The Three Cs and the Notion of Progress:
Copernicus, Condorcet, Comte
by
Caspar J M Hewett
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Definitions of Progress:
progress, n. a forward movement: an advance: a continuation:
an advance to something better or higher in development: a gain in proficiency:
a course: a passage from place to place: a procession: a journey of state: a
circuit. – v.i. progress, to go forward: to make progress: to go on, continue:
to go in progress, travel in state: to go
Chambers 20th Century Dictionary
A belief in human progress is a matter of faith. Progress does not necessarily
imply a monotonically increasing advance, but rather an advance that will eventually
occur within the limits of mankind's collective morality and knowledge of its respective
environment.
Wikipedia.org
It is common to hear both philosophers and non-philosophers complain that philosophy
makes no progress. Whether such a complaint is justified depends, of course, on one's
understanding of the nature of philosophy, and on one's criteria of "progress."
Wikipedia.org
progress, A linear movement forward. To advance or develop. A key drive
behind Western industrial culture. In the Modern world more people have greater
material wealth but more people starve and suffer from malnutrition than ever
before. Many philosophers claim that these two facts are directly related, and
the Western notion of 'progress' is morally flawed.
www.thegreenfuse.org/glossary.htm
progress v. t. Make progress [syn: come on, come along, advance, get
on, get along, shape up] [ant: regress] To make progress in; to pass through.
[Obs.] --Milton
progress n. [L. progressus, from progredi, p. p. progressus, to go
forth or forward; pro forward + gradi to step, go: cf. F. progrès.] Gradual
improvement or growth or development: "advancement of knowledge"; "great progress
in the arts"; "their research and development gave them an advantage" [syn:
advancement] The act of moving forward toward a goal [syn: progression, advance,
advancement, forward motion, onward motion] A movement forward; "he listened for the
progress of the troops" [syn: progression, advance]
artcontext.org/lexicon/definitions/
The Enlightenment conception of progress rested on the notion that human history is
primarily a history of the improvement of humanity in three respects:
1. increasing knowledge of the natural world and the ability to manipulate the
world through technology;
2. overcoming ignorance bred of superstition and religion;
3. overcoming human cruelty and violence through social improvements.
Copernicus and Galileo – The First Revolution
It is impossible to overestimate the importance of Copernicus and Galileo as they
laid the foundations for a whole new way of understanding the world and our place
in it. Nicolaus Copernicus was an intellectual and respected church man born in
1473 in Poland who studied law and medicine in Italy while the Renaissance was in
full swing. In 1543, the year of his death, his great work On the Revolution of
the Heavenly Spheres, was published and this arguably marks the beginning of the
Scientific Revolution.
It was the search for simplicity that set Copernicus on the path to a new description
of the motion of the heavenly bodies. Since the second century AD the system of Claudius
Ptolemy had been the accepted model of this motion. Ptolemy’s description was based on
observation of the paths drawn out by the planets as viewed from the earth. From this
preferential position the paths of the Sun and moon, both of which were considered as
planets at this time, appear circular. The paths of the other planets appear to loop
back on themselves and Ptolemy described this using a system of circles rolling on
circles. The heavenly bodies were pictured as objects carried around the earth on crystal
spheres in a beautiful, complex and predictable musical dance. This model survived for a
staggering 1400 years and is rooted in the Ancient Greek’s belief that nature consists of
harmonies that can be described by simple numbers and perfect geometrical relationships.
Copernicus took a step back and asked the simple and important question: What would the
motions of the planets look like viewed from another position in space, say the Sun? What
he discovered was that he could describe all the motions predicted by the Ptolemaic
system with one wonderfully simple answer; that all the planets except the moon moved
round the Sun in circular orbits, including the Earth itself. It is indicative of how
important this discovery was when we use the word revolutionary for this idea, as the
current use of the word originates here with this great work on the revolution of the
planets. For this was not only an astronomical discovery; it had repercussions in that
it contradicted Christian doctrine, which held that the Earth was at the centre of the
Universe. These were dangerous ideas and it was Galileo Galilei, who further developed
the work of Copernicus, who suffered the consequences of them at the hands of the Roman
Inquisition decades later.
