Condorcet was the friend and biographer of Turgot, and it was not unfitting that he should resume the design of a history of civilisation, in the light of the idea of Progress, for which Turgot had only left luminous suggestions. He did not execute the plan, but he completed an elaborate sketch in which the controlling ideas of the scheme are fully set forth. His principles are to be found almost entirely in Turgot. But they have a new significance for Condorcet. He has given them wings. He has emphasised, and made deductions. Turgot wrote in the calm spirit of an inquirer. Condorcet spoke with the verve of a prophet. He was prophesying under the shadow of death. It is amazing that the optimistic Sketch of a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind should have been composed when he was hiding from Robespierre in 1793. [Footnote: Published in 1795.] Condorcet was penetrated with the spirit of the Encyclopaedists, of whom he had been one, and his attitude to Christianity was that of Voltaire and Diderot. Turgot had treated the received religion respectfully. He had acknowledged Providence, and, though the place which he assigned to Providence was that of a sort of honorary President of the development of civilisation who might disappear without affecting the proceedings, there was a real difference between his views and those of his friend as to the role of Christianity and the civilisation of the Middle Ages. A more important difference between the two thinkers is connected with the different circumstances in which they wrote. Turgot did not believe in the necessity of violent changes; he thought that steady reforms under the existing regime would do wonders for France. Before the Revolution Condorcet had agreed, but he was swept away by its enthusiasm. The victory of liberty in America and the increasing volume of the movement against slavery--one of the causes which most deeply stirred his heart--had heightened his natural optimism and confirmed his faith in the dogma of Progress. He felt the exhilaration of the belief that he was living through "one of the greatest revolutions of the human race," and he deliberately designed his book to be opportune to a crisis of mankind, at which "a picture of revolutions of the past will be the best guide." Feeling that he is personally doomed, he consoles himself with brooding on the time, however remote, when the sun will shine "on an earth of none but freemen, with no master save reason; for tyrants and slaves, priests and their stupid or hypocritical tools, will all have disappeared." He is not satisfied with affirming generally the certainty of an indefinite progress in enlightenment and social welfare. He sets himself to think out its nature, to forecast its direction, and determine its goal, and insists, as his predecessors had never done, on the prospects of the distant future. 4.