The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Idea of Progress, by J. B. Bury
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: The Idea of Progress
An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth
Author: J. B. Bury
Release Date: October, 2003 [Etext #4557]
Posting Date: January 5, 2010
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE IDEA OF PROGRESS ***
Produced by Steve Harris, Charles Franks and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team
THE IDEA OF PROGRESS
AN INQUIRY INTO ITS ORIGIN AND GROWTH
By J. B. Bury
Regius Professor Of Modern History, And Fellow Of King's
College, In The University Of Cambridge
Dedicated to the memories of Charles Francois Castel de Saint-Pierre,
Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat de Condorcet, Auguste Comte, Herbert
Spencer, and other optimists mentioned in this volume.
Tantane uos generis tenuit fiducia uestri?
PREFACE
We may believe in the doctrine of Progress or we may not, but in either
case it is a matter of interest to examine the origins and trace the
history of what is now, even should it ultimately prove to be no more
than an idolum saeculi, the animating and controlling idea of western
civilisation. For the earthly Progress of humanity is the general test
to which social aims and theories are submitted as a matter of course.
The phrase CIVILISATION AND PROGRESS has become stereotyped, and
illustrates how we have come to judge a civilisation good or bad
according as it is or is not progressive. The ideals of liberty and
democracy, which have their own ancient and independent justifications,
have sought a new strength by attaching themselves to Progress. The
conjunctions of "liberty and progress," "democracy and progress,"
meet us at every turn. Socialism, at an early stage of its modern
development, sought the same aid. The friends of Mars, who cannot bear
the prospect of perpetual peace, maintain that war is an indispensable
instrument of Progress. It is in the name of Progress that the
doctrinaires who established the present reign of terror in Russia
profess to act. All this shows the prevalent feeling that a social or
political theory or programme is hardly tenable if it cannot claim that
it harmonises with this controlling idea.
In the Middle Ages Europeans followed a different guiding star. The idea
of a life beyond the grave was in control, and the great things of
this life were conducted with reference to the next. When men's deepest
feelings reacted more steadily and powerfully to the idea of saving
their souls than to any other, harmony with this idea was the test by
which the opportuneness of social theories and institutions was judged.
Monasticism, for instance, throve under its aegis, while liberty of
conscience had no chance. With a new idea in control, this has been
reversed. Religious freedom has thriven under the aegis of Progress;
monasticism can make no appeal to it.
For the hope of an ultimate happy state on this planet to be enjoyed by
future generations--or of some state, at least, that may relatively be
considered happy--has replaced, as a social power, the hope of felicity
in another world. Belief in personal immortality is still very widely
entertained, but may we not fairly say that it has ceased to be a
central and guiding idea of collective life, a criterion by which social
values are measured? Many people do not believe in it; many more regard
it as so uncertain that they could not reasonably permit it to affect
their lives or opinions. Those who believe in it are doubtless the
majority, but belief has many degrees; and one can hardly be wrong
in saying that, as a general rule, this belief does not possess the
imaginations of those who hold it, that their emotions react to it
feebly, that it is felt to be remote and unreal, and has comparatively
seldom a more direct influence on conduct than the abstract arguments to
be found in treatises on morals.
Under the control of the idea of Progress the ethical code recognised in
the Western world has been reformed in modern times by a new principle
of far-reaching importance which has emanated from that idea. When
Isocrates formulated the rule of life, "Do unto others," he probably did
not mean to include among "others" slaves or savages. The Stoics and the
Christians extended its application to the whole of living humanity. But
in late years the rule has received a vastly greater extension by the
inclusion of the unborn generations of the future. This principle of
duty to posterity is a direct corollary of the idea of Progress. In
the recent war that idea, involving the moral obligation of making
sacrifices for the sake of future ages, was constantly appealed to;
just as in the Crusades, the most characteristic wars of our medieval
ancestors, the idea of human destinies then in the ascendant lured
thousands to hardship and death.
The present attempt to trace the genesis and growth of the idea in broad
outline is a purely historical inquiry, and any discussion of the
great issue which is involved lies outside its modest scope. Occasional
criticisms on particular forms which the creed of Progress assumed,
or on arguments which were used to support it, are not intended as a
judgment on its general validity. I may, however, make two observations
here. The doubts which Mr. Balfour expressed nearly thirty years ago,
in an Address delivered at Glasgow, have not, so far as I know, been
answered. And it is probable that many people, to whom six years ago the
notion of a sudden decline or break-up of our western civilisation, as
a result not of cosmic forces but of its own development, would have
appeared almost fantastic, will feel much less confident to-day,
notwithstanding the fact that the leading nations of the world have
instituted a league of peoples for the prevention of war, the measure to
which so many high priests of Progress have looked forward as meaning a
long stride forward on the road to Utopia.
The preponderance of France's part in developing the idea is an
outstanding feature of its history. France, who, like ancient Greece,
has always been a nursing-mother of ideas, bears the principal
responsibility for its growth; and if it is French thought that will
persistently claim our attention, this is not due to an arbitrary
preference on my part or to neglect of speculation in other countries.
J. B. BURY. January, 1920.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I SOME INTERPRETATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY: BODIN AND
LE ROY
CHAPTER II UTILITY THE END OF KNOWLEDGE: BACON
CHAPTER III CARTESIANISM
CHAPTER IV THE DOCTRINE OF DEGENERATION: THE ANCIENTS AND
MODERNS
CHAPTER V THE PROGRESS OF KNOWLEDGE: FONTENELLE
CHAPTER VI THE GENERAL PROGRESS OF MAN: ABBE DE SAINT-PIERRE
CHAPTER VII NEW CONCEPTIONS OF HISTORY: MONTESQUIEU, VOLTAIRE,
TURGOT
CHAPTER VIII THE ENCYCLOPAEDISTS AND ECONOMISTS
CHAPTER IX WAS CIVILISATION A MISTAKE? ROUSSEAU, CHASTELLUX
CHAPTER X THE YEAR 2440
CHAPTER XI THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: CONDORCET
CHAPTER XII THE THEORY OF PROGRESS IN ENGLAND
CHAPTER XIII GERMAN SPECULATIONS ON PROGRESS
CHAPTER XIV CURRENTS OF THOUGHT IN FRANCE AFTER THE REVOLUTION
CHAPTER XV THE SEARCH FOR A LAW OF PROGRESS: I. SAINT-SIMON
CHAPTER XVI SEARCH FOR A LAW OF PROGRESS: II. COMTE
CHAPTER XVII "PROGRESS" IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT
(1830-1851)
CHAPTER XVIII MATERIAL PROGRESS: THE EXHIBITION OF 1851
CHAPTER XIX PROGRESS IN THE LIGHT OF EVOLUTION
EPILOGUE
APPENDIX: NOTES TO THE TEXT
[Proofreaders note: these notes have been
interspersed in the main text as Footnotes]
INTRODUCTION
When we say that ideas rule the world, or exercise a decisive power in
history, we are generally thinking of those ideas which express human
aims and depend for their realisation on the human will, such as
liberty, toleration, equality of opportunity, socialism. Some of these
have been partly realised, and there is no reason why any of them should
not be fully realised, in a society or in the world, if it were the
united purpose of a society or of the world to realise it. They are
approved or condemned because they are held to be good or bad, not
because they are true or false. But there is another order of ideas
that play a great part in determining and directing the course of man's
conduct but do not depend on his will--ideas which bear upon the mystery
of life, such as Fate, Providence, or personal immortality. Such ideas
may operate in important ways on the forms of social action, but they
involve a question of fact and they are accepted or rejected not because
they are believed to be useful or injurious, but because they are
believed to be true or false.
The idea of the progress of humanity is an idea of this kind, and it
is important to be quite clear on the point. We now take it so much for
granted, we are so conscious of constantly progressing in knowledge,
arts, organising capacity, utilities of all sorts, that it is easy to
look upon Progress as an aim, like liberty or a world-federation, which
it only depends on our own efforts and good-will to achieve. But though
all increases of power and knowledge depend on human effort, the idea
of the Progress of humanity, from which all these particular progresses
derive their value, raises a definite question of fact, which man's
wishes or labours cannot affect any more than his wishes or labours can
prolong life beyond the grave.
This idea means that civilisation has moved, is moving, and will move
in a desirable direction. But in order to judge that we are moving in
a desirable direction we should have to know precisely what the
destination is. To the minds of most people the desirable outcome of
human development would be a condition of society in which all the
inhabitants of the planet would enjoy a perfectly happy existence. But
it is impossible to be sure that civilisation is moving in the right
direction to realise this aim. Certain features of our "progress" may be
urged as presumptions in its favour, but there are always offsets, and
it has always been easy to make out a case that, from the point of view
of increasing happiness, the tendencies of our progressive civilisation
are far from desirable. In short, it cannot be proved that the unknown
destination towards which man is advancing is desirable. The movement
may be Progress, or it may be in an undesirable direction and therefore
not Progress. This is a question of fact, and one which is at present as
insoluble as the question of personal immortality. It is a problem which
bears on the mystery of life.
Moreover, even if it is admitted to be probable that the course of
civilisation has so far been in a desirable direction, and such as would
lead to general felicity if the direction were followed far enough, it
cannot be proved that ultimate attainment depends entirely on the human
will. For the advance might at some point be arrested by an insuperable
wall. Take the particular case of knowledge, as to which it is generally
taken for granted that the continuity of progress in the future depends
altogether on the continuity of human effort (assuming that human brains
do not degenerate). This assumption is based on a strictly limited
experience. Science has been advancing without interruption during the
last three or four hundred years; every new discovery has led to new
problems and new methods of solution, and opened up new fields for
exploration. Hitherto men of science have not been compelled to halt,
they have always found means to advance further. But what assurance have
we that they will not one day come up against impassable barriers? The
experience of four hundred years, in which the surface of nature has
been successfully tapped, can hardly be said to warrant conclusions
as to the prospect of operations extending over four hundred or four
thousand centuries. Take biology or astronomy. How can we be sure that
some day progress may not come to a dead pause, not because knowledge
is exhausted, but because our resources for investigation are
exhausted--because, for instance, scientific instruments have reached
the limit of perfection beyond which it is demonstrably impossible to
improve them, or because (in the case of astronomy) we come into the
presence of forces of which, unlike gravitation, we have no terrestrial
experience? It is an assumption, which cannot be verified, that we shall
not soon reach a point in our knowledge of nature beyond which the human
intellect is unqualified to pass.
But it is just this assumption which is the light and inspiration of
man's scientific research. For if the assumption is not true, it means
that he can never come within sight of the goal which is, in the case
of physical science, if not a complete knowledge of the cosmos and
the processes of nature, at least an immeasurably larger and deeper
knowledge than we at present possess.
Thus continuous progress in man's knowledge of his environment, which is
one of the chief conditions of general Progress, is a hypothesis which
may or may not be true. And if it is true, there remains the further
hypothesis of man's moral and social "perfectibility," which rests on
much less impressive evidence. There is nothing to show that he may not
reach, in his psychical and social development, a stage at which the
conditions of his life will be still far from satisfactory, and beyond
which he will find it impossible to progress. This is a question of fact
which no willing on man's part can alter. It is a question bearing on
the mystery of life.
Enough has been said to show that the Progress of humanity belongs to
the same order of ideas as Providence or personal immortality. It is
true or it is false, and like them it cannot be proved either true or
false. Belief in it is an act of faith.
The idea of human Progress then is a theory which involves a
synthesis of the past and a prophecy of the future. It is based on
an interpretation of history which regards men as slowly
advancing--pedetemtim progredientes--in a definite and desirable
direction, and infers that this progress will continue indefinitely. And
it implies that, as
The issue of the earth's great business,
a condition of general happiness will ultimately be enjoyed, which will
justify the whole process of civilisation; for otherwise the direction
would not be desirable. There is also a further implication. The process
must be the necessary outcome of the psychical and social nature of man;
it must not be at the mercy of any external will; otherwise there
would be no guarantee of its continuance and its issue, and the idea of
Progress would lapse into the idea of Providence.
As time is the very condition of the possibility of Progress, it is
obvious that the idea would be valueless if there were any cogent
reasons for supposing that the time at the disposal of humanity is
likely to reach a limit in the near future. If there were good cause for
believing that the earth would be uninhabitable in A.D. 2000 or 2100
the doctrine of Progress would lose its meaning and would automatically
disappear. It would be a delicate question to decide what is the minimum
period of time which must be assured to man for his future development,
in order that Progress should possess value and appeal to the emotions.
The recorded history of civilisation covers 6000 years or so, and if we
take this as a measure of our conceptions of time-distances, we might
assume that if we were sure of a period ten times as long ahead of us
the idea of Progress would not lose its power of appeal. Sixty thousand
years of HISTORICAL time, when we survey the changes which have come to
pass in six thousand, opens to the imagination a range vast enough to
seem almost endless.
This psychological question, however, need not be decided. For science
assures us that the stability of the present conditions of the solar
system is certified for many myriads of years to come. Whatever gradual
modifications of climate there may be, the planet will not cease to
support life for a period which transcends and flouts all efforts of
imagination. In short, the POSSIBILITY of Progress is guaranteed by the
high probability, based on astro-physical science, of an immense time to
progress in.
It may surprise many to be told that the notion of Progress, which now
seems so easy to apprehend, is of comparatively recent origin. It has
indeed been claimed that various thinkers, both ancient (for instance,
Seneca) and medieval (for instance, Friar Bacon), had long ago conceived
it. But sporadic observations--such as man's gradual rise from primitive
and savage conditions to a certain level of civilisation by a series of
inventions, or the possibility of some future additions to his knowledge
of nature--which were inevitable at a certain stage of human reflection,
do not amount to an anticipation of the idea. The value of such
observations was determined, and must be estimated, by the whole context
of ideas in which they occurred. It is from its bearings on the future
that Progress derives its value, its interest, and its power. You may
conceive civilisation as having gradually advanced in the past, but you
have not got the idea of Progress until you go on to conceive that it
is destined to advance indefinitely in the future. Ideas have
their intellectual climates, and I propose to show briefly in this
Introduction that the intellectual climates of classical antiquity and
the ensuing ages were not propitious to the birth of the doctrine of
Progress. It is not till the sixteenth century that the obstacles to
its appearance definitely begin to be transcended and a favourable
atmosphere to be gradually prepared.
[Footnote: The history of the idea of Progress has been treated
briefly and partially by various French writers; e.g. Comte, Cours de
philosophie positive, vi. 321 sqq.; Buchez, Introduction a la science
de l'histoire, i. 99 sqq. (ed. 2, 1842); Javary, De l'idee de progres
(1850); Rigault, Histoire de la querelle des Anciens et des Modernes
(1856); Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartesienne (1854); Caro,
Problemes de la morale sociale (1876); Brunetiere, La Formation de
l'idee de progres, in Etudes critiques, 5e serie. More recently M. Jules
Delvaille has attempted to trace its history fully, down to the end
of the eighteenth century. His Histoire de l'idee de progres (1910) is
planned on a large scale; he is erudite and has read extensively. But
his treatment is lacking in the power of discrimination. He strikes one
as anxious to bring within his net, as theoriciens du progres, as many
distinguished thinkers as possible; and so, along with a great deal
that is useful and relevant, we also find in his book much that is
irrelevant. He has not clearly seen that the distinctive idea of
Progress was not conceived in antiquity or in the Middle Ages, or even
in the Renaissance period; and when he comes to modern times he fails to
bring out clearly the decisive steps of its growth. And he does not seem
to realise that a man might be "progressive" without believing in, or
even thinking about, the doctrine of Progress. Leonardo da Vinci and
Berkeley are examples. In my Ancient Greek Historians (1909) I dwelt on
the modern origin of the idea (p. 253 sqq.). Recently Mr. R. H. Murray,
in a learned appendix to his Erasmus and Luther, has developed the
thesis that Progress was not grasped in antiquity (though he makes an
exception of Seneca),--a welcome confirmation.]
I
It may, in particular, seem surprising that the Greeks, who were so
fertile in their speculations on human life, did not hit upon an idea
which seems so simple and obvious to us as the idea of Progress. But if
we try to realise their experience and the general character of their
thought we shall cease to wonder. Their recorded history did not go back
far, and so far as it did go there had been no impressive series of new
discoveries suggesting either an indefinite increase of knowledge or a
growing mastery of the forces of nature. In the period in which their
most brilliant minds were busied with the problems of the universe
men might improve the building of ships, or invent new geometrical
demonstrations, but their science did little or nothing to transform the
conditions of life or to open any vista into the future. They were
in the presence of no facts strong enough to counteract that profound
veneration of antiquity which seems natural to mankind, and the
Athenians of the age of Pericles or of Plato, though they were
thoroughly, obviously "modern" compared with the Homeric Greeks, were
never self-consciously "modern" as we are.
1.
The indications that human civilisation was a gradual growth, and that
man had painfully worked his way forward from a low and savage state,
could not, indeed, escape the sharp vision of the Greeks. For instance,
Aeschylus represents men as originally living at hazard in sunless
caves, and raised from that condition by Prometheus, who taught them the
arts of life. In Euripides we find a similar recognition of the ascent
of mankind to a civilised state, from primitive barbarism, some god or
other playing the part of Prometheus. In such passages as these we have,
it may be said, the idea that man has progressed; and it may fairly be
suggested that belief in a natural progress lay, for Aeschylus as
well as for Euripides, behind the poetical fiction of supernatural
intervention. But these recognitions of a progress were not incompatible
with the widely-spread belief in an initial degeneration of the human
race; nor did it usually appear as a rival doctrine. The old legend of
a "golden age" of simplicity, from which man had fallen away, was
generally accepted as truth; and leading thinkers combined it with
the doctrine of a gradual sequence of social and material improvements
[Footnote: In the masterly survey of early Greek history which
Thucydides prefixed to his work, he traces the social progress of the
Greeks in historical times, and finds the key to it in the increase of
wealth.] during the subsequent period of decline. We find the two
views thus combined, for instance, in Plato's Laws, and in the earliest
reasoned history of civilisation written by Dicaearchus, a pupil of
Aristotle. [Footnote: Aristotle's own view is not very clear. He thinks
that all arts, sciences, and institutions have been repeatedly, or
rather an infinite number of times (word in Greek) discovered in the
past and again lost. Metaphysics, xi. 8 ad fin.; Politics, iv. 10,
cp. ii. 2. An infinite number of times seems to imply the doctrine of
cycles.] But the simple life of the first age, in which men were not
worn with toil, and war and disease were unknown, was regarded as
the ideal State to which man would lie only too fortunate if he could
return. He had indeed at a remote time ill the past succeeded in
ameliorating some of the conditions of his lot, but such ancient
discoveries as fire or ploughing or navigation or law-giving did
not suggest the guess that new inventions might lead ultimately to
conditions in which life would be more complex but as happy as the
simple life of the primitive world.