Galileo was born in Italy nineteen years after the death of Copernicus, in 1564. He
established himself in Pisa as a commercial scientist and inventor with a flair for
self-promotion which led to a professorship in mathematics in Venice. Galileo was fully
engaged in dealing with the practical problems of his day, as is indicated by his first
job in Padua as professor of physics and military engineering. While the Italian
Renaissance had venerated the Ancient Greeks Galileo was living in a time when the
ancient physics was not advanced enough to deal with the questions he wanted to answer.
The concept of power, or rate of work, which he invented to explain why it is easier to
move a given load up an inclined plane than to lift it straight up, provides a prime
example of the practical bent of his early work.
In 1609 Galileo came across an invention which was to prove immensely important to his
future and to history, for it was to provide the foundation for the establishment of
the scientific method. Galileo described it as ‘a spy-glass, made in such a way that
very distant things are made to look quite close, so that a man two miles away can be
distinctly seen.’ This simple spy-glass had been developed by some spectacle makers from
Flanders. They came to Venice to try to sell their invention, but Galileo quickly figured
out the principle behind its operation and created one of his own. What is more to the
point is that, by the time he got the Senate to the Campanile in Venice to see what it
could do, he had made a telescope of much higher magnification (8-10 times) with which
to impress them. Such an instrument had obvious military implications for, with this
telescope, it was possible to see ships out to sea from the top of the Campanile some
two hours before they could be seen with the naked eye.
All this was great for Galileo’s reputation but the next step he took was not an
obvious one. He built a telescope of even higher magnification – some thirty times -
and turned it on the heavens. In March 1610 he published The Starry Messenger, an
illustrated book presenting his observations. In it he published the first maps of the
surface of the moon and described seeing more than ten times more stars than had ever
been seen before. One of the most exciting discoveries of all was four ‘planets’ which
were not known, nor had been observed by any astronomers before him - they were the
moons of Jupiter. The book earned him the position of chief mathematician and philosopher
mathematician to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo de Medici II, in Florence in July 1610.
The Starry Messenger represents the first book which is recognisable as a work
of science; he built the experimental apparatus (the telescope), made his observations
and published them in form in which they could be refuted or confirmed by others. The
book caused a sensation, but the attention it attracted was not all to Galileo’s
advantage for it contained some dangerous ideas. First, his observations seemed to
confirm the findings of Copernicus and throw out once and for all Ptolemy’s Earth-centred
model. Second, he argued that the laws of the Universe are the same in the heavens as
they are on the Earth. In some ways this was the more risky of the two ideas to hold at
the time as it provoked the umbrage of the Pope. The church maintained that, as the
Universe was created by God and was subject to his whims, it could not be governed by
natural laws which were discoverable through observation and experiment. This is a
crucial point for, while it seems that Galileo was sensitive to the risks of promoting
the Copernicus world system, he was naïve enough to believe that the truth would protect
him. Ultimately it didn’t of course, for the case against him with the Holy Office of
the Inquisition began just after publication of this work.
This was the period of the Counter-Reformation. The authority of Rome had been
seriously undermined through the sixteenth century with the Protestant Reformation
in Northern Europe. In 1517 Martin Luther’s attack on the selling of indulgences
had started a chain reaction that was unstoppable. The Catholic church was on the
offensive and held that anyone who was not for the authority of the church was a
heretic. The Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition had been created by Pope Paul III
in 1542 in an attempt to halt the spread of Protestantism. In the 1570s an Index of
Prohibited Books was introduced. In 1616, partly in response to The Starry
Messenger, Rome expressly forbade holding that the Earth is not at the centre of
heaven and is not immovable, but moves round the sun and rotates on its axis.
