Let me count the ways..............

 

Condorcet wrote as though social progress is inevitable, and wars and revolutions were just Europe's way of sorting itself out.

     His serene assurance arose from the conviction that culture is governed by laws as exact as those of physics.  We need only understand them, he wrote, to keep humanity on its predestined course to a more perfect social order ruled by science and secular philosophy. . . .

     Condorcet, however mistaken in details and hopelessly trusting of human nature, made a major contribution to thought through his insistence that history is an evolving material process.  "The sole foundation for belief in the natural sciences," he declared, "is the idea that the general laws directing the phenomena of the universe, known or unknown, are necessary and constant.  Why should this principle be any less true for the development of the intellectual and moral faculties of man than for other operations of nature."

-Edward O. Wilson, Consilience:  The Unity of Knowledge