But, if some relative progress might be admitted, the general view of
Greek philosophers was that they were living in a period of inevitable
degeneration and decay--inevitable because it was prescribed by the
nature of the universe. We have only an imperfect knowledge of the
influential speculations of Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and Empedocles, but
we may take Plato's tentative philosophy of history to illustrate the
trend and the prejudices of Greek thought on this subject. The world was
created and set going by the Deity, and, as his work, it was perfect;
but it was not immortal and had in it the seeds of decay. The period of
its duration is 72,000 solar years. During the first half of this period
the original uniformity and order, which were impressed upon it by the
Creator, are maintained under his guidance; but then it reaches a point
from which it begins, as it were, to roll back; the Deity has loosened
his grip of the machine, the order is disturbed, and the second 36,000
years are a period of gradual decay and degeneration. At the end of this
time, the world left to itself would dissolve into chaos, but the Deity
again seizes the helm and restores the original conditions, and
the whole process begins anew. The first half of such a world-cycle
corresponds to the Golden Age of legend in which men lived happily and
simply; we have now unfortunately reached some point in the period of
decadence.
Plato applies the theory of degradation in his study of political
communities. [Footnote: Plato's philosophy of history. In the myth of
the Statesman and the last Books of the Republic. The best elucidation
of these difficult passages will be found in the notes and appendix to
Book viii. in J. Adam's edition of the Republic (1902).] He conceives
his own Utopian aristocracy as having existed somewhere towards the
beginning of the period of the world's relapse, when things were not so
bad, [Footnote: Similarly he places the ideal society which he describes
in the Critias 9000 years before Solon. The state which he plans in the
Laws is indeed imagined as a practicable project in his own day, but
then it is only a second-best. The ideal state of which Aristotle
sketched an outline (Politics, iv. v.) is not set either in time or in
place.] and exhibits its gradual deterioration, through the successive
stages of timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and despotism. He explains
this deterioration as primarily caused by a degeneration of the race,
due to laxity and errors in the State regulation of marriages, and the
consequent birth of biologically inferior individuals.
The theories of Plato are only the most illustrious example of the
tendency characteristic of Greek philosophical thinkers to idealise
the immutable as possessing a higher value than that which varies. This
affected all their social speculations. They believed in the ideal of an
absolute order in society, from which, when it is once established, any
deviation must be for the worse. Aristotle, considering the subject
from a practical point of view, laid down that changes in an established
social order are undesirable, and should be as few and slight as
possible. [Footnote: Politics, ii. 5.] This prejudice against change
excluded the apprehension of civilisation as a progressive movement.
It did not occur to Plato or any one else that a perfect order might be
attainable by a long series of changes and adaptations. Such an order,
being an embodiment of reason, could be created only by a deliberate and
immediate act of a planning mind. It might be devised by the wisdom of a
philosopher or revealed by the Deity. Hence the salvation of a community
must lie in preserving intact, so far as possible, the institutions
imposed by the enlightened lawgiver, since change meant corruption and
disaster. These a priori principles account for the admiration of the
Spartan state entertained by many Greek philosophers, because it was
supposed to have preserved unchanged for an unusually long period a
system established by an inspired legislator.
2.
Thus time was regarded as the enemy of humanity. Horace's verse,
Damnosa quid non imminuit dies?
"time depreciates the value of the world," expresses the pessimistic
axiom accepted in most systems of ancient thought.
The theory of world-cycles was so widely current that it may almost be
described as the orthodox theory of cosmic time among the Greeks, and it
passed from them to the Romans.
[Footnote: Plato's world-cycle. I have omitted details not essential;
e.g. that in the first period men were born from the earth and only in
the second propagated themselves. The period of 36,000 years, known as
the Great Platonic Year, was probably a Babylonian astronomical period,
and was in any case based on the Babylonian sexagesimal system and
connected with the solar year conceived as consisting of 360 days.
Heraclitus seems to have accepted it as the duration of the world
between his periodic universal conflagrations. Plato derived the number
from predecessors, but based it on operations with the numbers 3, 4, 5,
the length of the sides of the Pythagorean right-angled triangle. The
Great Year of the Pythagorean Philolaus seems to have been different,
and that of the Stoics was much longer (6,570,000 years).
I may refer here to Tacitus, Dialogus c. 16, as an appreciation of
historical perspective unusual in ancient writers: "The four hundred
years which separate us from the ancients are almost a vanishing
quantity if you compare them with the duration of the ages." See the
whole passage, where the Magnus Annus of 12,954 years is referred to.]
According to some of the Pythagoreans [Footnote: See Simplicius, Phys.
732, 26.] each cycle repeated to the minutest particular the course and
events of the preceding. If the universe dissolves into the original
chaos, there appeared to them to be no reason why the second chaos
should produce a world differing in the least respect from its
predecessor. The nth cycle would be indeed numerically distinct from
the first, but otherwise would be identical with it, and no man could
possibly discover the number of the cycle in which he was living. As no
end seems to have been assigned to the whole process, the course of
the world's history would contain an endless number of Trojan Wars, for
instance; an endless number of Platos would write an endless number
of Republics. Virgil uses this idea in his Fourth Eclogue, where he
meditates a return of the Golden Age:
Alter erit tum Tiphys, et altera quae uehat Argo
Delectos heroas; erunt etiam altera bella,
Atque iterum ad Troiam magnus mittetur Achilles.
The periodic theory might be held in forms in which this uncanny
doctrine of absolute identity was avoided; but at the best it meant an
endless monotonous iteration, which was singularly unlikely to stimulate
speculative interest in the future. It must be remembered that no
thinker had any means of knowing how near to the end of his cycle the
present hour might be. The most influential school of the later
Greek age, the Stoics, adopted the theory of cycles, and the natural
psychological effect of the theory is vividly reflected in Marcus
Aurelius, who frequently dwells on it in his Meditations. "The
rational soul," he says, "wanders round the whole world and through
the encompassing void, and gazes into infinite time, and considers the
periodic destructions and rebirths of the universe, and reflects that
our posterity will see nothing new, and that our ancestors saw nothing
greater than we have seen. A man of forty years, possessing the most
moderate intelligence, may be said to have seen all that is past and
all that is to come; so uniform is the world." [Footnote: xi. I. The
cyclical theory was curiously revived in the nineteenth; century by
Nietzsche, and it is interesting to note his avowal that it took him
a long time to overcome the feeling of pessimism which the doctrine
inspired.]
3.
And yet one Stoic philosopher saw clearly, and declared emphatically,
that increases in knowledge must be expected in the future.
"There are many peoples to-day," Seneca wrote, "who are ignorant of
the cause of eclipses of the moon, and it has only recently been
demonstrated among ourselves. The day will come when time and human
diligence will clear up problems which are now obscure. We divide the
few years of our lives unequally between study and vice, and it will
therefore be the work of many generations to explain such phenomena as
comets. One day our posterity will marvel at our ignorance of causes so
clear to them.
"How many new animals have we first come to know in the present age? In
time to come men will know much that is unknown to us. Many discoveries
are reserved for future ages, when our memory will have faded from men's
minds. We imagine ourselves initiated in the secrets of nature; we are
standing on the threshold of her temple."
[Footnote: The quotations from Seneca will be found in Naturales
Quaestiones, vii. 25 and 31. See also Epist. 64. Seneca implies
continuity in scientific research. Aristotle had stated this expressly,
pointing out that we are indebted not only to the author of the
philosophical theory which we accept as true, but also to the
predecessors whose views it has superseded (Metaphysics, i. ii. chap.
1). But he seems to consider his own system as final.]
But these predictions are far from showing that Seneca had the least
inkling of a doctrine of the Progress of humanity. Such a doctrine is
sharply excluded by the principles of his philosophy and his profoundly
pessimistic view of human affairs. Immediately after the passage which
I have quoted he goes on to enlarge on the progress of vice. "Are you
surprised to be told that human knowledge has not yet completed its
whole task? Why, human wickedness has not yet fully developed."
Yet, at least, it may be said, Seneca believed in a progress of
knowledge and recognised its value. Yes, but the value which he
attributed to it did not lie in any advantages which it would bring
to the general community of mankind. He did not expect from it any
improvement of the world. The value of natural science, from his point
of view, was this, that it opened to the philosopher a divine region, in
which, "wandering among the stars," he could laugh at the earth and all
its riches, and his mind "delivered as it were from prison could return
to its original home." In other words, its value lay not in its results,
but simply in the intellectual activity; and therefore it concerned not
mankind at large but a few chosen individuals who, doomed to live in a
miserable world, could thus deliver their souls from slavery.
For Seneca's belief in the theory of degeneration and the hopeless
corruption of the race is uncompromising. Human life on the earth is
periodically destroyed, alternately by fire and flood; and each period
begins with a golden age in which men live in rude simplicity,
innocent because they are ignorant not because they are wise. When they
degenerate from this state, arts and inventions promote deterioration by
ministering to luxury and vice.
Interesting, then, as Seneca's observations on the prospect of some
future scientific discoveries are, and they are unique in ancient
literature, [Footnote: They are general and definite. This distinguishes
them, for instance, from Plato's incidental hint in the Republic as to
the prospect of the future development of solid geometry.] they were
far from adumbrating a doctrine of the Progress of man. For him, as for
Plato and the older philosophers, time is the enemy of man. [Footnote:
The quotations and the references here will be found in Nat. Quaest. i.
Praef.; Epist. 104, Sec. 16 (cp. 110, Sec. 8; 117, Sec. 20, and the fine
passage in 65, Sec. 16-21); Nat. Quaest. iii. 28-30; and finally Epist.
90, Sec. 45, cp. Sec. 17. This last letter is a criticism on Posidonius,
who asserted that the arts invented in primitive times were due to
philosophers. Seneca repudiates this view: omnia enim ista sagacitas
hominum, non sapientia inuenit.
Seneca touches on the possibility of the discovery of new lands beyond
the ocean in a passage in his Medea (374 sqq.) which has been often
quoted:
uenient annis
secula seris, quibus oceanus
uincula rerum laxet et ingens
pateat tellus Tiphysque novos
detegat orbes,...
nec sit terris ultima Thule.]
4.
There was however a school of philosophical speculation, which might
have led to the foundation of a theory of Progress, if the historical
outlook of the Greeks had been larger and if their temper had been
different. The Atomic theory of Democritus seems to us now, in many
ways, the most wonderful achievement of Greek thought, but it had a
small range of influence in Greece, and would have had less if it had
not convinced the brilliant mind of Epicurus. The Epicureans developed
it, and it may be that the views which they put forward as to the
history of the human race are mainly their own superstructure. These
philosophers rejected entirely the doctrine of a Golden Age and a
subsequent degeneration, which was manifestly incompatible with their
theory that the world was mechanically formed from atoms without
the intervention of a Deity. For them, the earliest condition of men
resembled that of the beasts, and from this primitive and miserable
condition they laboriously reached the existing state of civilisation,
not by external guidance or as a consequence of some initial design, but
simply by the exercise of human intelligence throughout a long
period. [Footnote: Lucretius v. 1448 sqq. (where the word PROGRESS is
pronounced):
Usus et impigrae simul experientia mentis
Paulatim docuit pedetemtim progredientis.
Sic unum quicquid paulatim protrahit aetas
In medium ratioque in luminis erigit oras.
Namque alid ex alio clarescere et ordine debet
Artibus, ad summum donee uenere cacumen.]
The gradual amelioration of their existence was marked by the discovery
of fire and the use of metals, the invention of language, the invention
of weaving, the growth of arts and industries, navigation, the
development of family life, the establishment of social order by means
of kings, magistrates, laws, the foundation of cities. The last great
step in the amelioration of life, according to Lucretius, was the
illuminating philosophy of Epicurus, who dispelled the fear of invisible
powers and guided man from intellectual darkness to light.
But Lucretius and the school to which he belonged did not look forward
to a steady and continuous process of further amelioration in the
future. They believed that a time would come when the universe would
fall into ruins, [Footnote: Ib. 95.] but the intervening period did not
interest them. Like many other philosophers, they thought that their
own philosophy was the final word on the universe, and they did not
contemplate the possibility that important advances in knowledge might
be achieved by subsequent generations. And, in any case, their scope was
entirely individualistic; all their speculations were subsidiary to the
aim of rendering the life of the individual as tolerable as possible
here and now. Their philosophy, like Stoicism, was a philosophy of
resignation; it was thoroughly pessimistic and therefore incompatible
with the idea of Progress. Lucretius himself allows an underlying
feeling of scepticism as to the value of civilisation occasionally
to escape. [Footnote: His eadem sunt omnia semper (iii. 945) is the
constant refrain of Marcus Aurelius.]
Indeed, it might be said that in the mentality of the ancient Greeks
there was a strain which would have rendered them indisposed to take
such an idea seriously, if it had been propounded. No period of their
history could be described as an age of optimism. They were never, by
their achievements in art or literature, in mathematics or philosophy,
exalted into self-complacency or lured into setting high hopes on
human capacity. Man has resourcefulness to meet everything--[words in
Greek],--they did not go further than that.
This instinctive pessimism of the Greeks had a religious tinge which
perhaps even the Epicureans found it hard entirely to expunge. They
always felt that they were in the presence of unknown incalculable
powers, and that subtle dangers lurked in human achievements and gains.
Horace has taken this feeling as the motif of a criticism on man's
inventive powers. A voyage of Virgil suggests the reflection that his
friend's life would not be exposed to hazards on the high seas if the
art of navigation had never been discovered--if man had submissively
respected the limits imposed by nature. But man is audacious:
Nequiquam deus abscidit
Prudens oceano dissociabili Terras.
In vain a wise god sever'd lands
By the dissociating sea.
Daedalus violated the air, as Hercules invaded hell. The discovery
of fire put us in possession of a forbidden secret. Is this unnatural
conquest of nature safe or wise? Nil mortalibus ardui est:
Man finds no feat too hard or high;
Heaven is not safe from man's desire.
Our rash designs move Jove to ire,
He dares not lay his thunder by.
The thought of this ode [Footnote: i. 3.] roughly expresses what would
have been the instinctive sense of thoughtful Greeks if the idea of
Progress had been presented to them. It would have struck them as
audacious, the theory of men unduly elated and perilously at ease in the
presence of unknown incalculable powers.
This feeling or attitude was connected with the idea of Moira. If we
were to name any single idea as generally controlling or pervading Greek
thought from Homer to the Stoics, [Footnote: The Stoics identified
Moira with Pronoia, in accordance with their theory that the universe is
permeated by thought.] it would perhaps be Moira, for which we have no
equivalent. The common rendering "fate" is misleading. Moira meant a
fixed order in the universe; but as a fact to which men must bow, it had
enough in common with fatality to demand a philosophy of resignation and
to hinder the creation of an optimistic atmosphere of hope. It was this
order which kept things in their places, assigned to each its proper
sphere and function, and drew a definite line, for instance, between
men and gods. Human progress towards perfection--towards an ideal of
omniscience, or an ideal of happiness, would have been a breaking down
of the bars which divide the human from the divine. Human nature does
not alter; it is fixed by Moira.
5.
We can see now how it was that speculative Greek minds never hit on
the idea of Progress. In the first place, their limited historical
experience did not easily suggest such a synthesis; and in the second
place, the axioms of their thought, their suspiciousness of change,
their theories of Moira, of degeneration and cycles, suggested a view
of the world which was the very antithesis of progressive development.
Epicurean, philosophers made indeed what might have been an important
step in the direction of the doctrine of Progress, by discarding the
theory of degeneration, and recognising that civilisation had been
created by a series of successive improvements achieved by the effort of
man alone. But here they stopped short. For they had their eyes fixed on
the lot of the individual here and now, and their study of the history
of humanity was strictly subordinate to this personal interest. The
value of their recognition of human progress in the past is conditioned
by the general tenor and purpose of their theory of life. It was simply
one item in their demonstration that man owed nothing to supernatural
intervention and had nothing to fear from supernatural powers. It is
however no accident that the school of thought which struck on a path
that might have led to the idea of Progress was the most uncompromising
enemy of superstition that Greece produced.
It might be thought that the establishment of Roman rule and order in a
large part of the known world, and the civilising of barbarian peoples,
could not fail to have opened to the imagination of some of those who
reflected on it in the days of Virgil or of Seneca, a vista into the
future. But there was no change in the conditions of life likely to
suggest a brighter view of human existence. With the loss of freedom
pessimism increased, and the Greek philosophies of resignation were
needed more than ever. Those whom they could not satisfy turned their
thoughts to new mystical philosophies and religions, which were little
interested in the earthly destinies of human society.
II
1.
The idea of the universe which prevailed throughout the Middle Ages, and
the general orientation of men's thoughts were incompatible with some of
the fundamental assumptions which are required by the idea of Progress.
According to the Christian theory which was worked out by the Fathers,
and especially by St. Augustine, the whole movement of history has the
purpose of securing the happiness of a small portion of the human race
in another world; it does not postulate a further development of human
history on earth. For Augustine, as for any medieval believer, the
course of history would be satisfactorily complete if the world came
to an end in his own lifetime. He was not interested in the question
whether any gradual amelioration of society or increase of knowledge
would mark the period of time which might still remain to run before the
day of Judgment. In Augustine's system the Christian era introduced the
last period of history, the old age of humanity, which would endure only
so long as to enable the Deity to gather in the predestined number
of saved people. This theory might be combined with the widely-spread
belief in a millennium on earth, but the conception of such a
dispensation does not render it a theory of Progress.
Again, the medieval doctrine apprehends history not as a natural
development but as a series of events ordered by divine intervention and
revelations. If humanity had been left to go its own way it would have
drifted to a highly undesirable port, and all men would have incurred
the fate of everlasting misery from which supernatural interference
rescued the minority. A belief in Providence might indeed, and in a
future age would, be held along with a belief in Progress, in the same
mind; but the fundamental assumptions were incongruous, and so long as
the doctrine of Providence was undisputedly in the ascendant, a doctrine
of Progress could not arise. And the doctrine of Providence, as it was
developed in Augustine's "City of God," controlled the thought of the
Middle Ages.
There was, moreover, the doctrine of original sin, an insuperable
obstacle to the moral amelioration of the race by any gradual process of
development. For since, so long as the human species endures on earth,
every child will be born naturally evil and worthy of punishment,
a moral advance of humanity to perfection is plainly impossible.
[Footnote: It may be added that, as G. Monod observed, "les hommes du
moyen age n'avaient pas conscience des modifications successives que le
temps apporte avec lui dans les choses humaines" (Revue Historique, i.
p. 8).]
2.
But there are certain features in the medieval theory of which we must
not ignore the significance. In the first place, while it maintained
the belief in degeneration, endorsed by Hebrew mythology, it definitely
abandoned the Greek theory of cycles. The history of the earth was
recognised as a unique phenomenon in time; it would never occur again
or anything resembling it. More important than all is the fact that
Christian theology constructed a synthesis which for the first time
attempted to give a definite meaning to the whole course of human
events, a synthesis which represents the past as leading up to a
definite and desirable goal in the future. Once this belief had been
generally adopted and prevailed for centuries men might discard it along
with the doctrine of Providence on which it rested, but they could not
be content to return again to such views as satisfied the ancients,
for whom human history, apprehended as a whole, was a tale of little
meaning. [Footnote: It may be observed that Augustine (De Civ. Dei, x.
14) compares the teaching (recta eruditio) of the people of God, in
the gradual process of history, to the education of an individual.
Prudentius has a similar comparison for a different purpose (c.
Symmachum, ii. 315 sqq.):
Tardis semper processibus aucta Crescit vita hominis et longo proficit
usu. Sic aevi mortalis habet se mobilis ordo, Sic variat natura vices,
infantia repit, etc.
Floras (Epitome, ad init.) had already divided Roman history into four
periods corresponding to infancy, adolescence, manhood, and old age.]