Galileo came to Rome in 1616 to find out what views it was suitable to hold regarding
the Copernicus world system. He was told by Cardinal Bellarmine that it was contrary to
the Sacred Scriptures to hold the opinion of Copernicus as a proven fact. However, he
was also told that, while it could be neither held nor defended, it could be used as a
hypothesis, and he obtained a document to that effect from Cardinal Bellarmine. It is on
this that his trial in 1633 eventually hinged but it was his next work, Dialogue on the
Chief World Systems, that proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Galileo made a huge error of judgement. He recognised that the time was not right to
openly defend the theories of Copernicus in 1616, but in 1623 a new Pope was elected,
Maffeo Barberini, who was a lover of the arts and who had even written a sonnet
complimenting Galileo on his writings on astronomy. In 1624 visited the new Pope,
Urban VIII, and had a number of discussions with him in the hope that the 1616 ban on
holding the Copernicus world system would be lifted. He was to be disappointed. The
Pope would not consider it. However, Galileo left Rome with a sense that, given time,
the new ideas would be allowed to gradually replace the old. This was his ultimate
mistake for there was a fundamental difference of opinion between Galileo and Pope Urban
VIII. Galileo believed that what we observe in the natural world should influence the
study of physical problems most, not what is written in the scriptures. Further, he took
a great risk and argued explicitly for freedom of inquiry and expression. Urban VIII felt
that to claim that the world is governed by natural and discoverable laws was to attempt
to limit and confine God’s power, which was clearly not acceptable. He made it clear that
Galileo must state in his book that there could be no ultimate test of the Divine wisdom.
With this in mind Galileo decided to present his next work as a dialogue between three
characters, one of whom was to make all the necessary objections to the theories of
Copernicus, the other two of whom were to answer them. The Dialogue on the Chief
World Systems was published in 1632 and the Pope was furious when he read it.
Proceedings were instigated against Galileo. The Inquisition claimed that there was a
document dated 1616 which expressly forbade Galileo to teach the Copernican system in
any way whatsoever, even as a hypothesis. The truth of this claim is highly doubtful,
but there was no arguing with the Inquisition and Galileo stood accused of tricking the
censors and deliberately ignoring the prohibition. Galileo was threatened with torture
and forced to retract. He was held under house arrest for the rest of his life.
The trial of Galileo was to have far reaching implications – Scientists in the
Catholic world were effectively silenced and the Scientific Revolution shifted to
Northern Europe where conditions were more favourable. Surprisingly this is not the end
of the story for Galileo; he completed Discourses on Two New Sciences, a major
work on mechanics, in the three years following the trial and got it published in 1638
far away from Rome in the Netherlands. We will not go into the content of this work here
as the details are not relevant to our story. Galileo died in 1642, still under house
arrest. His books were not removed from the Index of Prohibited Books until 1835. What
is more, it took a staggering 350 years for the Roman Catholic Church to formally admit
to making a mistake in the way they dealt with Galileo, eventually doing so in 1992!
Before the Scientific Revolution nature was viewed in functional terms; the
teleological view pioneered by Aristotle. As the Scientific Revolution progresses we
see the emergence of an entirely new vision of nature as autonomous and proceeding
according to its own laws. As this notion of a natural order developed humanity was
placed further within it and this eventually led to the concept of natural law as the
basis of human nature. Although the new ideas placed humanity within the natural order
the thinkers of the period celebrated human reason as the instrument through which nature
could be explored. It is to this that we now turn.
Condorcet – The Enlightened Man
The Enlightenment is the term used to describe the intellectual movement that began
in the 17th Century in Britain and developed in the 18th Century in France and
Germany. This period is sometimes described as the Age of Reason or Age of Enlightenment
in contrast to the superstition and irrationality characteristic of the Middle Ages.
Immanuel Kant described the Enlightenment as
the emergence of man from his self-imposed infancy. Infancy is the inability to use
one’s reason without the guidance of another. It is self-imposed when it depends on a
deficiency, not of reason, but of the resolve and courage to use it without external
guidance. Thus the watchword of the Enlightenment is: Sapere aude! Have the
courage to use one’s own reason!
Broadly the Enlightenment can be characterised by a number of doctrines related to a
belief in progress, human perfectibility and a questioning of authority and tradition.
Enlightenment thinkers saw reason as humanity’s central capacity and argued that beliefs
should be accepted only on the basis of reason - not on the authority of tradition or
religious doctrine. They believed that human beings are by nature rational and good,
that both the individual and humankind as a whole can progress to perfection and that all
people are equal in respect of their rationality and thus that they should be granted
equality before the law and individual liberty. They argued for tolerance to be extended
to other ways of life and devalued local customs and prejudices in favour of a
universalism which depends on the exercise of reason.
