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entitles him to be counted, along with DeWitt, Quetelet, and others, as one of the founders of statistical sociology.
Voltaire was past middle life and at the height of his reputa- tion when Condorcet was born. The merely critical and destruct- ive work of the eighteenth century, had, in fact, been done and the Illumination was entering upon that positive and constructive phase which marks it as one of the great humanistic revivals in history. This is too much overlooked, even among specialist historians of that time, and in that sense there is truth in the remark that "the eighteenth century has still to be discovered." At the very time that Condorcet was born^ Diderot, D'Alembert, and their friends were planning the Encyclopedic, and this great constructive effort was destined in its literary form to serve the purpose of a Bible to the scientific world during at least a genera- tion and a half. And is it not true to say that, when crystallized into the modern German university and its academic imitators, the Encyclopedic was for at least another two generations destined to serve as an organized ritual for men of science throughout the western world?
Into the midst of this fever of enthusiasm for the organization of science as a regenerative and omnipotent spiritual power came Condorcet, and soon became one of the central figures of the drama. At what a very early age he felt the stirrings and prompt- ings of the spirit of his age, and how with increasing vividness he continued to feel this enthusiasm, and to be dominated by it throughout his life, there are many anecdotes to bear witness. In 1 790, when he was forty-seven years of age, he wrote : " For thirty years I have hardly ever passed a single day without meditating on the political sciences."
When Turgot was governing his province of Limousin, Con- dorcet wrote to him in 1772: "You are very happy in your passion for the public good and your power to satisfy it ; it is a great consolation, and of an order very superior to that of study." Two years after this, when Turgot became controller-general of France, he gave his friend, what Condorcet had so much longed for, an opportunity to participate in the work of government. . But with Turgot's demission of power Condorcet went also^and