They must seek for some new synthesis to replace it.
Another feature of the medieval theory, pertinent to our inquiry, was an
idea which Christianity took over from Greek and Roman thinkers. In
the later period of Greek history, which began with the conquests of
Alexander the Great, there had emerged the conception of the whole
inhabited world as a unity and totality, the idea of the whole human
race as one. We may conveniently call it the ecumenical idea--the
principle of the ecumene or inhabited world, as opposed to the principle
of the polis or city. Promoted by the vast extension of the geographical
limits of the Greek world resulting from Alexander's conquests, and by
his policy of breaking down the barriers between Greek and barbarian,
the idea was reflected in the Stoic doctrine that all men are brothers,
and that a man's true country is not his own particular city, but the
ecumene. [Footnote: Plutarch long ago saw the connection between the
policy of Alexander and the cosmopolitan teaching of Zeno. De Alexandri
Magni virtute, i. Sec. 6.] It soon became familiar, popularised by the
most popular of the later philosophies of Greece; and just as it had
been implied in the imperial aspiration and polity of Alexander, so it
was implied, still more clearly, in the imperial theory of Rome. The
idea of the Roman Empire, its theoretical justification, might
be described as the realisation of the unity of the world by the
establishment of a common order, the unification of mankind in a single
world-embracing political organism. The term "world," orbis (terrarum),
which imperial poets use freely in speaking of the Empire, is more than
a mere poetical or patriotic exaggeration; it expresses the idea, the
unrealised ideal of the Empire. There is a stone from Halicarnassus in
the British Museum, on which the idea is formally expressed from another
point of view. The inscription is of the time of Augustus, and the
Emperor is designated as "saviour of the community of mankind." There we
have the notion of the human race apprehended as a whole, the ecumenical
idea, imposing upon Rome the task described by Virgil as regere
imperio populos, and more humanely by Pliny as the creation of a single
fatherland for all the peoples of the world. [Footnote: Pliny, Nat.
Hist. iii. 6. 39.]
This idea, which in the Roman Empire and in the Middle Ages took the
form of a universal State and a universal Church, passed afterwards
into the conception of the intercohesion of peoples as contributors to
a common pool of civilisation--a principle which, when the idea of
Progress at last made its appearance in the world, was to be one of the
elements in its growth.
3.
One remarkable man, the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, [Footnote: c. A.D.
1210-92. Of Bacon's Opus Majus the best and only complete edition is
that of J. H. Bridges, 2 vols. 1897 (with an excellent Introduction).
The associated works, Opus Minus and Opus Tertium, have been edited by
Brewer, Fr. Rogeri Bacon Opera Inedita, 1859.]who stands on an
isolated pinnacle of his own in the Middle Ages, deserves particular
consideration. It has been claimed for him that he announced the idea of
Progress; he has even been compared to Condorcet or Comte. Such claims
are based on passages taken out of their context and indulgently
interpreted in the light of later theories. They are not borne out by an
examination of his general conception of the universe and the aim of his
writings.
His aim was to reform higher education and introduce into the
universities a wide, liberal, and scientific programme of secular
studies. His chief work, the "Opus Majus," was written for this purpose,
to which his exposition of his own discoveries was subordinate. It was
addressed and sent to Pope Clement IV., who had asked Bacon to give him
an account of his researches, and was designed to persuade the Pontiff
of the utility of science from an ecclesiastical point of view, and
to induce him to sanction an intellectual reform, which without the
approbation of the Church would at that time have been impossible. With
great ingenuity and resourcefulness he sought to show that the
studies to which he was devoted--mathematics, astronomy, physics,
chemistry--were indispensable to an intelligent study of theology and
Scripture. Though some of his arguments may have been urged simply to
capture the Pope's good-will, there can be no question that Bacon
was absolutely sincere in his view that theology was the mistress
(dominatrix) of the sciences and that their supreme value lay in being
necessary to it.
It was, indeed, on this principle of the close interconnection of
all branches of knowledge that Bacon based his plea and his scheme of
reform. And the idea of the "solidarity" of the sciences, in which
he anticipated a later age, is one of his two chief claims to be
remembered. [Footnote: Cp. Opus Tertium, c. iv. p. 18, omnes scientiae
sunt connexae et mutuis se fovent auxiliis sicut partes ejusdem totius,
quarum quaelibet opus suum peragit non solum propter se sed pro aliis.]
It is the motif of the Opus Majus, and it would have been more fully
elaborated if he had lived to complete the encyclopaedic work, Scriptum
Principale, which he had only begun before his death. His other title
to fame is well-known. He realised, as no man had done before him, the
importance of the experimental method in investigating the secrets of
nature, and was an almost solitary pioneer in the paths to which his
greater namesake, more than three hundred years later, was to invite the
attention of the world.
But, although Roger Bacon was inspired by these enlightened ideas,
although he cast off many of the prejudices of his time and boldly
revolted against the tyranny of the prevailing scholastic philosophy,
he was nevertheless in other respects a child of his age and could not
disencumber himself of the current medieval conception of the universe.
His general view of the course of human history was not materially
different from that of St. Augustine. When he says that the practical
object of all knowledge is to assure the safety of the human race, he
explains this to mean "things which lead to felicity in the next life."
[Footnote: Opus Majus, vii. p. 366.]
It is pertinent to observe that he not only shared in the belief in
astrology, which was then universal, but considered it one of the most
important parts of "mathematics." It was looked upon with disfavour by
the Church as a dangerous study; Bacon defended its use in the
interests of the Church itself. He maintained, like Thomas Aquinas,
the physiological influence of the celestial bodies, and regarded the
planets as signs telling us what God has decreed from eternity to come
to pass either by natural processes or by acts of human will or directly
at his own good pleasure. Deluges, plagues, and earthquakes were capable
of being predicted; political and religious revolutions were set in the
starry rubric. The existence of six principal religions was determined
by the combinations of Jupiter with the other six planets. Bacon
seriously expected the extinction of the Mohammedan religion before the
end of the thirteenth century, on the ground of a prediction by an Arab
astrologer. [Footnote: Ib. iv. p. 266; vii. p. 389.]
One of the greatest advantages that the study of astrological lore
will bring to humanity is that by its means the date of the coming of
Anti-Christ may be fixed with certainty, and the Church may be prepared
to face the perils and trials of that terrible time. Now the arrival
of Anti-Christ meant the end of the world, and Bacon accepted the view,
which he says was held by all wise men, that "we are not far from the
times of Anti-Christ." Thus the intellectual reforms which he urged
would have the effect, and no more, of preparing Christendom to resist
more successfully the corruption in which the rule of Anti-Christ would
involve the world. "Truth will prevail," by which he meant science
will make advances, "though with difficulty, until Anti-Christ and his
forerunners appear;" and on his own showing the interval would probably
be short.
The frequency with which Bacon recurs to this subject, and the emphasis
he lays on it, show that the appearance of Anti-Christ was a fixed
point in his mental horizon. When he looked forward into the future,
the vision which confronted him was a scene of corruption, tyranny, and
struggle under the reign of a barbarous enemy of Christendom; and after
that, the end of the world. [Footnote: (1) His coming may be fixed by
astrology: Opus Majus, iv. p. 269 (inveniretur sufficiens suspicio vel
magis certitudo de tempore Antichristi; cp. p. 402). (2) His coming
means the end of the world: ib. p. 262. (3) We are not far from it: ib.
p. 402. One of the reasons which seem to have made this view probable to
Bacon was the irruption of the Mongols into Europe during his lifetime;
cp. p. 268 and vii. p. 234. Another was the prevalent corruption,
especially of the clergy, which impressed him deeply; see Compendium
studii philosophiae, ed. Brewer, p. 402. (4) "Truth will prevail," etc.:
Opus Majus, i. pp. 19, 20. He claimed for experimental science that
it would produce inventions which could be usefully employed against
Antichrist: ib. vii. p. 221.] It is from this point of view that we
must appreciate the observations which he made on the advancement of
knowledge. "It is our duty," he says, "to supply what the ancients have
left incomplete, because we have entered into their labours, which,
unless we are asses, can stimulate us to achieve better results";
Aristotle corrected the errors of earlier thinkers; Avicenna and
Averroes have corrected Aristotle in some matters and have added much
that is new; and so it will go on till the end of the world. And Bacon
quotes passages from Seneca's "Physical Inquiries" to show that the
acquisition of knowledge is gradual. Attention has been already called
to those passages, and it was shown how perverse it is, on the strength
of such remarks, to claim Seneca as a teacher of the doctrine
of Progress. The same claim has been made for Bacon with greater
confidence, and it is no less perverse. The idea of Progress is
glaringly incongruous with his vision of the world. If his programme of
revolutionising secular learning had been accepted--it fell completely
dead, and his work was forgotten for many ages,--he would have been the
author of a progressive reform; but how many reformers have there been
before and after Bacon on whose minds the idea of Progress never dawned?
[Footnote: Bacon quotes Seneca: See Opus Majus, i. pp. 37, 55, 14.
Much has been made out of a well-known passage in his short Epistle de
secretis operibus artis et naturae et de militate magiae, c. iv. (ed.
Brewer, p. 533), in which he is said to PREDICT inventions which have
been realised in the locomotives, steam navigation, and aeroplanes of
modern times. But Bacon predicts nothing. He is showing that science can
invent curious and, to the vulgar, incredible things without the aid of
magic. All the inventions which he enumerates have, he declares, been
actually made in ancient times, with the exception of a flying-machine
(instrumentum volandi quod non vidi nec hominem qui vidisset cognovi,
sed sapientem qui hoc artificium excogitavit explere cognosco).
Compare the remarks of S. Vogl, Die Physik Roger Bacos (1906), 98 sqq.]
4.
Thus Friar Bacon's theories of scientific reform, so far from amounting
to an anticipation of the idea of Progress, illustrate how impossible it
was that this idea could appear in the Middle Ages. The whole spirit
of medieval Christianity excluded it. The conceptions which were
entertained of the working of divine Providence, the belief that the
world, surprised like a sleeping household by a thief in the night,
might at any moment come to a sudden end, had the same effect as the
Greek theories of the nature of change and of recurring cycles of the
world. Or rather, they had a more powerful effect, because they were
not reasoned conclusions, but dogmas guaranteed by divine authority. And
medieval pessimism as to man's mundane condition was darker and sterner
than the pessimism of the Greeks. There was the prospect of happiness in
another sphere to compensate, but this, engrossing the imagination, only
rendered it less likely that any one should think of speculating about
man's destinies on earth.
III
1.
The civilised countries of Europe spent about three hundred years in
passing from the mental atmosphere of the Middle Ages into the mental
atmosphere of the modern world. These centuries were one of the
conspicuously progressive periods in history, but the conditions were
not favourable to the appearance of an idea of Progress, though the
intellectual milieu was being prepared in which that idea could be born.
This progressive period, which is conveniently called the Renaissance,
lasted from the fourteenth into the seventeenth century. The great
results, significant for our present purpose, which the human mind
achieved at this stage of its development were two. Self-confidence
was restored to human reason, and life on this planet was recognised as
possessing a value independent of any hopes or fears connected with a
life beyond the grave.
But in discarding medieval naivete and superstition, in assuming a
freer attitude towards theological authority, and in developing a new
conception of the value of individual personality, men looked to the
guidance of Greek and Roman thinkers, and called up the spirit of the
ancient world to exorcise the ghosts of the dark ages. Their minds were
thus directed backwards to a past civilisation which, in the ardour of
new discovery, and in the reaction against medievalism, they enthroned
as ideal; and a new authority was set up, the authority of ancient
writers. In general speculation the men of the Renaissance followed
the tendencies and adopted many of the prejudices of Greek philosophy.
Although some great discoveries, with far-reaching, revolutionary
consequences, were made in this period, most active minds were engaged
in rediscovering, elaborating, criticising, and imitating what was old.
It was not till the closing years of the Renaissance that speculation
began to seek and feel its way towards new points of departure. It
was not till then that a serious reaction set in against the deeper
influences of medieval thought.
2.
To illustrate the limitations of this period let us take Machiavelli,
one of the most original thinkers that Italy ever produced.
There are certain fundamental principles underlying Machiavelli's
science of politics, which he has indicated incidentally in his
unsystematic way, but which are essential to the comprehension of his
doctrines. The first is that at all times the world of human beings has
been the same, varying indeed from land to land, but always presenting
the same aspect of some societies advancing towards prosperity, and
others declining. Those which are on the upward grade will always reach
a point beyond which they cannot rise further, but they will not remain
permanently on this level, they will begin to decline; for human things
are always in motion and therefore must go up or down. Similarly,
declining states will ultimately touch bottom and then begin to ascend.
Thus a good constitution or social organisation can last only for a
short time. [Footnote: Machiavelli's principle of advance and decline:
Discorsi, ii. Introduction; Istorie fiorentine, v. ad init. For the
cycle of constitutions through which all states tend to move see
Discorsi, ii. 2 (here we see the influence of Polybius).]
It is obvious that in this view of history Machiavelli was inspired and
instructed by the ancients. And it followed from his premisses that the
study of the past is of the highest value because it enables men to
see what is to come; since to all social events at any period there are
correspondences in ancient times. "For these events are due to men, who
have and always had the same passions, and therefore of necessity the
effects must be the same." [Footnote: Discorsi, iii. 43.]
Again, Machiavelli follows his ancient masters in assuming as evident
that a good organisation of society can be effected only by the
deliberate design of a wise legislator. [Footnote: Ib. iii. 1. The
lawgiver must assume for his purposes that all men are bad: ib. i. 3.
Villari has useful remarks on these principles in his Machiavelli,
Book ii. cap. iii.] Forms of government and religions are the personal
creations of a single brain; and the only chance for a satisfactory
constitution or for a religion to maintain itself for any length of
time is constantly to repress any tendencies to depart from the original
conceptions of its creator.
It is evident that these two assumptions are logically connected. The
lawgiver builds on the immutability of human nature; what is good for
one generation must be good for another. For Machiavelli, as for Plato,
change meant corruption. Thus his fundamental theory excluded any
conception of a satisfactory social order gradually emerging by the
impersonal work of successive generations, adapting their institutions
to their own changing needs and aspirations. It is characteristic, and
another point of resemblance with ancient thinkers that he sought the
ideal state in the past--republican Rome.
These doctrines, the sameness of human nature and the omnipotent
lawgiver, left no room for anything resembling a theory of Progress.
If not held afterwards in the uncompromising form in which Machiavelli
presented them, yet it has well been pointed out that they lay at the
root of some of the most famous speculations of the eighteenth century.
[Footnote: Villari, loc. cit.]
Machiavelli's sameness of human nature meant that man would always have
the same passions and desires, weaknesses and vices. This assumption was
compatible with the widely prevailing view that man had degenerated in
the course of the last fifteen hundred years. From the exaltation of
Greek and Roman antiquity to a position of unattainable superiority,
especially in the field of knowledge, the degeneration of humanity was
an easy and natural inference. If the Greeks in philosophy and
science were authoritative guides, if in art and literature they were
unapproachable, if the Roman republic, as Machiavelli thought, was an
ideal state, it would seem that the powers of Nature had declined, and
she could no longer produce the same quality of brain. So long as this
paralysing theory prevailed, it is manifest that the idea of Progress
could not appear.
But in the course of the sixteenth century men began here and there,
somewhat timidly and tentatively, to rebel against the tyranny of
antiquity, or rather to prepare the way for the open rebellion which was
to break out in the seventeenth. Breaches were made in the proud citadel
of ancient learning. Copernicus undermined the authority of Ptolemy
and his predecessors; the anatomical researches of Vesalius injured the
prestige of Galen; and Aristotle was attacked on many sides by men like
Telesio, Cardan, Ramus, and Bruno. [Footnote: It has been observed that
the thinkers who were rebelling against the authority of Aristotle--the
most dangerous of the ancient philosophers, because he was so closely
associated with theological scholasticism and was supported by the
Church--frequently attacked under the standard of some other ancient
master; e.g. Telesio resorted to Parmenides, Justus Lipsius to
the Stoics, and Bruno is under the influence of Plotinus and Plato
(Bouillier, La Philosophie cartesienne, vol. i. p. 5). The idea of
"development" in Bruno has been studied by Mariupolsky (Zur Geschichte
des Entwicklungsbegriffs in Berner Studien, Bd. vi. 1897), who pointed
out the influence of Stoicism on his thought.] In particular branches of
science an innovation was beginning which heralded a radical revolution
in the study of natural phenomena, though the general significance of
the prospect which these researches opened was but vaguely understood at
the time. The thinkers and men of science were living in an intellectual
twilight. It was the twilight of dawn. At one extremity we have
mysticism which culminated in the speculations of Bruno and Campanella;
at the other we have the scepticism of Montaigne, Charron, and Sanchez.
The bewildered condition of knowledge is indicated by the fact that
while Bruno and Campanella accepted the Copernican astronomy, it was
rejected by one who in many other respects may claim to be reckoned as a
modern--I mean Francis Bacon.
But the growing tendency to challenge the authority of the ancients does
not sever this period from the spirit which informed the Renaissance.
For it is subordinate or incidental to a more general and important
interest. To rehabilitate the natural man, to claim that he should be
the pilot of his own course, to assert his freedom in the fields of art
and literature had been the work of the early Renaissance. It was the
problem of the later Renaissance to complete this emancipation in the
sphere of philosophical thought. The bold metaphysics of Bruno, for
which he atoned by a fiery death, offered the solution which was most
unorthodox and complete. His deification of nature and of man as part of
nature involved the liberation of humanity from external authority. But
other speculative minds of the age, though less audacious, were equally
inspired by the idea of freely interrogating nature, and were all
engaged in accomplishing the programme of the Renaissance--the
vindication of this world as possessing a value for man independent of
its relations to any supermundane sphere. The raptures of Giordano Bruno
and the sobrieties of Francis Bacon are here on common ground. The whole
movement was a necessary prelude to a new age of which science was to be
the mistress.
It is to be noted that there was a general feeling of complacency as to
the condition of learning and intellectual pursuits. This optimism is
expressed by Rabelais. Gargantua, in a letter to Pantagruel, studying
at Paris, enlarges to his son on the vast improvements in learning and
education which had recently, he says, been brought about. "All the
world is full of savants, learned teachers, large libraries; and I am of
opinion that neither in the time of Plato nor of Cicero nor of Papinian
were there such facilities for study as one sees now." It is indeed the
study of the ancient languages and literatures that Gargantua considers
in a liberal education, but the satisfaction at the present diffusion of
learning, with the suggestion that here at least contemporaries have
an advantage over the ancients, is the significant point. [Footnote:
Rabelais, Book ii. chap. 8.] This satisfaction shines through the
observation of Ramus that "in one century we have seen a greater
progress in men and works of learning than our ancestors had seen in the
whole course of the previous fourteen centuries." [Footnote: Praefat.
Scholarum Mathematicarum, maiorem doctorum hominum et operum proventum
seculo uno vidimus quam totis antea 14 seculis maiores nostri viderent.
(Ed. Basel, 1569.)] [Footnote 1. Guillaume Postel observed in his
De magistratibus Atheniensium liber (1541) that the ages are always
progressing (secula semper proficere), and every day additions are made
to human knowledge, and that this process would only cease if Providence
by war, or plague, or some catastrophe were to destroy all the
accumulated stores of knowledge which have been transmitted from
antiquity in books (Praef., B verso). What is known of the life of this
almost forgotten scholar has been collected by G. Weill (De Gulielmi
Postelli vita et indole, 1892). He visited the East, brought back
oriental MSS., and was more than once imprisoned on charges of heresy.
