WORK
Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind
Condorcet's posthumous 1795 treatise — composed in hiding on the Rue des Fossoyeurs while the Jacobins hunted him — that maps nine epochs of intellectual progress and projects a tenth defined by universal education and indefinite perfectibility.
Composed between July 1793 and March 1794 in the home of Madame Vernet, the Sketch is Condorcet's testament to the indefinite perfectibility of the human understanding. Dividing history into nine epochs — each marked by a transformation in the capacity to understand, organize, and improve the conditions of existence — it projects a tenth epoch in which the partiality of all previous expansions is overcome through universal instruction, the application of scientific method to social questions, and the self-sustaining acceleration of discovery. The work is audacious precisely because its circumstances refuted its thesis at every turn: the rational republic Condorcet had helped design was devouring its theorists. The manuscript survived because his wife Eliza carried it out.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The Sketch was not composed in academic security but by a