Quote by Marquis de Condorcet: “No bounds have been fixed to the improvement of the human faculties.”

Human intelligence and capability are not fixed at birth or by nature — they can always grow further. Condorcet, writing while awaiting execution during the Terror, still believed in humanity's unlimited potential for development. This is optimism as an act of philosophical defiance.

Condorcet wrote the Sketch in 1793–94 while hiding from the Jacobin authorities who had condemned him to death during the Reign of Terror. The work's radical optimism about human progress was composed under conditions of extraordinary personal danger, giving it a remarkable quality of courage.

French mathematician, philosopher, and political scientist who was a leading figure of the late Enlightenment. His Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, written while in hiding from the Revolutionary authorities, is a landmark of progressive thought.