He dreamed of converting the Mohammedans, and of uniting the whole world
under the empire of France.]
In this last stage of the Renaissance, which includes the first quarter
of the seventeenth century, soil was being prepared in which the idea of
Progress could germinate, and our history of it origin definitely begins
with the work of two men who belong to this age, Bodin, who is hardly
known except to special students of political science, and Bacon, who
is known to all the world. Both had a more general grasp of the
significance of their own time than any of their contemporaries, and
though neither of them discovered a theory of Progress, they both made
contributions to thought which directly contributed to its subsequent
appearance.
CHAPTER I. SOME INTERPRETATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY: BODIN AND LE ROY
1.
It is a long descent from the genius of Machiavelli to the French
historian, Jean Bodin, who published his introduction to historical
studies [Footnote: Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem, 1566.]
about forty years after Machiavelli's death. His views and his method
differ widely from those of that great pioneer, whom he attacks. His
readers were not arrested by startling novelties or immoral doctrine; he
is safe, and dull.
But Bodin had a much wider range of thought than Machiavelli, whose mind
was entirely concentrated on the theory of politics; and his importance
for us lies not in the political speculations by which he sought to
prove that monarchy is the best form of government [Footnote: Les six
livres de la Republique, 1576.], but in his attempt to substitute a new
theory of universal history for that which prevailed in the Middle Ages.
He rejected the popular conception of a golden age and a subsequent
degeneration of mankind; and he refuted the view, generally current
among medieval theologians, and based on the prophecies of Daniel, which
divided the course of history into four periods corresponding to the
Babylonian Persian, Macedonian, and Roman monarchies, the last of which
was to endure till the day of Judgement. Bodin suggests a division into
three great periods: the first, of about two thousand years, in which
the South-Eastern peoples were predominant; the second, of the same
duration, in which those whom he calls the Middle (Mediterranean)
peoples came to the front; the third, in which the Northern nations
who overthrew Rome became the leaders in civilisation. Each period is
stamped by the psychological character of the three racial groups. The
note of the first is religion, of the second practical sagacity, of the
third warfare and inventive skill. This division actually anticipates
the synthesis of Hegel. [Footnote: Hegel's division is (1) the Oriental,
(2) a, the Greek, b, the Roman, and (3) the Germanic worlds.] But the
interesting point is that it is based on anthropological considerations,
in which climate and geography are taken into account; and,
notwithstanding the crudeness of the whole exposition and the intrusion
of astrological arguments, it is a new step in the study of universal
history. [Footnote: Climates and geography. The fullest discussion
will be found in the Republique, Book v. cap. i. Here Bodin anticipated
Montesquieu. There was indeed nothing new in the principle; it had been
recognised by Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, and other Greeks,
and in a later age by Roger Bacon.
But Bodin first developed and applied it methodically. This part of
his work was ignored, and in the eighteenth century Montesquieu's
speculations on the physical factors in history were applauded as a new
discovery.]
I have said that Bodin rejected the theory of the degeneration of man,
along with the tradition of a previous age of virtue and felicity.
[Footnote: See especially Methodus, cap. v. pp. 124, 130, 136.] The
reason which he alleged against it is important. The powers of nature
have always been uniform. It is illegitimate to suppose that she could
at one time produce the men and conditions postulated by the theory of
the golden age, and not produce them at another. In other words, Bodin
asserts the principle of the permanent and undiminishing capacities
of nature, and, as we shall see in the sequel, this principle was
significant. It is not to be confounded with the doctrine of the
immutability of human things assumed by Machiavelli. The human scene has
vastly changed since the primitive age of man; "if that so-called golden
age could be revoked and compared with our own, we should consider
it iron." [Footnote: Methodus, cap. VII. p. 353.] For history largely
depends on the will of men, which is always changing; every day new
laws, new customs, new institutions, both secular and religious, come
into being, and new errors. [Footnote: Ib. cap. I. p. 12.]
But in this changing scene we can observe a certain regularity, a law of
oscillation. Rise is followed by fall, and fall by rise; it is a mistake
to think that the human race is always deteriorating. [Footnote: Ib.
cap. VII. p. 361: "cum aeterna quadam lege naturae conversio rerum
omnium velut in orbem redire videatur, ut aeque vitia virtutibus,
ignoratio scientiae, turpe honesto consequens sit, atque tenebrae luci,
fallunt qui genus hominum semper deterius seipso evadere putant."] If
that were so, we should long ago have reached the lowest stage of vice
and iniquity. On the contrary, there has been, through the series of
oscillations, a gradual ascent. In the ages which have been foolishly
designated as gold and silver men lived like the wild beasts; and from
that state they have slowly reached the humanity of manners and the
social order which prevail to-day. [Footnote: Ib. p. 356.]
Thus Bodin recognises a general progress in the past. That is nothing
new; it was the view, for instance, of the Epicureans. But much had
passed in the world since the philosophy of Epicurus was alive, and
Bodin had to consider twelve hundred years of new vicissitudes. Could
the Epicurean theory be brought up to date?
2.
Bodin deals with the question almost entirely in respect to human
knowledge. In definitely denying the degeneration of man, Bodin was only
expressing what many thinkers of the sixteenth century had been coming
to feel, though timidly and obscurely. The philosophers and men of
science, who criticised the ancients in special departments, did not
formulate any general view on the privileged position of antiquity.
Bodin was the first to do so.
Knowledge, letters, and arts have their vicissitudes, he says; they
rise, increase, and nourish, and then languish and die. After the decay
of Rome there was a long fallow period; but this was followed by a
splendid revival of knowledge and an intellectual productivity which
no other age has exceeded. The scientific discoveries of the ancients
deserve high praise; but the moderns have not only thrown new light
on phenomena which they had incompletely explained, they have made new
discoveries of equal or indeed greater importance. Take, for instance,
the mariner's compass which has made possible the circumnavigation of
the earth and a universal commerce, whereby the world has been
changed, as it were, into a single state. [Footnote: Cardan had
already signalised the compass, printing, and gunpowder as three modern
inventions, to which "the whole of antiquity has nothing equal to show."
He adds, "I pass over the other inventions of this age which, though
wonderful, form rather a development of ancient arts than surpass the
intellects of our ancestors." De subtilitate, lib. 3 ad init. (Opera,
iii. p. 609).] Take the advances we have made in geography and
astronomy; the invention of gunpowder; the development of the woollen
and other industries. The invention of printing alone can be set against
anything that the ancients achieved. [Footnote: Methodus, cap. VII.,
pp. 359-61. Bodin also points out that there was an improvement, in
some respects, in manners and morals since the early Roman Empire; for
instance, in the abolition of gladiatorial spectacles (p. 359).]
An inference from all this, obvious to a modern reader, would be that
in the future there will be similar oscillations, and new inventions and
discoveries as remarkable as any that have been made in the past. But
Bodin does not draw this inference. He confines himself to the past and
present, and has no word to say about the vicissitudes of the future.
But he is not haunted by any vision of the end of the world, or the
coming of Antichrist; three centuries of humanism lay between him and
Roger Bacon.
3.
And yet the influence of medievalism, which it had been the work of
those three centuries to overcome, was still pervasively there. Still
more the authority of the Greeks and Romans, which had been set up by
the revival of learning, was, without their realising it, heavy even
upon thinkers like Bodin, who did not scruple freely to criticise
ancient authors. And so, in his thoughtful attempt to find a clew to
universal history, he was hampered by theological and cosmic theories,
the legacy of the past. It is significant of the trend of his mind that
when he is discussing the periodic decline of science and letters, he
suggests that it may be due to the direct action of God, punishing those
who misapplied useful sciences to the destruction of men.
But his speculations were particularly compromised by his belief
in astrology, which, notwithstanding the efforts of humanists like
Petrarch, Aeneas Sylvius, and Pico to discredit it, retained its
hold over the minds of many eminent, otherwise emancipated, thinkers
throughout the period of the Renaissance. [Footnote: Bodin was also a
firm believer in sorcery. His La Demonomanie (1578) is a monument of
superstition.] Here Bodin is in the company of Machiavelli and Lord
Bacon. But not content with the doctrine of astral influence on human
events, he sought another key to historical changes in the influence of
numbers, reviving the ideas of Pythagoras and Plato, but working them
out in a way of his own. He enumerates the durations of the lives of
many famous men, to show that they can be expressed by powers of 7 and
9, or the product of these numbers. Other numbers which have special
virtues are the powers of 12, the perfect number [Footnote: I.e. a
number equal to the sum of all its factors.] 496, and various others.
He gives many examples to prove that these mystic numbers determine the
durations of empires and underlie historical chronology. For instance,
the duration of the oriental monarchies from Ninus to the Conquest of
Persia by Alexander the Great was 1728 (= 12 cubed) years. He gives the
Roman republic from the foundation of Rome to the battle of Actium 729
(=9 cubed) years. [Footnote: Methodus, cap. v. pp. 265 sqq.]
4.
From a believer in such a theory, which illustrates the limitations of
men's outlook on the world in the Renaissance period, we could perhaps
hardly expect a vision of Progress. The best that can be said for it
is that, both here and in his astrological creed, Bodin is crudely
attempting to bring human history into close connection with the rest of
the universe, and to establish the view that the whole world is built
on a divine plan by which all the parts are intimately interrelated.
[Footnote: Cp. Baudrillart, J. Bodin et son temps, p. 148 (1853). This
monograph is chiefly devoted to a full analysis of La Republique.] He is
careful, however, to avoid fatalism. He asserts, as we have seen, that
history depends largely on the will of men. And he comes nearer to the
idea of Progress than any one before him; he is on the threshold.
For if we eliminate his astrological and Pythagorean speculations, and
various theological parentheses which do not disturb his argument, his
work announces a new view of history which is optimistic regarding man's
career on earth, without any reference to his destinies in a future
life. And in this optimistic view there are three particular points
to note, which were essential to the subsequent growth of the idea of
Progress. In the first place, the decisive rejection of the theory of
degeneration, which had been a perpetual obstacle to the apprehension
of that idea. Secondly, the unreserved claim that his own age was fully
equal, and in some respects superior, to the age of classical antiquity,
in respect of science and the arts. He leaves the ancients reverently on
their pedestal, but he erects another pedestal for the moderns, and
it is rather higher. We shall see the import of this when we come to
consider the intellectual movement in which the idea of Progress was
afterwards to emerge. In the third place, he had a conception of the
common interest of all the peoples of the earth, a conception which
corresponded to the old ecumenical idea of the Greeks and Romans,
[Footnote: See above, p. 23.] but had now a new significance through the
discoveries of modern navigators. He speaks repeatedly of the world as a
universal state, and suggests that the various races, by their peculiar
aptitudes and qualities, contribute to the common good of the whole.
This idea of the "solidarity" of peoples was to be an important element
in the growth of the doctrine of Progress. [Footnote: Republique, Book
v. cap. 1 (p. 690; ed. 1593); Methodus, cap. vi. p. 194; cap. vii. p.
360.]
These ideas were in the air. Another Frenchman, the classical scholar,
Louis Le Roy, translator of Plato and Aristotle, put forward similar
views in a work of less celebrity, On the Vicissitude or Variety of
the Things in the Universe. [Footnote: De la vicissitude ou variete
des choses en l'univers, 1577, 2nd ed. (which I have used), 1584.] It
contains a survey of great periods in which particular peoples attained
an exceptional state of dominion and prosperity, and it anticipates
later histories of civilisation by dwelling but slightly on political
events and bringing into prominence human achievements in science,
philosophy, and the arts. Beginning with the advance of man from
primitive rudeness to ordered society--a sketch based on the conjectures
of Plato in the Protagoras--Le Roy reviews the history, and estimates
the merits, of the Egyptians, Assyrians and Persians, the Greeks, Romans
and Saracens, and finally of the modern age. The facts, he thinks,
establish the proposition that the art of warfare, eloquence,
philosophy, mathematics, and the fine arts, generally flourish and
decline together.
But they do decline. Human things are not perpetual; all pass through
the same cycle--beginning, progress, perfection, corruption, end. This,
however, does not explain the succession of empires in the world, the
changes of the scene of prosperity from one people or set of peoples
to another. Le Roy finds the cause in providential design. God, he
believes, cares for all parts of the universe and has distributed
excellence in arms and letters now to Asia, now to Europe, again to
Africa, letting virtue and vice, knowledge and ignorance travel from
country to country, that all in their turn may share in good and bad
fortune, and none become too proud through prolonged prosperity.
But what of the modern age in Western Europe? It is fully the equal, he
assevers, of the most illustrious ages of the past, and in some respects
it is superior. Almost all the liberal and mechanical arts of antiquity,
which had been lost for about 1200 years, have been restored, and
there have been new inventions, especially printing, and the mariner's
compass, and "I would give the third place to gunnery but that it seems
invented rather for the ruin than for the utility of the human race." In
our knowledge of astronomy and cosmography we surpass the ancients. "We
can affirm that the whole world is now known, and all the races of men;
they can interchange all their commodities and mutually supply their
needs, as inhabitants of the same city or world-state." And hence there
has been a notable increase of wealth.
Vice and suffering, indeed, are as grave as ever, and we are afflicted
by the trouble of heresies; but this does not prove a general
deterioration of morals. If that inveterate complaint, the refrain
chanted by old men in every age, were true, the world would already
have reached the extreme limit of wickedness, and integrity would have
disappeared utterly. Seneca long ago made the right criticism. Hoc
maiores nostri questi sunt, hoc nos querimur, hoc posteri nostri
querentur, eversos esse mores.... At ista stant loco eodem. Perhaps
Le Roy was thinking particularly of that curious book the Apology for
Herodotus, in which the eminent Greek scholar, Henri Estienne, exposed
with Calvinistic prejudice the iniquities of modern times and the
corruption of the Roman Church. [Footnote: L'Introduction au traite
de la conformite des merveilles anciennes avec les modernes, ou traite
preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote, ed. Ristelhuber, 2 vols., 1879.
The book was published in 1566.]
But if we are to judge by past experience, does it not follow that this
modern age must go the same way as the great ages of the past which
it rivals or even surpasses? Our civilisation, too, having reached
perfection, will inevitably decline and pass away: is not this the clear
lesson of history? Le Roy does not shirk the issue; it is the point to
which his whole exposition has led and he puts it vividly.
"If the memory of the past is the instruction of the present and the
premonition of the future, it is to be feared that having reached
so great excellence, power, wisdom, studies, books, industries
will decline, as has happened in the past, and disappear--confusion
succeeding to the order and perfection of to-day, rudeness to
civilisation, ignorance to knowledge. I already foresee in imagination
nations, strange in form, complexion, and costume, overwhelming
Europe--like the Goths, Huns, Vandals, Lombards, Saracens of
old--destroying our cities and palaces, burning our libraries,
devastating all that is beautiful. I foresee in all countries wars,
domestic and foreign, factions and heresies which will profane all
things human and divine; famines, plagues, and floods; the universe
approaching an end, world-wide confusion, and the return of things to
their original chaos." [Footnote: It is characteristic of the age that
in the last sentence the author goes beyond the issue and contemplates
the possibility which still haunted men's minds that the end of the
world might not be far off.]
But having conducted us to this pessimistic conclusion Le Roy finds
it repugnant, and is unwilling to acquiesce in it. Like an embarrassed
dramatist he escapes from the knot which he has tied by introducing the
deus ex machina.
"However much these things proceed according to the fatal law of the
world, and have their natural causes, yet events depend principally
on Divine Providence which is superior to nature and alone knows the
predetermined times of events." That is to say, it depends, after all,
on Providence whether the argument from past experience is valid. Who
knows whether the modern age may not prove the exception to the law
which has hitherto prevailed? Let us act as if it would.
This is the practical moral that Le Roy enforces in the last book of his
dissertation. We must not allow ourselves to be paralysed or dismayed by
the destinies of past civilisations, but must work hard to transmit to
posterity all that has been achieved, and augment the discoveries of the
past by new researches. For knowledge is inexhaustible. "Let us not be
so simple as to believe that the ancients have known and said everything
and left nothing to their successors. Or that nature gave them all her
favours in order to remain sterile ever after." Here Le Roy lays
down Bodin's principle which was to be asserted more urgently in the
following century--the permanence of natural forces. Nature is the same
now as always, and can produce as great intellects as ever. The elements
have the same power, the constellations keep their old order, men are
made of the same material. There is nothing to hinder the birth in this
age of men equal in brains to Plato, Aristotle, or Hippocrates.
Philosophically, Le Roy's conclusion is lame enough. We are asked to
set aside the data of experience and act on an off-chance. But the
determination of the optimist to escape from the logic of his own
argument is significant. He has no conception of an increasing
purpose or underlying unity in the history of man, but he thinks that
Providence--the old Providence of St. Augustine, who arranged the events
of Roman history with a view to the coming of Christ--may, for some
unknown reason, prolong indefinitely the modern age. He is obeying
the instinct of optimism and confidence which was already beginning to
create the appropriate atmosphere for the intellectual revolution of the
coming century.
His book was translated into English, but neither in France nor in
England had it the same influence as the speculations of Bodin. But it
insinuated, as the reader will have observed, the same three views which
Bodin taught, and must have helped to propagate them: that the world
has not degenerated; that the modern age is not inferior to classical
antiquity; and that the races of the earth form now a sort of "mundane
republic."
CHAPTER II. UTILITY THE END OF KNOWLEDGE: BACON
1.
Among the great precursors of a new order of thought Francis Bacon
occupies a unique position. He drew up a definite programme for a
"great Renovation" of knowledge; he is more clearly conscious than his
contemporaries of the necessity of breaking with the past and making
a completely new start; and his whole method of thought seems
intellectually nearer to us than the speculations of a Bruno or a
Campanella. Hence it is easy to understand that he is often regarded,
especially in his own country, as more than a precursor, as the first
philosopher, of the modern age, definitely within its precincts.
[Footnote: German critics have been generally severe on Bacon as
deficient in the scientific spirit. Kuno Fischer, Baco van Verulam
(1856). Liebig, Ueber Francis Bacon van Verulam und die Methode der
Naturforschung (1863). Lange (Geschichte des Materialismus, i. 195)
speaks of "die aberglaubische und eitle Unwissenschaftlichkeit Bacos."]
It is not indeed a matter of fundamental importance how we classify
these men who stood on the border of two worlds, but it must
be recognised that if in many respects Bacon is in advance of
contemporaries who cannot be dissociated from the Renaissance, in other
respects, such as belief in astrology and dreams, he stands on the same
ground, and in one essential point--which might almost be taken as
the test of mental progress at this period--Bruno and Campanella have
outstripped him. For him Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo worked in vain;
he obstinately adhered to the old geocentric system.
It must also be remembered that the principle which he laid down in his
ambitious programme for the reform of science--that experiment is the
key for discovering the secrets of nature--was not a new revelation. We
need not dwell on the fact that he had been anticipated by Roger Bacon;
for the ideas of that wonderful thinker had fallen dead in an age
which was not ripe for them. But the direct interrogation of nature
was already recognised both in practice and in theory in the sixteenth
century. What Bacon did was to insist upon the principle more strongly
and explicitly, and to formulate it more precisely. He clarified and
explained the progressive ideas which inspired the scientific thought
of the last period of the European Renaissance, from which he cannot, I
think, be dissociated.