The Enlightenment developed in part thanks to the philosophes, a group of
French thinkers who emerged in the 18th century. This group was a heterogenous mix of
people who pursued a variety of interests but were united by some common themes: belief
in the perfectibility of humanity, the rejection of the authority of the past and a
dedication to systematising a number of intellectual disciplines. For the purpose of this
discussion I will focus on just one of the philosophes, the grandfather of
sociology Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, otherwise known as Condorcet.
Condorcet was the son of a cavalry officer born in 1743 in Ribemont, France. His title,
the Marquis de Condorcet, came from the town of Condorcet in Dauphiné. Like the other
giants of the Enlightenment he was a multi-faceted individual who can comfortably be
described as a philosopher, mathematician, historian of the sciences, social scientist,
economist, political theorist and social reformer. He is particularly interesting in the
context of this discussion as a proponent of human progress with ideas incredibly ahead
of his time. He was the only one of the Enlightenment philosophes who actually
played an important part in the French Revolution of 1789. He was also one of the
youngest of Denis Diderot's Encyclopadiasts. Educated in Jesuit Colleges in Reims and at
the Collège de Navarre in Paris, he went on to study at the Collège Mazarin in Paris.
His first major work Essai sur le calcul integral was published in 1765 at the
age of twenty two and this was undoubtedly a major factor in his election to the
prestigious Académie des Sciences in 1769. Seven years later he became secretary of
the Académie.
While a member of the Académie, Condorcet produced a number of important works
including a series of eulogies to deceased academicians which helped to popularise
science and make it more accessible to a growing literate, middle class audience. He
was also the protege of the leading mathematician and philosophe, D'Alembert (1717-1783).
In 1772 he published a work on the integral calculus which was described by Lagrange as
‘filled with sublime and fruitful ideas which could have furnished material for several
works.’ Soon after the publication of this work, he fell in with Voltaire, Diderot and,
most importantly, the economist Jacques Turgot who became his mentor and encouraged him
to explore economic questions. Turgot became an administrator under Louis XV and later
became Controller General of Finance in 1774 under Louis XVI and had Condorcet appointed
Inspector General of the Mint. When Turgot was dismissed from his post in 1776 Condorcet
tended his resignation, but his resignation was refused and he ended up staying at the
mint until 1791.
His most important work was on the philosophy of mathematics and probability. His
Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions,
published in 1785 is a particularly important work in the development of the theory of
probability. He is widely known for showing that it is possible that a majority prefers
option A over option B, a majority prefers option B over option C, and yet a majority
prefers option C over option A, which is known as the Condorcet Paradox. Condorcet
published two important biographies: one of Turgot in 1786 and one of Voltaire in 1789
in which he made it clear that he favoured Turgot’s economic theories and agreed with
Voltaire’s opposition to the Church.
In 1786 Condorcet married Sophie de Gouchy, whose salon in Paris was one of the most
important gathering places of the philosophes before the French Revolution.
In this period he was a member of the municipal council of Paris and took part in the
opening debates of the Revolution, playing an active part in campaigns for legal reform,
religious toleration, economic freedom and the abolition of slavery. He was elected to
the Legislative Assembly in 1791 as the Paris representative. As secretary of the
Assembly he directed a great deal of effort to drawing up plans for public education
which provided the basis for the educational system of France established in 1805. By
1792 he had become one of the leaders of the Republican movement. His opposition to the
death penalty led him to argue strongly against the execution of Louis XVI in 1792/93. He
then set about drawing up a draft constitution for the new republic which resulted in a
liberal constitutional scheme commonly known as the Girondin Constitution of 1793.
However the Girondists fell from favour and the Jacobins, a more radical political group
led by Robespierre, took over. Foolishly defending his liberal constitution against one
proposed by the Jacobins led to his condemnation in July 1793.
Condorcet went into hiding and spent the remaining months of his life in seclusion in
Paris writing his greatest work Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de
l'esprit humain (Sketch for a historical picture of the progress of the human mind),
which was published in 1795. In it Condorcet examined history in order to demonstrate
the power of reason in social affairs. Its aim was to demonstrate humanity’s progressive
emancipation from both the bondage of the social structures it had created for itself
throughout history and from the arbitrary domination of the physical environment. He
argued that progress would ultimately result in liberal democratic government which would
sweep away all the obstacles which had hindered reason in the past. In his own words:
“The time will therefore come … when the sun will shine only on free men who know no
other master but their reason; when tyrants and slaves, priests and their stupid or
hypocritical instruments will exist only in works of history or on the stage; and when we
shall think of them only . . . to learn how to recognize and so to destroy by force of
reason, the first seeds of tyranny and superstition, should they ever dare to reappear
amongst us.”
