is the “final step of philosophy, that which places a sort of eternal barrier between humanity and its ancient infantile errors.”  “By applying it to morals, politics and political economy the moral sciences have progressed nearly as much as the natural sciences.  With its help we have been able to discover the rights of man.”  As in mathematics, they have been deduced from one primordial statement only, which statement, similar to a first principle in mathematics, becomes a fact of daily experience, seen by all and therefore self-evident. — This school of thought is to endure throughout the Revolution, the Empire and even into the Restoration,[43] together with the tragedy of which it is the sister, with the classic spirit their common parent, a primordial, sovereign power, as dangerous as it is useful, as destructive as it is creative, as capable of propagating error as truth, as astonishing in the rigidity of its code, the narrow-mindedness of its yoke and in the uniformity of its works as in the duration of its reign and the universality of its ascendancy.[44]

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Notes: 

[1] Voltaire, “Dict.  Phil.,” see the articles on Language.  “Of all the languages in Europe the French is most generally used because it is the best adapted to conversation.  Its character is derived from that of the people who speak it.  For more than a hundred and fifty years past, the French have been the most familiar with (good) society and the first to avoid all embarrassment . . .  It is a better currency than any other, even if it should lack weight.”