But in clearing up and defining these progressive ideas, he made a
contribution to the development of human thought which had far-reaching
importance and has a special significance for our present subject. In
the hopes of a steady increase of knowledge, based on the application of
new methods, he had been anticipated by Roger Bacon, and further back
by Seneca. But with Francis Bacon this idea of the augmentation of
knowledge has an entirely new value. For Seneca the exploration of
nature was a means of escaping from the sordid miseries of life. For the
friar of Oxford the principal use of increasing knowledge was to prepare
for the coming of Antichrist. Francis Bacon sounded the modern note; for
him the end of knowledge is utility. [Footnote; The passages specially
referred to are: De Aug. Sc. vii. i; Nov. Org. i. 81 and 3.]
2.
The principle that the proper aim of knowledge is the amelioration
of human life, to increase men's happiness and mitigate their
sufferings--commodis humanis inservire--was the guiding star of Bacon
in all his intellectual labour. He declared the advancement of "the
happiness of mankind" to be the direct purpose of the works he had
written or designed. He considered that all his predecessors had gone
wrong because they did not apprehend that the finis scientarum, the real
and legitimate goal of the sciences, is "the endowment of human life
with new inventions and riches"; and he made this the test for defining
the comparative values of the various branches of knowledge.
The true object, therefore, of the investigation of nature is not, as
the Greek philosophers held, speculative satisfaction, but to establish
the reign of man over nature; and this Bacon judged to be attainable,
provided new methods of attacking the problems were introduced. Whatever
may be thought of his daring act in bringing natural science down from
the clouds and assigning to her the function of ministering to the
material convenience and comfort of man, we may criticise Bacon for his
doctrine that every branch of science should be pursued with a single
eye towards practical use. Mathematics, he thought, should conduct
herself as a humble, if necessary, handmaid, without any aspirations
of her own. But it is not thus that the great progress in man's command
over nature since Bacon's age has been effected. Many of the most
valuable and surprising things which science has succeeded in doing for
civilisation would never have been performed if each branch of
knowledge were not guided by its own independent ideal of speculative
completeness. [Footnote: This was to be well explained by Fontenelle,
Preface sur l'utilite des mathematiques, in Oeuvres (ed. 1729), iii,
I sqq.] But this does not invalidate Bacon's pragmatic principle, or
diminish the importance of the fact that in laying down the utilitarian
view of knowledge he contributed to the creation of a new mental
atmosphere in which the theory of Progress was afterwards to develop.
3.
Bacon's respect for the ancients and his familiarity with their writings
are apparent on almost every page he wrote. Yet it was one of his
principal endeavours to shake off the yoke of their authority, which he
recognised to be a fatal obstacle to the advancement of science. "Truth
is not to be sought in the good fortune of any particular conjuncture of
time"; its attainment depends on experience, and how limited was theirs.
In their age "the knowledge both of time and of the world was confined
and meagre; they had not a thousand years of history worthy of that
name, but mere fables and ancient traditions; they were not acquainted
with but a small portion of the regions and countries of the world."
[Footnote: Nov. Org. i. 84; 56, 72, 73, 74.] In all their systems and
scientific speculation "there is hardly one single experiment that has a
tendency to assist mankind." Their theories were founded on opinion,
and therefore science has remained stationary for the last two thousand
years; whereas mechanical arts, which are founded on nature and
experience, grow and increase.
In this connection, Bacon points out that the word "antiquity" is
misleading, and makes a remark which will frequently recur in writers
of the following generations. Antiquitas seculi iuventus mundi; what we
call antiquity and are accustomed to revere as such was the youth of the
world. But it is the old age and increasing years of the world--the
time in which we are now living--that deserves in truth to be called
antiquity. We are really the ancients, the Greeks and Romans were
younger than we, in respect to the age of the world. And as we look to
an old man for greater knowledge of the world than from a young man, so
we have good reason to expect far greater things from our own age than
from antiquity, because in the meantime the stock of knowledge has been
increased by an endless number of observations and experiments. Time
is the great discoverer, and truth is the daughter of time, not of
authority.
Take the three inventions which were unknown to the ancients-printing,
gunpowder, and the compass. These "have changed the appearance and state
of the whole world; first in literature, then in warfare, and lastly in
navigation; and innumerable changes have been thence derived, so that
no empire, sect, or star appears to have exercised a greater power
or influence on human affairs than these mechanical discoveries."
[Footnote: Nov. Org. 129. We have seen that these three inventions had
already been classed together as outstanding by Cardan and Le Roy. They
also appear in Campanella. Bodin, as we saw, included them in a longer
list.] It was perhaps the results of navigation and the exploration of
unknown lands that impressed Bacon more than all, as they had impressed
Bodin. Let me quote one passage.
"It may truly be affirmed to the honour of these times, and in a
virtuous emulation with antiquity, that this great building of the world
had never through-lights made in it till the age of us and our fathers.
For although they [the ancients] had knowledge of the antipodes... yet
that mought be by demonstration, and not in fact; and if by travel, it
requireth the voyage but of half the earth. But to circle the earth, as
the heavenly bodies do, was not done nor enterprised till these later
times: and therefore these times may justly bear in their word... plus
ultra in precedence of the ancient non ultra.... And this proficience in
navigation and discoveries may plant also an expectation of the further
proficience and augmentation of all sciences, because it may seem that
they are ordained by God to be coevals, that is, to meet in one age. For
so the prophet Daniel, speaking of the latter times foretelleth, Plurimi
pertransibunt, et multiplex erit scientia: as if the openness and
through-passage of the world and the increase of knowledge were
appointed to be in the same ages; as we see it is already performed in
great part: the learning of these later times not much giving place to
the former two periods or returns of learning, the one of the Grecians,
the other of the Romans." [Footnote: Advancement of Learning, ii. 13,
14.]
In all this we have a definite recognition of the fact that knowledge
progresses. Bacon did not come into close quarters with the history of
civilisation, but he has thrown out some observations which amount to a
rough synthesis. [Footnote: Advancement, ii. 1, 6; Nov. Org. i. 78,
79, 85.] Like Bodin, he divided, history into three periods--(1) the
antiquities of the world; (2) the middle part of time which comprised
two sections, the Greek and the Roman; (3) "modern history," which
included what we now call the Middle Ages. In this sequence three
particular epochs stand out as fertile in science and favourable to
progress--the Greek, the Roman, and our own--"and scarcely two centuries
can with justice be assigned to each." The other periods of time are
deserts, so far as philosophy and science are concerned. Rome and Greece
are "two exemplar States of the world for arms, learning, moral virtue,
policy, and laws." But even in those two great epochs little progress
was made in natural philosophy. For in Greece moral and political
speculation absorbed men's minds; in Rome, meditation and labour were
wasted on moral philosophy, and the greatest intellects were devoted to
civil affairs. Afterwards, in the third period, the study of theology
was the chief occupation of the Western European nations. It was
actually in the earliest period that the most useful discoveries for
the comfort of human life were made, "so that, to say the truth, when
contemplation and doctrinal science began, the discovery of useful works
ceased."
So much for the past history of mankind, during which many things
conspired to make progress in the subjugation of nature slow, fitful,
and fortuitous. What of the future? Bacon's answer is: if the errors
of the past are understood and avoided there is every hope of steady
progress in the modern age.
But it might be asked. Is there not something in the constitution of
things which determines epochs of stagnation and vigour, some force
against which man's understanding and will are impotent? Is it not
true that in the revolutions of ages there are floods and ebbs of the
sciences, which flourish now and then decline, and that when they have
reached a certain point they can proceed no further? This doctrine of
Returns or ricorsi [Footnote: Bodin's conversiones.] is denounced
by Bacon as the greatest obstacle to the advancement of knowledge,
creating, as it does, diffidence or despair. He does not formally
refute it, but he marshals the reasons for an optimistic view, and these
reasons supply the disproof The facts on which the fatalistic doctrine
of Returns is based can be explained without resorting to any mysterious
law. [Footnote: Nov. Org. i. 92 sqq.] Progress has not been steady or
continuous on account of the prejudices and errors which hindered men
from setting to work in the right way. The difficulties in advancing did
not arise from things which are not in our power; they were due to the
human understanding, which wasted time and labour on improper objects.
"In proportion as the errors which have been committed impeded the past,
so do they afford reason to hope for the future."
4.
But will the new period of advance, which Bacon expected and strove to
secure, be of indefinite duration? He does not consider the question.
His view that he lived in the old age of the world implies that he did
not anticipate a vast tract of time before the end of mankind's career
on earth. And an orthodox Christian of that time could hardly be
expected to predict. The impression we get is that, in his sanguine
enthusiasm, he imagined that a "prudent interrogation" of nature could
extort all her secrets in a few generations. As a reformer he was so
engaged in the immediate prospect of results that his imagination did
not turn to the possibilities of a remoter future, though these would
logically follow from his recognition of "the inseparable propriety of
time which is ever more and more to disclose truth." He hopes everything
from his own age in which learning has made her third visitation to the
world, a period which he is persuaded will far surpass that of Grecian
and Roman learning. [Footnote: Advancement, ii. 24.] If he could have
revisited England in 1700 and surveyed what science had performed since
his death his hopes might have been more than satisfied.
But, animated though he was with the progressive spirit, as Leonardo
da Vinci had been before him, all that he says of the prospects of an
increase of knowledge fails to amount to the theory of Progress. He
prepares the way, he leads up to it; but his conception of his own time
as the old age of humanity excludes the conception of an indefinite
advance in the future, which is essential if the theory is to have
significance and value. And in regard to progress in the past, though he
is clearer and more emphatic than Bodin, he hardly adds anything to what
Bodin had observed. The novelty of his view lies not in his recognition
of the advance of knowledge and its power to advance still further, but
in the purpose which he assigned to it. [Footnote: Campanella held its
purpose to be the contemplation of the wisdom of God; cp., for instance,
De sensu rerum, Bk. iv. epilogus, where the world is described as statua
Dei altissimi (p. 370; ed. 1620).] The end of the sciences is their
usefulness to the human race. To increase knowledge is to extend
the dominion of man over nature, and so to increase his comfort and
happiness, so far as these depend on external circumstances. To Plato
or Seneca, or to a Christian dreaming of the City of God, this doctrine
would seem material and trivial; and its announcement was revolutionary:
for it implied that happiness on earth was an end to be pursued for its
own sake, and to be secured by co-operation for mankind at large. This
idea is an axiom which any general doctrine of Progress must presuppose;
and it forms Bacon's great contribution to the group of ideas which
rendered possible the subsequent rise of that doctrine.
Finally, we must remember that by Bacon, as by most of his Elizabethan
contemporaries, the doctrine of an active intervening Providence, the
Providence of Augustine, was taken as a matter of course, and governed
more or less their conceptions of the history of civilisation. But, I
think, we may say that Bacon, while he formally acknowledged it, did not
press it or emphasise it. [Footnote: See Advancement, iii. II. On
the influence of the doctrine on historical writing in England at the
beginning of the seventeenth century see Firth, Sir Walter Raleigh's
History of the World (Proc. of British Academy, vol. viii., 1919), p.
8.]
5.
Bacon illustrated his view of the social importance of science in his
sketch of an ideal state, the New Atlantis. He completed only a part of
the work, and the fragment was published after his death. [Footnote: In
1627. It was composed about 1623. It seems almost certain that he
was acquainted with the Christianopolis of Johann Valentin Andreae
(1586-1654), which had appeared in Latin in 1614, and contained a plan
for a scientific college to reform the civilised world. Andreae, who was
acquainted both with More and with Campanella, placed his ideal society
in an island which he called Caphar Salama (the name of a village in
Palestine). Andreae's work had also a direct influence on the Nova
Solyma of Samuel Gott (1648). See the Introduction of F. E. Held to his
edition of Christianopolis (1916). In Macaria, another imaginary state
of the seventeenth century (A description of the famous Kingdoms of
Macaria, 1641, by Hartlib), the pursuit of science is not a feature.]
It is evident that the predominating interest that moved his imagination
was different from that which guided Plato. While Plato aimed at
securing a permanent solid order founded on immutable principles,
the design of Bacon was to enable his imaginary community to achieve
dominion over nature by progressive discoveries. The heads of Plato's
city are metaphysicians, who regulate the welfare of the people by
abstract doctrines established once for all; while the most important
feature in the New Atlantis is the college of scientific investigators,
who are always discovering new truths which may alter the conditions of
life. Here, though only in a restricted field, an idea of progressive
improvement, which is the note of the modern age, comes in to modify
the idea of a fixed order which exclusively prevailed in ancient
speculation.
On the other hand, we must not ignore the fact that Bacon's ideal
society is established by the same kind of agency as the ideal societies
of Plato and Aristotle. It has not developed; it was framed by the
wisdom of an original legislator Solamona. In this it resembles
the other imaginary commonwealths of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. The organisation of More's Utopia is fixed initially once for
all by the lawgiver Utopus. The origin of Campanella's Civitas Solis is
not expressly stated, but there can be no doubt that he conceived its
institutions as created by the fiat of a single lawgiver. Harrington,
in his Oceana, argues with Machiavelli that a commonwealth, to be
well turned, must be the work of one man, like a book or a building.
[Footnote: Harrington, Oceana, pp. 77-8, 3rd ed. (1747).]
What measure of liberty Bacon would have granted to the people of his
perfect state we cannot say; his work breaks off before he comes
to describe their condition. But we receive the impression that the
government he conceived was strictly paternal, though perhaps less
rigorous than the theocratic despotism which Campanella, under Plato's
influence, set up in the City of the Sun. But even Campanella has this
in common with More--and we may be sure that Bacon's conception would
have agreed here--that there are no hard-and-fast lines between the
classes, and the welfare and happiness of all the inhabitants is
impartially considered, in contrast with Plato's scheme in the Laws,
where the artisans and manual labourers were an inferior caste existing
less for their own sake than for the sake of the community as a whole.
[Footnote: This however does not apply to the Republic, as is so
commonly asserted. See the just criticisms of A. A. Trever, A History of
Greek Economic Thought (Chicago, 1916), 49 sqq.]
It may finally be pointed out that these three imaginary commonwealths
stand together as a group, marked by a humaner temper than the ancient,
and also by another common characteristic which distinguishes them, on
one hand, from the ideal states of Plato and, on the other, from modern
sketches of desirable societies. Plato and Aristotle conceived their
constructions within the geographical limits of Hellas, either in the
past or in the present. More, Bacon, and Campanella placed theirs in
distant seas, and this remoteness in space helped to create a certain
illusion, of reality. [Footnote: Civitas Solis, p. 461 (ed. 1620).
Expectancy of end of world: Ib. p. 455.] The modern plan is to project
the perfect society into a period of future time. The device of More
and his successors was suggested by the maritime explorations of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the later method was a result of the
rise of the idea of Progress. [Footnote: Similarly the ideal communistic
states imagined by Euemerus and Iambulus in the southern seas owed
their geographical positions to the popular interest in seafaring in the
Indian Ocean in the age after Alexander. One wonders whether Campanella
knew the account of the fictitious journey of Iambulus to the Islands of
the Sun, in Diodorus Siculus, ii. 55-60.]
6.
A word or two more may be said about the City of the Sun. Campanella was
as earnest a believer in the interrogation of nature as Bacon, and the
place which science and learning hold in his state (although research is
not so prominent as in the New Atlantis), and the scientific training of
all the citizens, are a capital feature. The progress in inventions, to
which science may look forward, is suggested. The men of the City of
the Sun "have already discovered the one art which the world seemed
to lack--the art of flying; and they expect soon to invent ocular
instruments which will enable them to see the invisible stars and
auricular instruments for hearing the harmony of the spheres."
Campanella's view of the present conditions and prospects of knowledge
is hardly less sanguine than that of Bacon, and characteristically he
confirms his optimism by astrological data. "If you only knew what their
astrologers say about the coming age. Our times, they assert, have more
history in a hundred years than the whole world in four thousand. More
books have been published in this century than in five thousand
years before. They dwell on the wonderful inventions of printing, of
artillery, and of the use of the magnet,--clear signs of the times--and
also instruments for the assembling of the inhabitants of the world into
one fold," and show that these discoveries were conditioned by stellar
influences.
But Campanella is not very sure or clear about the future. Astrology
and theology cause him to hesitate. Like Bacon, he dreams of a great
Renovation and sees that the conditions are propitious, but his faith is
not secure. The astronomers of his imaginary state scrutinise the stars
to discover whether the world will perish or not, and they believe in
the oracular saying of Jesus that the end will come like a thief in the
night. Therefore they expect a new age, and perhaps also the end of the
world.
The new age of knowledge was about to begin. Campanella, Bruno, and
Bacon stand, as it were, on the brink of the dividing stream, tenduntque
manus ripae ulterioris amore.
CHAPTER III. CARTESIANISM
If we are to draw any useful lines of demarcation in the continuous flux
of history we must neglect anticipations and announcements, and we need
not scruple to say that, in the realm of knowledge and thought, modern
history begins in the seventeenth century. Ubiquitous rebellion against
tradition, a new standard of clear and precise thought which affects
even literary expression, a flow of mathematical and physical
discoveries so rapid that ten years added more to the sum of knowledge
than all that had been added since the days of Archimedes, the
introduction of organised co-operation to increase knowledge by the
institution of the Royal Society at London, the Academy of Sciences at
Paris, Observatories--realising Bacon's Atlantic dream--characterise the
opening of a new era.
For the ideas with which we are concerned, the seventeenth century
centres round Descartes, whom an English admirer described as "the grand
secretary of Nature." [Footnote: Joseph Glanvill, Vanity of Dogmatising,
p. 211, 64] Though his brilliant mathematical discoveries were the sole
permanent contribution he made to knowledge, though his metaphysical and
physical systems are only of historical interest, his genius exercised
a more extensive and transforming influence on the future development of
thought than any other man of his century.
Cartesianism affirmed the two positive axioms of the supremacy of
reason, and the invariability of the laws of nature; and its instrument
was a new rigorous analytical method, which was applicable to history as
well as to physical knowledge. The axioms had destructive corollaries.
The immutability of the processes of nature collided with the theory
of an active Providence. The supremacy of reason shook the thrones from
which authority and tradition had tyrannised over the brains of men.
Cartesianism was equivalent to a declaration of the Independence of Man.
It was in the atmosphere of the Cartesian spirit that a theory of
Progress was to take shape.
1.
Let us look back. We saw that all the remarks of philosophers prior to
the seventeenth century, which have been claimed as enunciations of the
idea of Progress, amount merely to recognitions of the obvious fact that
in the course of the past history of men there have been advances
and improvements in knowledge and arts, or that we may look for some
improvements in the future. There is not one of them that adumbrates
a theory that can be called a theory of Progress. We have seen several
reasons why the idea could not emerge in the ancient or in the
Middle Ages. Nor could it have easily appeared in the period of the
Renaissance. Certain preliminary conditions were required, and these
were not fulfilled till the seventeenth century. So long as men believed
that the Greeks and Romans had attained, in the best days of their
civilisation, to an intellectual plane which posterity could never
hope to reach, so long as the authority of their thinkers was set up as
unimpeachable, a theory of degeneration held the field, which excluded
a theory of Progress. It was the work of Bacon and Descartes to liberate
science and philosophy from the yoke of that authority; and at the same
time, as we shall see, the rebellion began to spread to other fields.