In March 1794, Condorcet thought that the place where he was hiding was being watched
and fled from Paris only to be arrested and imprisoned three days later. On 29 March he
was found dead in his prison cell in Bourg-la-Reine and it is not known whether he died
of natural causes thanks to exhaustion, or if he was murdered or even took his own life.
Condorcet is a perfect example of an Enlightenment thinker. He was an optimist on the
possibility of social progress, believing passionately in the perfectability of man. His
mathematical science of man represented an attempt to apply mathematics and statistics to
socio-economic phenomena. He rejected Rousseau’s approach which attempted to augment
classic rationalism with sentiment, and instead tried to raise reason to the mathematical
level, arguing that the only social obligation is to obey the general reason, rather than
the general will. Thus, according to Condorcet the will of the majority should only be
adhered to if it complies with reason. His model of human behaviour was based on the
notion of an individual acting as a gambler, weighing the probability of one opinion
against that of another. His social mathematics was intended to be both an objective
description of social behaviour and to act as a scientific basis for individual conduct,
freeing human beings from instinct and passion by applying reason to all social affairs.
Most significant from the point of view of this discussion his Sketch was a key factor in
establishing the notion of progress as the guiding principle of 19th century social
thought.
Auguste Comte – The Father of Sociology
We turn next to Auguste Comte, founder of Positivism and inventor of the term
‘sociology’ as a description of the scientific study of humanity. While there can be
doubt that Condorcet, was the forefather of Comte, in that both aspired using the
methods of observation and experimentation used in the natural sciences to establish a
science of humanity, but there are also great contrasts in their approach, particularly
in their understanding of the way in which society could be transformed.
Born in Montpellier in 1798, just four years after the death of Condorcet, Isidore
Marie Auguste François Xavier Comte was the son of discreetly royalist, Roman Catholic
parents who rejected the scepticism and republicanism that followed the French
Revolution. However, at an early age Comte rejected both the Catholicism and royalism
of his parents in favour of an ardent republican faith in liberty.
A very bright youth, Comte entered the prestigious École Polytechnique in 1814 and worked
his way through his education as a journalist and mathematics teacher. He read widely in
history and philosophy and developed a strong interest in thinkers who had attempted to
understand the history of human society including Condorcet, Turgot, and de Maistre.
In Paris Comte got to know one of the founding fathers of socialism, Henri de Saint-Simon,
who was distinguished as one of the first thinkers to recognise the importance of economic
organisation in modern society. Comte was to be highly influenced by Saint-Simon, who was
to become his mentor. Some four years before they met, in his Essay on the Sciences of
Man (1813), Saint-Simon had applied the word "positive" to the natural sciences,
emphasising the way they are based on "facts which have been observed and analysed." Some
of Comte’s early articles appeared in Saint-Simon’s publications and they worked together
closely for some time. However, there were also some important differences between the
outlooks of the two men and this eventually led to them falling out in 1824.
In his late twenties Comte began to develop his ideas for a system of “positive philosophy”,
and in 1826 began to disseminate his ideas through a series of lectures to a private
audience. Comte married Caroline Massin in 1825, but their marriage was unhappy and this
may have contributed to the mental breakdown he had in 1826. It was almost two years before
he was again well enough to resume his lecture series. By 1829 the interest in his work had
grown sufficiently for him to complete his lecture series at the prestigious Royal Athenaeum. Over the next twelve years (1830-42) he devoted his energy to publishing his Course of Positive Philosophy.
