How the Printing Press Ensures Eternal Enlightenment (Or So They Thought in the 18th Century)

For the Heinz science communication workshop out here at UC Davis, there's a reading I assigned from the Marquis de Condorcet's magnificent 1794 Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. I assign Chapter 8, in which Condorcet, the greatest of enlightenment optimists, explains how the arrival of the printing press basically ensures that reasoned arguments would become widely disseminated, leading to the downfall of irrationality and superstition. Some choice quotations: