Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/130

 1 1 8 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

how, and the whence of man and society are but preliminaries to the whither. To this question the tenth chapter of the Sketch is, may we not say, the first answer of the nascent and (then) nameless science of sociology.

In estimating its value we must think, not of its present use, but of its past services. That it was a real contribution of car- dinal value to the science of sociology is proved alike by its qualities and by its defects. Some of its fallacies survive, if not in sociology, yet in its subsciences ; witness the idea of the linear evolution of the hunter into the shepherd, and of the shepherd into the peasant a hypothesis of Condorcet, but, since the advent of Darwinism, a dogma in anthropology and speculative politics. To innumerable workers in many departments of social science the Sketch has served, consciously or unconsciously, as a convenient framework within which to collect and to arrange facts which otherwise might have passed unobserved, or at least have remained outside of the ordered data of social science. In this way the Sketch has been the means of greatly enlarging the social experience accumulated by and for sociologists. There is probably no student of sociology who may not derive benefit from a reading of the first chapter (on method) and the last (on future progress). But the rest are of merely historical value, and to be read only by those possessed of an adequate power of historical perspective. The naturalist, the psychological and social sciences were in the eighteenth century only beginning as scientific special- isms; biology, history, and geography were only beginning as great synthetic scientific studies. And even such resources as these then afforded were imperfectly at the command of Con- dorcet. Judged even by the standard of his own time, he was imperfectly trained in biology, in psychology, and in those studies which were then growing into a science of comparative religion. In all these respects Condorcet fell short of what an eighteenth- century sociologist should and might have been.

The circumstances under which the Sketch was written are usually tendered as an excuse for its defects and mistakes. To be sure, the daily, even hourly, expectation of the executioner cannot conduce to that mental composure which is needful for