Separating from Caroline in 1842, Comte went on to meet Clothilde de Vaux for whom he
developed a deep romantic attachment in 1845 but who sadly died of tuberculosis the
following year. This romance was to have a profound influence on Comte and was to be
important in his developing thoughts on the role of women in the positivist society he
hoped to establish. After the death of Clothilde, Comte spent a number of years developing
his positivist ideas further and completing his formulation of sociology, publishing his
Discours sur l'Ensemble du positivisme (A general view of Positivism) in 1848 and
his most important work, the Systeme de Politique Positive (System of Positive Polity)
between 1851 and 1854. Comte rejected metaphysics in favour of the scientific method as
the path to enlightenment, arguing that morality and moral progress should be the central
preoccupation of human knowledge. In the Systeme he described the form of political
organisation required to make this possible. Comte’s Positivism can rightly be considered
as humanist philosophy in that it placed humanity at the centre of its concerns. However
his position could not have been further from Enlightenment humanism in that he rejected
democracy, and instead emphasised hierarchy and obedience, arguing that the ideal government
would be made up of an intellectual elite.
The period in which Comte lived was one characterised by huge changes - science, technology
and the Industrial Revolution were transforming the societies of Europe and this provided
the backdrop to his work. His great strength was in drawing on diverse schools of thought
and attempting to synthesise them within his positivist philosophy: from Saint-Simon he
adopted the position that there was a need for a unifying social science to explain existing
social relations and provide the knowledge required to plan new and better forms of social
organisation; from the Enlightenment thinkers he took the notion of historical progress;
from the philosophers David Hume and Immanuel Kant he took the idea that positive knowledge
must be rooted in the methods of the natural sciences; and from the French clericalist
thinkers he adopted the idea of a form of social organisation that would imitate the
hierarchy and discipline of the Catholic church.
Comte’s view of the development of human intellectual development in general and of the
sciences was that of progression through a historical sequence. He proposed (following
Saint-Simon) a ‘law of the three stages’ that began with a theological stage, progressing
through a transitional metaphysical stage to the positive stage, In the first two stages,
attempts are made to understand the nature of things through supernatural and metaphysical
explanations. The positive stage, by contrast, was distinguished from those that preceded
it by a recognition of the limitations of human knowledge: the positive thinker relies only
on the experience of the senses and seeks to establish truth by means of observation and
experiment.
His sequence for the development of the sciences began with mathematics, moving through
astronomy, physics, and chemistry to biology and ultimately to sociology. He held that a
positivist approach to examining social phenomena would lead to the discovery of laws to
describe social relations just as in the natural sciences, and that the sum of human
knowledge would eventually be synthesised through sociology. Further, he believed that
humanity would progress to a superior state of civilization by means of the application
of sociology itself.
Within his lifetime many English intellectuals were influenced by Comte, most notably
John Stuart Mill, and as a consequence his publications were translated into English and
widely disseminated. His influence in France also grew after the publication of the
Systeme, and a number of positivist societies sprung up throughout the world.
However, in his later years Comte’s ideas became increasingly bizarre as he descended
into mysticism, arguing for a Religion of Humanity, with himself at the head. Perhaps this
was inevitable when we consider that his start point for Positivism was a faith in the
scientific method as the route to social progress, something that stands in stark contrast
to the rejection of authority so important to the Scientific Revolution and to the
Enlightenment philosophes. Beginning as a fervent admirer of the French Revolution,
Comte ended as a proponent of draconian government to coerce people into changing their
nature. The influence of certain French clericalist thinkers also led him to refuse to
condemn church opposition to social reform, something that was to alienate many who had
been influenced by his work. T.H. Huxley went as far as to describe his later ideas as
‘Catholicism minus Christianity.’ Towards the end even his friends shied away from him,
so that he was melancholy and alone when he died of cancer in September 1857.
John Stuart Mill wrote of Comte in On Liberty ‘M. Comte, in particular, whose social
system, as unfolded in his Systeme de Politique Positive, aims at establishing (though
by moral more than by legal appliances) a despotism of society over the individual,
surpassing anything contemplated in the political ideal of the most rigid disciplinarian
among the ancient philosophers.’
Another of Comte’s contemporaries, Karl Marx, was particularly contemptuous of Comte’s
work, condemning his "shit positivism" (Scheisspositivismus) and vehemently denying ever
"writing Comtist recipes for the kitchens of the future." Marx saw the supposed expertise
and neutrality of social engineers influenced by Comte as a sham, as it is impossible to
stand above society and manipulate social variables. Marx pointed out that the social
engineer is human, and is therefore "no abstract being squatting outside the world."
Caspar Hewett, March 2006
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