THE FOUNDERS OF SOCIOLOGY 1 19
calm contemplation. But in a type of character such as Condor- cet's, where lofty spirituality is fortified by invincible courage, this overhanging fate might well be stimulating to thought rather than inhibitory. In respect to his being cut off from books and other external sources of knowledge, is not that, to a writer of original powers, a source of added strength ? At least three other of the great classics in the history of sociology were written in spiritual isolation. It was enforced isolation in one case that of Campanula's City of the Sun, written during his imprisonment for a political offense, like Condorcet's an offense intended by its perpetrator to be a service to those who persecuted him. In the other cases : Comte, we know, in writing the Positive Polity made it a deliberate policy to refrain rigidly from all books, journals, and newspapers, whether for reading or for reference. And to a somewhat similar practice of Hobbes we owe probably not a little of the originality and forcefulness of the Leviathan. It is said to have been a favorite saying of Hobbes : " If I had read as much as other people, I should be as stupid."
Among the founders of sociology must always be counted Leibnitz, if only for his reiterated insistence on two great ideas which are parts of one still greater idea the idea of social evo- lution. The first is the conception that the historic past is always with us here and now; it survives both in archaeological fossils and, what is of vastly greater sociological import, it survives also as active elements guiding and conditioning our daily life. The second is the conception that what we think and feel, what we do and say, here and now, are the great factors in determining the character of the succeeding phases of human and social life. The two conceptions are summed up in what Leibnitz called the " law of historic continuity," and which he expressed in the oft- quoted phrase: "The present is charged with the past and big with the future."
The life of Condorcet is one of those creative moments in the history of sociology in which the student may see the unity of the science and feel the inspiration of its practical stimulus. Seen by the random observer at his stationary point of view, the objective and subjective sociologists, the historical ones, and the
