This means that individual thinkers should not only be unconstrained by the edicts of tyrants and priests, but that they should also have material support. The main barriers to improvement, says Condorcet, are the three inequalities: inequality of wealth, inequality of status, and inequality of instruction. Remedy these and society becomes a huge improving machine, the gears of education and teaching and learning working in a great virtuous cycle, each generation improving upon the last. ‘[A]s facts multiply, the human mind learns to classify them and reduce them to more general facts, and the
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