Another condition for the organisation of a theory of Progress was a
frank recognition of the value of mundane life and the subservience of
knowledge to human needs. The secular spirit of the Renaissance prepared
the world for this new valuation, which was formulated by Bacon, and has
developed into modern utilitarianism.
There was yet a third preliminary condition. There can be no certainty
that knowledge will continually progress until science has been
placed on sure foundations. And science does not rest for us on sure
foundations unless the invariability of the laws of nature is admitted.
If we do not accept this hypothesis, if we consider it possible that the
uniformities of the natural world may be changed from time to time, we
have no guarantee that science can progress indefinitely. The philosophy
of Descartes established this principle, which is the palladium of
science; and thus the third preliminary condition was fulfilled.
2.
During the Renaissance period the authority of the Greeks and Romans
had been supreme in the realm of thought, and in the interest of
further free development it was necessary that this authority should
be weakened. Bacon and others had begun the movement to break down this
tyranny, but the influence of Descartes was weightier and more decisive,
and his attitude was more uncompromising. He had none of Bacon's
reverence for classical literature; he was proud of having forgotten the
Greek which he had learned as a boy. The inspiration of his work was the
idea of breaking sharply and completely with the past, and constructing
a system which borrows nothing from the dead. He looked forward to an
advancement of knowledge in the future, on the basis of his own method
and his own discoveries, [Footnote: Cf. for instance his remarks on
medicine, at the end of the Discours de la methode.] and he conceived
that this intellectual advance would have far-reaching effects on the
condition of mankind. The first title he had proposed to give to his
Discourse on Method was "The Project of a Universal Science which can
elevate our Nature to its highest degree of Perfection." He regarded
moral and material improvement as depending on philosophy and science.
The justification of an independent attitude towards antiquity, on
the ground that the world is now older and more mature, was becoming a
current view. [Footnote: Descartes wrote: Non est quod antiquis multum
tribuamus propter antiquitatem, sed nos potius iis seniores dicendi. Jam
enim senior est mundus quam tune majoremque habemus rerum experientiam.
(A fragment quoted by Baillet, Vie de Descartes, viii. 10.) Passages
to the same effect occur in Malebranche, Arnauld, and Nicole. (See
Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartesienne, i. 482-3.)
A passage in La Mothe Le Vayer's essay Sur l'opiniatrete in Orasius
Tubero (ii. 218) is in point, if, as seems probable, the date of that
work is 1632-33. "Some defer to the ancients and allow themselves to be
led by them like children; others hold that the ancients lived in the
youth of the world, and it is those who live to-day who are really the
ancients, and consequently ought to carry most weight." See Rigault,
Histoire de la querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, p. 52.
The passage of Pascal occurs in the Fragment d'un traite du vide, not
published till 1779 (now included in the Pensees, Premiere Partie, Art.
I), and therefore without influence on the origination of the theory of
progress. It has been pointed out that Guillaume Colletet had in 1636
expressed a similar view (Brunetiere, Etudes critiques, v. 185-6).]
Descartes expressed it like Bacon, and it was taken up and repeated
by many whom Descartes influenced. Pascal, who till 1654 was a man of
science and a convert to Cartesian ideas, put it in a striking way.
The whole sequence of men (he says) during so many centuries should
be considered as a single man, continually existing and continually
learning. At each stage of his life this universal man profited by the
knowledge he had acquired in the preceding stages, and he is now in his
old age. This is a fuller, and probably an independent, development of
the comparison of the race to an individual which we found in Bacon. It
occurs in a fragment which remained unpublished for more than a hundred
years, and is often quoted as a recognition, not of a general progress
of man, but of a progress in human knowledge.
To those who reproached Descartes with disrespect towards ancient
thinkers he might have replied that, in repudiating their authority, he
was really paying them the compliment of imitation and acting far more
in their own spirit than those who slavishly followed them. Pascal saw
this point. "What can be more unjust," he wrote, "than to treat our
ancients with greater consideration than they showed towards their own
predecessors, and to have for them this incredible respect which they
deserve from us only because they entertained no such regard for
those who had the same advantage (of antiquity) over them?" [Footnote:
Pensees, ib.]
At the same time Pascal recognised that we are indebted to the ancients
for our very superiority to them in the extent of our knowledge. "They
reached a certain point, and the slightest effort enables us to mount
higher; so that we find ourselves on a loftier plane with less trouble
and less glory." The attitude of Descartes was very different. Aspiring
to begin ab integro and reform the foundations of knowledge, he ignored
or made little of what had been achieved in the past. He attempted
to cut the threads of continuity as with the shears of Atropos. This
illusion [Footnote: He may be reproached himself with scholasticism in
his metaphysical reasoning.] hindered him from stating a doctrine of
the progress of knowledge as otherwise he might have done. For any such
doctrine must take account of the past as well as of the future.
But a theory of progress was to grow out of his philosophy, though he
did not construct it. It was to be developed by men who were imbued with
the Cartesian spirit.
3.
The theological world in France was at first divided on the question
whether the system of Descartes could be reconciled with orthodoxy
or not. The Jesuits said no, the Fathers of the Oratory said yes.
The Jansenists of Port Royal were enthusiastic Cartesians. Yet it was
probably the influence of the great spiritual force of Jansenism that
did most to check the immediate spread of Cartesian ideas. It was
preponderant in France for fifty years. The date of the Discourse of
Method is 1637. The Augustinus of Jansenius was published in 1640, and
in 1643 Arnauld's Frequent Communion made Jansenism a popular power.
The Jansenist movement was in France in some measure what the Puritan
movement was in England, and it caught hold of serious minds in much
the same way. The Jesuits had undertaken the task of making Christianity
easy, of finding a compromise between worldliness and religion, and they
flooded the world with a casuistic literature designed for this purpose.
Ex opinionum varietate jugum Christi suavius deportatur. The doctrine of
Jansenius was directed against this corruption of faith and morals.
He maintained that there can be no compromise with the world; that
casuistry is incompatible with morality; that man is naturally corrupt;
and that in his most virtuous acts some corruption is present.
Now the significance of these two forces--the stern ideal of the
Jansenists and the casuistry of the Jesuit teachers--is that they both
attempted to meet, by opposed methods, the wave of libertine thought and
conduct which is a noticeable feature in the history of French society
from the reign of Henry IV. to that of Louis XV. [Footnote: For the
prevalence of "libertine" thought in France at the beginning of the
seventeenth century see the work of the Pere Garasse, La Doctrine
curieuse des beaux esprits de ce temps ou pretendus tels, etc. (1623).
Cp. also Brunetiere's illuminating study, "Jansenistes et Cartesiens"
in Etudes critiques, 4me serie.] This libertinism had its philosophy, a
sort of philosophy of nature, of which the most brilliant exponents
were Rabelais and Moliere. The maxim, "Be true to nature," was evidently
opposed sharply to the principles of the Christian religion, and it was
associated with sceptical views which prevailed widely in France from
the early years of the seventeenth century. The Jesuits sought to make
terms by saying virtually: "Our religious principles and your philosophy
of nature are not after all so incompatible in practice. When it comes
to the application of principles, opinions differ. Theology is as
elastic as you like. Do not abandon your religion on the ground that her
yoke is hard." Jansenius and his followers, on the other hand, fought
uncompromisingly with the licentious spirit of the time, maintaining
the austerest dogmas and denouncing any compromise or condescension. And
their doctrine had a wonderful success, and penetrated everywhere. Few
of the great literary men of the reign of Louis XIV. escaped it. Its
influence can be traced in the Maximes of La Rochefoucauld and the
Caracteres of La Bruyere. It was through its influence that Moliere
found it difficult to get some of his plays staged. It explains the fact
that the court of Louis XIV., however corrupt, was decorous compared
with the courts of Henry IV. and Louis XV.; a severe standard was set
up, if it was not observed.
The genius of Pascal made the fortunes of Jansenism. He outlived his
Cartesianism and became its most influential spokesman. His
Provinciales (1656) rendered abstruse questions of theology more or less
intelligible, and invited the general public to pronounce an opinion on
them. His lucid exposition interested every one in the abstruse problem,
Is man's freedom such as not to render grace superfluous? But Pascal
perceived that casuistry was not the only enemy that menaced the true
spirit of religion for which Jansenism stood. He came to realise that
Cartesianism, to which he was at first drawn, was profoundly opposed to
the fundamental views of Christianity. His Pensees are the fragments of
a work which he designed in defence of religion, and it is easy to see
that this defence was to be specially directed against the ideas of
Descartes.
Pascal was perfectly right about the Cartesian conception of the
Universe, though Descartes might pretend to mitigate its tendencies, and
his fervent disciple, Malebranche, might attempt to prove that it was
more or less reconcilable with orthodox doctrine. We need not trouble
about the special metaphysical tenets of Descartes. The two axioms
which he launched upon the world--the supremacy of reason, and the
invariability of natural laws--struck directly at the foundations of
orthodoxy. Pascal was attacking Cartesianism when he made his memorable
attempt to discredit the authority of reason, by showing that it is
feeble and deceptive. It was a natural consequence of his changed
attitude that he should speak (in the Pensees) in a much less confident
tone about the march of science than he had spoken in the passage which
I quoted above. And it was natural that he should be pessimistic about
social improvement, and that, keeping his eyes fixed on his central fact
that Christianity is the goal of history, he should take only a slight
and subsidiary interest in amelioration.
The preponderant influence of Jansenism only began to wane during the
last twenty years of the seventeenth century, and till then it seems
to have been successful in counteracting the diffusion of the Cartesian
ideas. Cartesianism begins to become active and powerful when Jansenism
is beginning to decline. And it is just then that the idea of Progress
begins definitely to emerge. The atmosphere in France was favourable for
its reception.
4.
The Cartesian mechanical theory of the world and the doctrine of
invariable law, carried to a logical conclusion, excluded the doctrine
of Providence. This doctrine was already in serious danger. Perhaps
no article of faith was more insistently attacked by sceptics in the
seventeenth century, and none was more vital. The undermining of the
theory of Providence is very intimately connected with our subject;
for it was just the theory of an active Providence that the theory of
Progress was to replace; and it was not till men felt independent of
Providence that they could organise a theory of Progress.
Bossuet was convinced that the question of Providence was the most
serious and pressing among all the questions of the day that were at
issue between orthodox and heretical thinkers. Brunetiere, his fervent
admirer, has named him the theologian of Providence, and has shown that
in all his writings this doctrine is a leading note. It is sounded
in his early sermons in the fifties, and it is the theme of his most
ambitious work, the Discourse on Universal History, which appeared
in 1681. [Footnote; It has been shown that on one hand he controverts
Spinoza's Tractatus theologico-politicus, and on the other the dangerous
methods of Richard Simon, one of the precursors of modern biblical
criticism. Brunetiere, op. cit. 74-85.] This book, which has received
high praise from those who most heartily dissent from its conclusions,
is in its main issue a restatement of the view of history which
Augustine had worked out in his memorable book. The whole course of
human experience has been guided by Providence for the sake of the
Church; that is, for the sake of the Church to which Bossuet belonged.
Regarded as a philosophy of history the Discourse may seem little more
than the theory of the De Civitate Dei brought up to date; but this is
its least important aspect. We shall fail to understand it unless we
recognise that it was a pragmatical, opportune work, designed for the
needs of the time, and with express references to current tendencies of
thought.
One main motive of Bossuet in his lifelong concern for Providence
was his conviction that the doctrine was the most powerful check on
immorality, and that to deny it was to remove the strongest restraint
on the evil side of human nature. There is no doubt that the free-living
people of the time welcomed the arguments which called Providence in
question, and Bossuet believed that to champion Providence was the
most efficient means of opposing the libertine tendencies of his day.
"Nothing," he declared in one of his sermons (1662), "has appeared
more insufferable to the arrogance of libertines than to see themselves
continually under the observation of this ever-watchful eye of
Providence. They have felt it as an importunate compulsion to recognise
that there is in Heaven a superior force which governs all our movements
and chastises our loose actions with a severe authority. They have
wished to shake off the yoke of this Providence, in order to maintain,
in independence, an unteachable liberty which moves them to live at
their own fancy, without fear, discipline, or restraint." [Passage from
Bossuet, quoted by Brunetiere, op. cit. 58.] Bossuet was thus working in
the same cause as the Jansenists.
He had himself come under the influence of Descartes, whose work he
always regarded with the deepest respect. The cautiousness of the master
had done much to disguise the insidious dangers of his thought, and it
was in the hands of those disciples who developed his system and sought
to reconcile it at all points with orthodoxy that his ideas displayed
their true nature. Malebranche's philosophy revealed the incompatibility
of Providence--in the ordinary acceptation--with immutable natural laws.
If the Deity acts upon the world, as Malebranche maintained, only by
means of general laws, His freedom is abolished, His omnipotence is
endangered, He is subject to a sort of fatality. What will become of the
Christian belief in the value of prayers, if God cannot adapt or modify,
on any given occasion, the general order of nature to the needs of human
beings? These are some of the arguments which we find in a treatise
composed by Fenelon, with the assistance of Bossuet, to demonstrate
that the doctrine of Malebranche is inconsistent with piety and orthodox
religion. They were right. Cartesianism was too strong a wine to
be decanted into old bottles. [Footnote: Fenelon's Refutation of
Malebranche's Traite de la nature et de la grace was not published till
1820. This work of Malebranche also provoked a controversy with Arnauld,
who urged similar arguments.]
Malebranche's doctrine of what he calls divine Providence was closely
connected with his philosophical optimism. It enabled him to maintain
the perfection of the universe. Admitting the obvious truth that the
world exhibits many imperfections, and allowing that the Creator
could have produced a better result if he had employed other means,
Malebranche argued that, in judging the world, we must take into account
not only the result but the methods by which it has been produced. It is
the best world, he asserts, that could be framed by general and simple
methods; and general and simple methods are the most perfect, and alone
worthy of the Creator. Therefore, if we take the methods and the
result together, a more perfect world is impossible. The argument was
ingenious, though full of assumptions, but it was one which could only
satisfy a philosopher. It is little consolation to creatures suffering
from the actual imperfections of the system into which they are born to
be told that the world might have been free from those defects, only in
that case they would not have the satisfaction of knowing that it was
created and conducted on theoretically superior principles.
Though Malebranche's conception was only a metaphysical theory,
metaphysical theories have usually their pragmatic aspects; and the
theory that the universe is as perfect as it could be marks a stage
in the growth of intellectual optimism which we can trace from the
sixteenth century. It was a view which could appeal to the educated
public in France, for it harmonised with the general spirit of
self-complacency and hopefulness which prevailed among the higher
classes of society in the reign of Louis XIV. For them the conditions
of life under the new despotism had become far more agreeable than in
previous ages, and it was in a spirit of optimism that they devoted
themselves to the enjoyment of luxury and elegance. The experience of
what the royal authority could achieve encouraged men to imagine that
one enlightened will, with a centralised administration at its command,
might accomplish endless improvements in civilisation. There was no age
had ever been more glorious, no age more agreeable to live in.
The world had begun to abandon the theory of corruption, degeneration,
and decay.
Some years later the optimistic theory of the perfection of the universe
found an abler exponent in Leibnitz, whom Diderot calls the father of
optimism. [Footnote: See particularly Monadologie, ad fin. published
posthumously in German 1720, in Latin 1728; Theodicee, Section 341
(1710); and the paper, De rerum originatione radicali, written in 1697,
but not published till 1840 (Opera philosophica, ed. Erdmann, p. 147
sqq).] The Creator, before He acted, had considered all possible worlds,
and had chosen the best. He might have chosen one in which humanity
would have been better and happier, but that would not have been
the best possible, for He had to consider the interests of the whole
universe, of which the earth with humanity is only an insignificant
part. The evils and imperfections of our small world are negligible
in comparison with the happiness and perfection of the whole cosmos.
Leibnitz, whose theory is deduced from the abstract proposition that
the Creator is perfect, does not say that now or at any given moment
the universe is as perfect as it could be; its merit lies in its
potentialities; it will develop towards perfection throughout infinite
time.
The optimism of Leibnitz therefore concerns the universe as a whole, not
the earth, and would obviously be quite consistent with a pessimistic
view of the destinies of humanity. He does indeed believe that it would
be impossible to improve the universal order, "not only for the
whole, but for ourselves in particular," and incidentally he notes
the possibility that "in the course of time the human race may reach a
greater perfection than we can imagine at present." But the significance
of his speculation and that of Malebranche lies in the fact that the old
theories of degeneration are definitely abandoned.
CHAPTER IV. THE DOCTRINE OF DEGENERATION: THE ANCIENTS AND MODERNS
1.
Outside the circle of systematic thinkers the prevalent theory of
degeneration was being challenged early in the seventeenth century. The
challenge led to a literary war, which was waged for about a hundred
years in France and England; over the comparative merits of the ancients
and the moderns. It was in the matter of literature, and especially
poetry, that the quarrel was most acrimonious, and that the interest of
the public was most keenly aroused, but the ablest disputants extended
the debate to the general field of knowledge. The quarrel of the
Ancients and Moderns used commonly to be dismissed as a curious and
rather ridiculous episode in the history of literature. [Footnote:
The best and fullest work on the subject is Rigault's "Histoire de la
querelle des Anciens et des Modernes" (1856).] Auguste Comte was, I
think, one of the first to call attention to some of its wider bearings.
The quarrel, indeed, has considerable significance in the history of
ideas. It was part of the rebellion against the intellectual yoke of
the Renaissance; the cause of the Moderns, who were the aggressors,
represented the liberation of criticism from the authority of the
dead; and, notwithstanding the perversities of taste of which they were
guilty, their polemic, even on the purely literary side, was distinctly
important, as M. Brunetiere has convincingly shown, [Footnote: See his
"L'evolution des genres dans l'histoire de la litterature."] in the
development of French criticism. But the form in which the critical
questions were raised forced the debate to touch upon a problem of
greater moment. The question, Can the men of to-day contend on equal
terms with the illustrious ancients, or are they intellectually
inferior? implied the larger issue, Has nature exhausted her powers;
is she no longer capable of producing men equal in brains and vigour to
those whom she once produced; is humanity played out, or are her forces
permanent and inexhaustible?
The assertion of the permanence of the powers of nature by the
champions of the Moderns was the direct contradiction of the theory of
degeneration, and they undoubtedly contributed much towards bringing
that theory into discredit. When we grasp this it will not be surprising
to find that the first clear assertions of a doctrine of progress
in knowledge were provoked by the controversy about the Ancients and
Moderns.
Although the great scene of the controversy was France, the question had
been expressly raised by an Italian, no less a person than Alessandro
Tassoni, the accomplished author of that famous ironical poem, "La
Secchia rapita," which caricatured the epic poets of his day. He was
bent on exposing the prejudices of his time and uttering new doctrine,
and he created great scandal in Italy by his attacks on Petrarch, as
well as on Homer and Aristotle. The earliest comparison of the merits of
the ancients and the moderns will be found in a volume of Miscellaneous
Thoughts which he published in 1620. [Footnote: Dieci libri di pensieri
diversi (Carpi, 1620). The first nine books had appeared in 1612. The
tenth contains the comparison. Rigault was the first to connect this
work with the history of the controversy.] He speaks of the question
as a matter of current dispute, [Footnote: It was incidental to the
controversy which arose over the merits of Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered.
That the subject had been discussed long before may be inferred from a
remark of Estienne in his Apology for Herodotus, that while some of
his contemporaries carry their admiration of antiquity to the point of
superstition, others depreciate and trample it underfoot.] on which he
proposes to give an impartial decision by instituting a comprehensive
comparison in all fields, theoretical, imaginative, and practical.
He begins by criticising the a priori argument that, as arts are
brought to perfection by experience and long labour, the modern age must
necessarily have the advantage. This reasoning, he says, is unsound,
because the same arts and studies are not always uninterruptedly pursued
by the most powerful intellects, but pass into inferior hands, and
so decline or are even extinguished, as was the case in Italy in the
decrepitude of the Roman Empire, when for many centuries the arts fell
below mediocrity. Or, to phrase it otherwise, the argument would be
admissible only if there were no breaches of continuity. [Footnote:
Tassoni argues that a decline in all pursuits is inevitable when
a certain point of excellence has been reached, quoting Velleius
Paterculus (i. 17): difficilisque in perfecto mora est naturaliterque
quod procedere non potest recedit.]
In drawing his comparison Tassoni seeks to make good his claim that he
is not an advocate. But while he awards superiority here and there to
the ancients, the moderns on the whole have much the best of it. He
takes a wide enough survey, including the material side of civilisation,
even costume, in contrast with some of the later controversialists, who
narrowed the field of debate to literature and art.
Tassoni's Thoughts were translated into French, and the book was
probably known to Boisrobert, a dramatist who is chiefly remembered
for the part he took in founding the Academie francaise. He delivered a
discourse before that body immediately after its institution (February
26, 1635), in which he made a violent and apparently scurrilous attack
on Homer. This discourse kindled the controversy in France, and even
struck a characteristic note. Homer--already severely handled by
Tassoni--was to be the special target for the arrows of the Moderns, who
felt that, if they could succeed in discrediting him, their cause would
be won.
Thus the gauntlet was flung--and it is important to note this--before
the appearance of the Discourse of Method (1637); but the influence
of Descartes made itself felt throughout the controversy, and the most
prominent moderns were men who had assimilated Cartesian ideas. This
seems to be true even of Desmarets de Saint Sorlin, who, a good many
years after the discourse of Boisrobert, opened the campaign. Saint
Sorlin had become a fanatical Christian; that was one reason for hating
the ancients. [Footnote: For the views of Saint Sorlin see the Preface
to his Clovis and his Traite pour juger des poefes grecs, latins, et
francais, chap. iv. (1670). Cp. Rigault, Hist. de la querelle, p. 106.
The polemic of Saint Sorlin extended over about five years (1669-73).]
He was also, like Boisrobert, a bad poet; that was another. His thesis
was that the history of Christianity offered subjects far more inspiring
to a poet than those which had been treated by Homer and Sophocles, and
that Christian poetry must bear off the palm from pagan. His own Clovis
and Mary Magdalene or the Triumph of Grace were the demonstration of
Homer's defeat. Few have ever heard of these productions; how many have
read them? Curiously, about the same time an epic was being composed
in England which might have given to the foolish contentions of Saint
Sorlin some illusory plausibility.
But the literary dispute does not concern us here. What does concern
us is that Saint Sorlin was aware of the wider aspects of the question,
though he was not seriously interested in them. Antiquity, he says, was
not so happy or so learned or so rich or so stately as the modern age,
which is really the mature old age, and as it were the autumn of the
world, possessing the fruits and the spoils of all the past centuries,
with the power to judge of the inventions, experiences, and errors of
predecessors, and to profit by all that. The ancient world was a spring
which had only a few flowers. Nature indeed, in all ages, produces
perfect works but it is not so with the creations of man, which require
correction; and the men who live latest must excel in happiness and
knowledge. Here we have both the assertion of the permanence of the
forces of nature and the idea, already expressed by Bacon and others,
that the modern age has advantages over antiquity comparable to those of
old age over childhood.
2.
How seriously the question between the Moderns and the Ancients--on
whose behalf Boileau had come forward and crossed swords with Saint
Sorlin--was taken is shown by the fact that Saint Sorlin, before his
death, solemnly bequeathed the championship of the Moderns to a younger
man, Charles Perrault. We shall see how he fulfilled the trust. It
is illustrated too by a book which appeared in the seventies, Les
Entretiens d'Ariste et Eugene, by Bouhours, a mundane and popular Jesuit
Father. In one of these dialogues the question is raised, but with a
curious caution and evasiveness, which suggests that the author was
afraid to commit himself; he did not wish to make enemies. [Footnote:
Rigault notes that he makes one contribution to the subject, the idea
that the torch of civilisation has passed from country to country, in
different ages, e.g. from Greece to Rome, and recently from Italy to
France. In the last century the Italians were first in doctrine and
politesse. The present century is for France what the last was for
Italy: "We have all the esprit and all the science, all other countries
are barbarous in comparison" (p. 239, ed. 1782, Amsterdam). But, as we
shall see, he had been anticipated by Hakewill, whose work was unknown
to Rigault.]
The general atmosphere in France, in the reign of Louis XIV., was
propitious to the cause of the Moderns. Men felt that it was a great
age, comparable to the age of Augustus, and few would have preferred
to have lived at any other time. Their literary artists, Corneille, and
then Racine and Moliere, appealed so strongly to their taste that they
could not assign to them any rank but the first. They were impatient
of the claims to unattainable excellence advanced for the Greeks and
Romans. "The ancients," said Moliere, "are the ancients, we are the
people of to-day." This might be the motto of Descartes, and it probably
expressed a very general feeling.
It was in 1687 that Charles Perrault--who is better remembered for his
collection of fairy-tales than for the leading role which he played in
this controversy--published his poem on "The Age of Louis the Great."
The enlightenment of the present age surpasses that of antiquity,--this
is the theme.
La docte Antiquite dans toute sa duree
A l'egal de nos jours ne fut point eclairee.
Perrault adopts a more polite attitude to "la belle antiquite" than
Saint Sorlin, but his criticism is more insidious. Greek and Roman men
of genius, he suggests, were all very well in their own times, and might
be considered divine by our ancestors. But nowadays Plato is rather
tiresome; and the "inimitable Homer" would have written a much better
epic if he had lived in the reign of Louis the Great. The important
passage, however, in the poem is that in which the permanent power of
nature to produce men of equal talent in every age is affirmed.
A former les esprits comme a former les corps
La Nature en tout temps fait les mesmes efforts;
Son etre est immuable, et cette force aisee
Dont elle produit tout ne s'est point epuisee;
..... De cette mesme main les forces infinies
Produisent en tout temps de semblables genies.
The "Age of Louis the Great" was a brief declaration of faith. Perrault
followed it up by a comprehensive work, his Comparison of the Ancients
and the Moderns (Parallele des Anciens et des Modernes), which appeared
in four parts during the following years (1688-1696). Art, eloquence,
poetry the sciences, and their practical applications are all discussed
at length; and the discussion is thrown into the form of conversations
between an enthusiastic champion of the modern age, who conducts the
debate, and a devotee of antiquity, who finds it difficult not to admit
the arguments of his opponent, yet obstinately persists in his own
views.
Perrault bases his thesis on those general considerations which we
have met incidentally in earlier writers, and which were now almost
commonplaces among those who paid any attention to the matter. Knowledge
advances with time and experience; perfection is not necessarily
associated with antiquity; the latest comers have inherited from their
predecessors and added new acquisitions of their own. But Perrault has
thought out the subject methodically, and he draws conclusions which
have only to be extended to amount to a definite theory of the progress
of knowledge.
A particular difficulty had done much to hinder a general admission of
progressive improvement in the past. The proposition that the
posterior is better and the late comers have the advantage seemed to be
incompatible with an obvious historical fact. We are superior to the men
of the dark ages in knowledge and arts. Granted. But will you say that
the men of the tenth century were superior to the Greeks and Romans? To
this question--on which Tassoni had already touched--Perrault replies:
Certainly not. There are breaches of continuity. The sciences and arts
are like rivers, which flow for part of their course underground, and
then, finding an opening, spring forth as abundant as when they plunged
beneath the earth. Long wars, for instance, may force peoples to
neglect studies and throw all their vigour into the more urgent needs
of self-preservation; a period of ignorance may ensue but with peace
and felicity knowledge and inventions will begin again and make further
advances. [Footnote: The passages in Perrault's Parallele specially
referred to in the text will be found in vol. i. pp. 35-7, 60-61, 67,
231-3.]
It is to be observed that he does not, claim any superiority in talents
or brain power for the moderns. On the contrary, he takes his stand on
the principle which he had asserted in the "Age of Louis the Great,"
that nature is immutable. She still produces as great men as ever, but
she does not produce greater. The lions of the deserts of Africa in our
days do not differ in fierceness from those the days of Alexander the
Great, and the best men of all times are equal in vigour. It is their
work and productions that are unequal, and, given equally favourable
conditions, the latest must be the best. For science and the arts depend
upon the accumulation of knowledge, and knowledge necessarily increases
as time goes on.
But could this argument be applied to poetry and literary art, the field
of battle in which the belligerents, including Perrault himself, were
most deeply interested? It might prove that the modern age was capable
of producing poets and men of letter no less excellent than the ancient
masters, but did it prove that their works must be superior? The
objection did not escape Perrault, and he answers it ingeniously. It is
the function of poetry and eloquence to please the human heart, and
in order to please it we must know it. Is it easier to penetrate the
secrets of the human heart than the secrets of nature, or will it take
less time? We are always making new discoveries about its passions and
desires. To take only the tragedies of Corneille you will find there
finer and more delicate reflections on ambition, vengeance, and jealousy
than in all the books of antiquity. At the close of his Parallel,
however, Perrault, while he declares the general superiority of the
moderns, makes a reservation in regard to poetry and eloquence "for the
sake of peace."
The discussion of Perrault falls far short of embodying a full idea
of Progress. Not only is he exclusively concerned with progress in
knowledge--though he implies, indeed, without developing, the doctrine
that happiness depends on knowledge--but he has no eyes for the future,
and no interest in it. He is so impressed with the advance of knowledge
in the recent past that he is almost incapable of imagining further
progression. "Read the journals of France and England," he says, "and
glance at the publications of the Academies of these great kingdoms, and
you will be convinced that within the last twenty or thirty years more
discoveries have been made in natural science than throughout the period
of learned antiquity. I own that I consider myself fortunate to know the
happiness we enjoy; it is a great pleasure to survey all the past ages
in which I can see the birth and the progress of all things, but nothing
which has not received a new increase and lustre in our own times. Our
age has, in some sort, arrived at the summit of perfection. And since
for some years the rate of the progress is much slower and appears
almost insensible--as the days seem to cease lengthening when the
solstice is near--it is pleasant to think that probably there are not
many things for which we need envy future generations."
Indifference to the future, or even a certain scepticism about it, is
the note of this passage, and accords with the view that the world
has reached its old age. The idea of the progress of knowledge, which
Perrault expounds, is still incomplete.
3.
Independently of this development in France, the doctrine of
degeneration had been attacked, and the comparison of the ancients with
the moderns incidentally raised, in England.
A divine named George Hakewill published in 1627 a folio of six hundred
pages to confute "the common error touching Nature's perpetual and
universal decay." [Footnote: An Apologie or Declaration of the Power
and Providence of God in the Government of the World, consisting in an
Examination and Censure of the common Errour, etc. (1627, 1630, 1635).]
He and his pedantic book, which breathes the atmosphere of the sixteenth
century, are completely forgotten; and though it ran to three editions,
it can hardly have attracted the attention of many except theologians.
The writer's object is to prove that the power and providence of God
in the government of the world are not consistent with the current view
that the physical universe, the heavens and the elements, are undergoing
a process of decay, and that man is degenerating physically, mentally,
and morally. His arguments in general are futile as well as tedious.
But he has profited by reading Bodin and Bacon, whose ideas, it would
appear, were already agitating theological minds.
A comparison between the ancients and the moderns arises in a general
refutation of the doctrine of decay, as naturally as the question of
the stability of the powers of nature arises in a comparison between the
ancients and moderns. Hakewill protests against excessive admiration of
antiquity, just because it encourages the opinion of the world's
decay. He gives his argument a much wider scope than the French
controversialists. For him the field of debate includes not only
science, arts, and literature, but physical qualities and morals. He
seeks to show that mentally and physically there has been no decay, and
that the morals of modern Christendom are immensely superior to those
of pagan times. There has been social progress, due to Christianity; and
there has been an advance in arts and knowledge.
Multa dies uariusque labor mutabilis aeui
Rettulit in melius.
Hakewill, like Tassoni, surveys all the arts and sciences, and concludes
that the moderns are equal to the ancients in poetry, and in almost
all other things excel them. [Footnote: Among modern poets equal to
the ancients, Hakewill signalises Sir Philip Sidney, Spenser, Marot,
Ronsard, Ariosto, Tasso (Book iii. chap. 8, Section 3).]
One of the arguments which he urges against the theory of degeneration
is pragmatic--its paralysing effect on human energy. "The opinion of the
world's universal decay quails the hopes and blunts the edge of men's
endeavours." And the effort to improve the world, he implies, is a duty
we owe to posterity.
"Let not then the vain shadows of the world's fatal decay keep us either
from looking backward to the imitation of our noble predecessors or
forward in providing for posterity, but as our predecessors worthily
provided, for us, so let our posterity bless us in providing for them,
it being still as uncertain to us what generations are still to ensue,
as it was to our predecessors in their ages."
We note the suggestion that history may be conceived as a sequence of
improvements in civilisation, but we note also that Hakewill here is
faced by the obstacle which Christian theology offered to the logical
expansion of the idea. It is uncertain what generations are still to
ensue. Roger Bacon stood before the same dead wall. Hakewill thinks that
he is living in the last age of the world; but how long it shall last
is a question which cannot be resolved, "it being one of those secrets
which the Almighty hath locked up in the cabinet of His own counsel."
Yet he consoles himself and his readers with a consideration which
suggests that the end is not yet very near. [Footnote: See Book i.
chap. 2, Section 4, p. 24.] "It is agreed upon all sides by Divines that
at least two signs forerunning the world's end remain unaccomplished--the
subversion of Rome and the conversion of the Jews. And when they shall
be accomplished God only knows, as yet in man's judgment there being
little appearance of the one or the other."
It was well to be assured that nature is not decaying or man
degenerating. But was the doctrine that the end of the world does
not "depend upon the law of nature," and that the growth of human
civilisation may be cut off at any moment by a fiat of the Deity, less
calculated to "quail the hopes and blunt the edge of men's endeavours?"
Hakewill asserted with confidence that the universe will be suddenly
wrecked by fire. Una dies dabit exitio. Was the prospect of an arrest
which might come the day after to-morrow likely to induce men to exert
themselves to make provision for posterity?
The significance of Hakewill lies in the fact that he made the current
theory of degeneration, which stood in the way of all possible theories
of progress, the object of a special inquiry. And his book illustrates
the close connection between that theory and the dispute over the
Ancients and Moderns. It cannot be said that he has added anything
valuable to what may be found in Bodin and Bacon on the development
of civilisation. The general synthesis of history which he attempts is
equivalent to theirs. He describes the history of knowledge and arts,
and all things besides, as exhibiting "a kind of circular progress," by
which he means that they have a birth, growth, nourishing, failing and
fading, and then within a while after a resurrection and reflourishing.
[Footnote: Book iii. chap. 6, Section i, p. 259.] In this method of
progress the lamp of learning passed from one people to another. It
passed from the Orientals (Chaldeans and Egyptians) to the Greeks; when
it was nearly extinguished in Greece it began to shine afresh among the
Romans; and having been put out by the barbarians for the space of
a thousand years it was relit by Petrarch and his contemporaries. In
stating this view of "circular progress," Hakewill comes perilously near
to the doctrine of Ricorsi or Returns which had been severely denounced
by Bacon.
In one point indeed Hakewill goes far beyond Bodin. It was suggested,
as we saw, by the French thinker that in some respects the modern age is
superior in conduct and morals to antiquity, but he said little on the
matter. Hakewill develops the suggestion at great length into a severe
and partial impeachment of ancient manners and morals. Unjust and
unconvincing though his arguments are, and inspired by theological
motives, his thesis nevertheless deserves to be noted as an assertion of
the progress of man in social morality. Bacon, and the thinkers of the
seventeenth century generally, confined their views of progress in the
past to the intellectual field. Hakewill, though he overshot the mark
and said nothing actually worth remembering, nevertheless anticipated
the larger problem of social progress which was to come to the front in
the eighteenth century.
4.
During the forty years that followed the appearance of Hakewill's book
much had happened in the world of ideas, and when we take up Glanvill's
Plus ultra, or the Progress and Advancement of Knowledge since the days
of Aristotle, [Footnote: The title is evidently suggested by a passage
in Bacon quoted above, p. 55.] we breathe a different atmosphere. It was
published in 1668, and its purpose was to defend the recently founded
Royal Society which was attacked on the ground that it was inimical
to the interests of religion and sound learning. For the Aristotelian
tradition was still strongly entrenched in the English Church and
Universities, notwithstanding the influence of Bacon; and the Royal
Society, which realised "the romantic model" of Bacon's society
of experimenters, repudiated the scholastic principles and methods
associated with Aristotle's name.
Glanvill was one of those latitudinarian clergymen, so common in the
Anglican Church in the seventeenth century, who were convinced that
religious faith must accord with reason, and were unwilling to abate in
its favour any of reason's claims. He was under the influence of
Bacon, Descartes, and the Cambridge Platonists, and no one was more
enthusiastic than he in following the new scientific discoveries of his
time. Unfortunately for his reputation he had a weak side. Enlightened
though he was, he was a firm believer in witchcraft, and he is chiefly
remembered not as an admirer of Descartes and Bacon, and a champion
of the Royal Society, but as the author of Saducismus Triumphatus,
a monument of superstition, which probably contributed to check the
gradual growth of disbelief in witches and apparitions.
His Plus ultra is a review of modern improvements of useful knowledge.
It is confined to mathematics and science, in accordance with its
purpose of justifying the Royal Society; and the discoveries of the past
sixty years enable the author to present a far more imposing picture
of modern scientific progress than was possible for Bodin or Bacon.
[Footnote: Bacon indeed could have made out a more impressive picture of
the new age if he had studied mathematics and taken the pains to master
the evidence which was revolutionising astronomy. Glanvill had the
advantage of comprehending the importance of mathematics for the advance
of physical science.] He had absorbed Bacon's doctrine of utility. His
spirit is displayed in the remark that more gratitude is due to the
unknown inventor of the mariners' compass
"than to a thousand Alexanders and Caesars, or to ten times the number
of Aristotles. And he really did more for the increase of knowledge
and the advantage of the world by this one experiment than the numerous
subtile disputers that have lived ever since the erection of the school
of talking."
Glanvill, however, in his complacency with what has already been
accomplished, is not misled into over-estimating its importance. He
knows that it is indeed little compared with the ideal of attainable
knowledge. The human design, to which it is the function of the Royal
Society to contribute, is laid as low, he says, as the profoundest
depths of nature, and reaches as high as the uppermost storey of the
universe, extends to all the varieties of the great world, and aims at
the benefit of universal mankind. Such a work can only proceed slowly,
by insensible degrees. It is an undertaking wherein all the generations
of men are concerned, and our own age can hope to do little more than
to remove useless rubbish, lay in materials, and put things in order for
the building. "We must seek and gather, observe and examine, and lay up
in bank for the ages that come after."
These lines on "the vastness of the work" suggest to the reader that
a vast future will be needed for its accomplishment. Glanvill does not
dwell on this, but he implies it. He is evidently unembarrassed by the
theological considerations which weighed so heavily on Hakewill. He does
not trouble himself with the question whether Anti-Christ has still to
appear. The difference in general outlook between these two clergymen is
an indication how the world had travelled in the course of forty years.
Another point in Glanvill's little book deserves attention. He takes
into his prospect the inhabitants of the Transatlantic world; they, too,
are to share in the benefits which shall result from the subjugation of
nature.
"By the gaining that mighty continent and the numerous fruitful isles
beyond the Atlantic, we have obtained a larger field of nature, and
have thereby an advantage for more phenomena, and more helps both for
knowledge and for life, which 'tis very like that future ages will make
better use of to such purposes than those hitherto have done; and that
science also may at last travel into those parts and enrich Peru with
a more precious treasure than that of its golden mines, is not
improbable."
Sprat, the Bishop of Rochester, in his interesting History of the Royal
Society, so sensible and liberal--published shortly before Glanvill's
book,--also contemplates the extension of science over the world.
Speaking of the prospect of future discoveries, he thinks it will partly
depend on the enlargement of the field of western civilisation "if this
mechanic genius which now prevails in these parts of Christendom shall
happen to spread wide amongst ourselves and other civil nations, or if
by some good fate it shall pass farther on to other countries that were
yet never fully civilised."
This then being imagin'd, that there may some lucky tide of civility
flow into those lands which are yet salvage, then will a double
improvement thence arise both in respect of ourselves and them. For even
the present skilful parts of mankind will be thereby made more skilful,
and the other will not only increase those arts which we shall bestow
upon them, but will also venture on new searches themselves.
He expects much from the new converts, on the ground that nations which
have been taught have proved more capable than their teachers, appealing
to the case of the Greeks who outdid their eastern masters, and to that
of the peoples of modern Europe who received their light from the Romans
but have "well nigh doubled the ancient stock of trades delivered to
their keeping."
5.
The establishment of the Royal Society in 1660 and the Academy of
Sciences in 1666 made physical science fashionable in London and Paris.
Macaulay, in his characteristic way, describes how "dreams of perfect
forms of government made way for dreams of wings with which men were to
fly from the Tower to the Abbey, and of double-keeled ships which were
never to founder in the fiercest storm. All classes were hurried along
by the prevailing sentiment. Cavalier and Roundhead, Churchman and
Puritan were for once allied. Divines, jurists, statesmen, nobles,
princes, swelled the triumph of the Baconian philosophy." The seeds sown
by Bacon had at last begun to ripen, and full credit was given to him by
those who founded and acclaimed the Royal Society. The ode which Cowley
addressed to that institution might have been entitled an ode in honour
of Bacon, or still better--for the poet seized the essential point of
Bacon's labours--a hymn on the liberation of the human mind from the
yoke of Authority.
Bacon has broke that scar-crow Deity.
Dryden himself, in the Annus Mirabilis, had turned aside from his
subject, the defeat of the Dutch and England's mastery of the seas, to
pay a compliment to the Society, and to prophesy man's mastery of the
universe.
Instructed ships shall sail to rich commerce,
By which remotest regions are allied;
Which makes one city of the universe,
Where some may gain and all may be supplied.
Then we upon our globe's last verge shall go,
And view the ocean leaning on the sky,
From thence our rolling neighbours we shall know,
And on the lunar world securely pry.
[Footnote: It may be noted that John Wilkins (Bishop of Chester)
published in 1638 a little book entitled Discovery of a New World,
arguing that the moon is inhabited. A further edition appeared in 1684.
He attempted to compose a universal language (Sprat, Hist. of Royal
Society, p. 251). His Mercury or the Secret and Swift Messenger (1641)
contains proposals for a universal script (chap. 13). There is also an
ingenious suggestion for the communication of messages by sound, which
might be described as an anticipation of the Morse code. Wilkins and
another divine, Seth Ward, the Bishop of Salisbury, belonged to the
group of men who founded the Royal Society.]
Men did not look far into the future; they did not dream of what the
world might be a thousand or ten thousand years hence. They seem to have
expected quick results. Even Sprat thinks that "the absolute perfection
of the true philosophy" is not far off, seeing that "this first great
and necessary preparation for its coming"--the institution of scientific
co-operation--has been accomplished. Superficial and transient though
the popular enthusiasm was, it was a sign that an age of intellectual
optimism had begun, in which the science of nature would play a leading
role.
CHAPTER V. THE PROGRESS OF KNOWLEDGE: FONTENELLE
1.
Nine months before the first part of Perrault's work appeared a younger
and more brilliant man had formulated, in a short tract, the essential
points of the doctrine of the progress of knowledge. It was Fontenelle.
Fontenelle was an anima naturaliter moderna. Trained in the principles
of Descartes, he was one of those who, though like Descartes himself,
too critical to swear by a master, appreciated unreservedly the value of
the Cartesian method. Sometimes, he says, a great man gives the tone
to his age; and this is true of Descartes, who can claim the glory
of having established a new art of reasoning. He sees the effects
in literature. The best books on moral and political subjects are
distinguished by an arrangement and precision which he traces to the
esprit geometrique characteristic of Descartes. [Footnote: Sur l'utilite
des mathematiques el de la physique (Oeuvres, iii. p. 6, ed. 1729).]
Fontenelle himself had this "geometrical mind," which we see at its best
in Descartes and Hobbes and Spinoza.
He had indeed a considerable aptitude for letters. He wrote poor verses,
and could not distinguish good poetry from bad. That perhaps was the
defect of l'esprit geometrique. But he wrote lucid prose. There was an
ironical side to his temper, and he had an ingenious paradoxical wit,
which he indulged, with no little felicity, in his early work, Dialogues
of the Dead. These conversations, though they show no dramatic power and
are simply a vehicle for the author's satirical criticisms on life, are
written with a light touch, and are full of surprises and unexpected
turns. The very choice of the interlocutors shows a curious fancy,
which we do not associate with the geometrical intellect. Descartes
is confronted with the Third False Demetrius, and we wonder what the
gourmet Apicius will find to say to Galileo.
2.
In the Dialogues of the Dead, which appeared in 1683, the Ancient and
Modern controversy is touched on more than once, and it is the subject
of the conversation between Socrates and Montaigne. Socrates ironically
professes to expect that the age of Montaigne will show a vast
improvement on his own; that men will have profited by the experience
of many centuries; and that the old age of the world will be wiser and
better regulated than its youth. Montaigne assures him that it is not
so, and that the vigorous types of antiquity, like Pericles, Aristides,
and Socrates himself, are no longer to be found. To this assertion
Socrates opposes the doctrine of the permanence of the forces of Nature.
Nature has not degenerated in her other works; why should she cease to
produce reasonable men?
He goes on to observe that antiquity is enlarged and exalted by
distance: "In our own day we esteemed our ancestors more than they
deserved, and now our posterity esteems us more than we deserve. There
is really no difference between our ancestors, ourselves, and our
posterity. C'est toujours la meme chose." But, objects Montaigne, I
should have thought that things were always changing; that different
ages had their different characters. Are there not ages of learning and
ages of ignorance, rude ages and polite? True, replies Socrates, but
these are only externalities. The heart of man does not change with
the fashions of his life. The order of Nature remains constant (l'ordre
general de la Nature a l'air bien constant).
This conclusion harmonises with the general spirit of the Dialogues. The
permanence of the forces of Nature is asserted, but for the purpose
of dismissing the whole controversy as rather futile. Elsewhere modern
discoveries, like the circulation of the blood and the motions of the
earth, are criticised as useless; adding nothing to the happiness and
pleasures of mankind. Men acquired, at an early period, a certain amount
of useful knowledge, to which they have added nothing; since then they
have been slowly discovering things that are unnecessary. Nature has not
been so unjust as to allow one age to enjoy more pleasures than
another. And what is the value of civilisation? It moulds our words, and
embarrasses our actions; it does not affect our feelings. [Footnote:
See the dialogues of Harvey with Erasistratus (a Greek physician of
the third century B.C.); Galileo with Apicius; Montezuma with Fernando
Cortez.]
One might hardly have expected the author of these Dialogues to come
forward a few years later as a champion of the Moderns, even though, in
the dedicatory epistle to Lucian, he compared France to Greece. But he
was seriously interested in the debated question, as an intellectual
problem, and in January 1688 he published his Digression on the Ancients
and Moderns, a short pamphlet, but weightier and more suggestive than
the large work of his friend Perrault, which began to appear nine months
later.
3.
The question of pre-eminence between the Ancients and Moderns is
reducible to another. Were trees in ancient times greater than to-day?
If they were, then Homer, Plato, and Demosthenes cannot be equalled in
modern times; if they were not, they can.
Fontenelle states the problem in this succinct way at the beginning of
the Digression. The permanence of the forces of Nature had been asserted
by Saint Sorlin and Perrault; they had offered no proof, and had used
the principle rather incidentally and by way of illustration. But
the whole inquiry hinged on it. If it can be shown that man has not
degenerated, the cause of the Moderns is practically won. The issue
of the controversy must be decided not by rhetoric but by physics. And
Fontenelle offers what he regards as a formal Cartesian proof of the
permanence of natural forces.
If the Ancients had better intellects than ours, the brains of that
age must have been better arranged, formed of firmer or more delicate
fibres, fuller of "animal spirits." But if such a difference existed,
Nature must have been more vigorous; and in that case the trees must
have profited by that superior vigour and have been larger and finer.
The truth is that Nature has in her hands a certain paste which is
always the same, which she is ever turning over and over again in a
thousand ways, and of which she forms men, animals, and plants. She has
not formed Homer, Demosthenes, and Plato of a finer or better kneaded
clay than our poets, orators, and philosophers. Do not object that minds
are not material. They are connected by a material bond with the brain,
and it is the quality of this material bond that determines intellectual
differences.
But although natural processes do not change from age to age, they
differ in their effects in different climates. "It is certain that as
a result of the reciprocal dependence which exists between all parts of
the material world, differences of climate, which so clearly affect the
life of plants, must also produce some effect on human brains." May it
not be said then that, in consequence of climatic conditions, ancient
Greece and Rome produced men of mental qualities different from those
which could be produced in France? Oranges grow easily in Italy; it is
more difficult to cultivate them in France. Fontenelle replies that art
and cultivation exert a much greater influence on human brains than
on the soil; ideas can be transported more easily from one country
to another than plants; and as a consequence of commerce and mutual
influence, peoples do not retain the original mental peculiarities due
to climate. This may not be true of the extreme climates in the torrid
and glacial zones, but in the temperate zone we may discount entirely
climatic influence. The climates of Greece and Italy and that of France
are too similar to cause any sensible difference between the Greeks or
Latins and the French.
Saint Sorlin and Perrault had argued directly from the permanence of
vigour in lions or trees to the permanence of vigour in man. If trees
are the same as ever, brains must also be the same. But what about the
minor premiss? Who knows that trees are precisely the same? It is an
indemonstrable assumption that oaks and beeches in the days of Socrates
and Cicero were not slightly better trees than the oaks and beeches of
to-day. Fontenelle saw the weakness of this reasoning. He saw that it
was necessary to prove that the trees, no less than human brains, have
not degenerated. But his a priori proof is simply a statement of the
Cartesian principle of the stability of natural processes, which he put
in a thoroughly unscientific form. The stability of the laws of nature
is a necessary hypothesis, without which science would be impossible.
But here it was put to an illegitimate use. For it means that, given
precisely the same conditions, the same physical phenomena will occur.
Fontenelle therefore was bound to show that conditions had not altered
in such a way as to cause changes in the quality of nature's organic
productions. He did not do this. He did not take into consideration, for
instance, that climatic conditions may vary from age to age as well as
from country to country.
4.
Having established the natural equality of the Ancients and Moderns,
Fontenelle inferred that whatever differences exist are due to external
conditions--(1) time; (2) political institutions and the estate of
affairs in general.
The ancients were prior in time to us, therefore they were the authors
of the first inventions. For that, they cannot be regarded as our
superiors. If we had been in their place we should have been the
inventors, like them; if they were in ours, they would add to those
inventions, like us. There is no great mystery in that. We must impute
equal merit to the early thinkers who showed the way and to the later
thinkers who pursued it. If the ancient attempts to explain the universe
have been recently replaced by the discovery of a simple system (the
Cartesian), we must consider that the truth could only be reached by
the elimination of false routes, and in this way the numbers of the
Pythagoreans, the ideas of Plato, the qualities of Aristotle, all served
indirectly to advance knowledge. "We are under an obligation to the
ancients for having exhausted almost all the false theories that could
be formed." Enlightened both by their true views and by their errors, it
is not surprising that we should surpass them.
But all this applies only to scientific studies, like mathematics,
physics, and medicine, which depend partly on correct reasoning and
partly on experience. Methods of reasoning improve slowly, and the most
important advance which has been made in the present age is the method
inaugurated by Descartes. Before him reasoning was loose; he introduced
a more rigid and precise standard, and its influence is not only
manifest in our best works on physics and philosophy, but is even
discernible in books on ethics and religion.
We must expect posterity to excel us as we excel the Ancients, through
improvement of method, which is a science in itself--the most difficult
and least studied of all--and through increase of experience. Evidently
the process is endless (il est evident que tout cela n'a point de fin),
and the latest men of science must be the most competent.
But this does not apply to poetry or eloquence, round which the
controversy has most violently raged. For poetry and eloquence do not
depend on correct reasoning. They depend principally on vivacity of
imagination, and "vivacity of imagination does not require a long
course of experiments, or a great multitude of rules, to attain all the
perfection of which it is capable." Such perfection might be attained in
a few centuries. If the ancients did achieve perfection in imaginative
literature, it follows that they cannot be surpassed; but we have no
right to say, as their admirers are fond of pretending, that they cannot
be equalled.
5.
Besides the mere nature of time, we have to take into account external
circumstances in considering this question.
If the forces of nature are permanent, how are we to explain the fact
that in the barbarous centuries after the decline of Rome--the term
Middle Ages has not yet come into currency--ignorance was so dense and
deep? This breach of continuity is one of the plausible arguments of
the advocates of the Ancients. Those ages, they say, were ignorant and
barbarous because the Greek and Latin writers had ceased to be read;
as soon as the study of the classical models revived there was a
renaissance of reason and good taste. That is true, but it proves
nothing. Nature never forgot how to mould the head of Cicero or Livy.
She produces in every age men who might be great men; but the age does
not always allow them to exert their talents. Inundations of barbarians,
universal wars, governments which discourage or do not favour science
and art, prejudices which assume all variety of shapes--like the
Chinese prejudice against dissecting corpses--may impose long periods of
ignorance or bad taste.
But observe that, though the return to the study of the ancients
revived, as at one stroke, the aesthetic ideals which they had created
and the learning which they had accumulated, yet even if their works
had not been preserved we should, though it would have cost us many long
years of labour, have discovered for ourselves "ideas of the true and
the beautiful." Where should we have found them? Where the ancients
themselves found them, after much groping.
6.
The comparison of the life of collective humanity to the life of a
single man, which had been drawn by Bacon and Pascal, Saint Sorlin and
Perrault, contains or illustrates an important truth which bears on
the whole question. Fontenelle puts it thus. An educated mind is, as it
were, composed of all the minds of preceding ages; we might say that a
single mind was being educated throughout all history. Thus this secular
man, who has lived since the beginning of the world, has had his infancy
in which he was absorbed by the most urgent needs of life; his youth in
which he succeeded pretty well in things of imagination like poetry
and eloquence, and even began to reason, but with more courage than
solidity. He is now in the age of manhood, is more enlightened, and
reasons better; but he would have advanced further if the passion for
war had not distracted him and given him a distaste for the sciences to
which he has at last returned.
Figures, if they are pressed, are dangerous; they suggest unwarrantable
conclusions. It may be illuminative to liken the development of humanity
to the growth of an individual; but to infer that the human race is now
in its old age, merely on the strength of the comparison, is obviously
unjustifiable. That is what Bacon and the others had done. The fallacy
was pointed out by Fontenelle.
From his point of view, an "old age" of humanity, which if it meant
anything meant decay as well as the wisdom of experience, was contrary
to the principle of the permanence of natural forces. Man, he asserts,
will have no old age. He will be always equally capable, of achieving
the successes of his youth; and he will become more and more expert in
the things which become the age of virility. Or "to drop metaphor,
men will never degenerate." In ages to come we may be regarded--say in
America--with the same excess of admiration with which we regard the
ancients. We might push the prediction further. In still later ages the
interval of time which divides us from the Greeks and Romans will appear
so relatively small to posterity that they will classify us and the
ancients as virtually contemporary; just in the same way as we group
together the Greeks and Romans, though the Romans in their own day were
moderns in relation to the Greeks. In that remote period men will be
able to judge without prejudice the comparative merits of Sophocles and
Corneille.
Unreasonable admiration for the ancients is one of the chief obstacles
to progress (le progres des choses). Philosophy not only did not
advance, but even fell into an abyss of unintelligible ideas, because,
through devotion to the authority of Aristotle, men sought truth in his
enigmatic writings instead of seeking it in nature. If the authority of
Descartes were ever to have the same fortune, the results would be no
less disastrous.
7.
This memorable brochure exhibits, without pedantry, perspicuous
arrangement and the "geometrical" precision on which Fontenelle remarked
as one of the notes of the new epoch introduced by Descartes. It
displays too the author's open-mindedness, and his readiness to
follow where the argument leads. He is able already to look beyond
Cartesianism; he knows that it cannot be final. No man of his time was
more open-minded and free from prejudice than Fontenelle. This quality
of mind helped him to turn his eyes to the future. Perrault and his
predecessors were absorbed in the interest of the present and the past.
Descartes was too much engaged in his own original discoveries to do
more than throw a passing glance at posterity.
Now the prospect of the future was one of the two elements which were
still needed to fashion the theory of the progress of knowledge. All the
conditions for such a theory were present. Bodin and Bacon, Descartes
and the champions of the Moderns--the reaction against the Renaissance,
and the startling discoveries of science--had prepared the way; progress
was established for the past and present. But the theory of the progress
of knowledge includes and acquires its value by including the indefinite
future. This step was taken by Fontenelle. The idea had been almost
excluded by Bacon's misleading metaphor of old age, which Fontenelle
expressly rejects. Man will have no old age; his intellect will never
degenerate; and "the sound views of intellectual men in successive
generations will continually add up."
But progress must not only be conceived as extending indefinitely into
the future; it must also be conceived as necessary and certain. This is
the second essential feature of the theory. The theory would have
little value or significance, if the prospect of progress in the future
depended on chance or the unpredictable discretion of an external will.
Fontenelle asserts implicitly the certainty of progress when he declares
that the discoveries and improvements of the modern age would have been
made by the ancients if they exchanged places with the moderns; for
this amounts to saying that science will progress and knowledge increase
independently of particular individuals. If Descartes had not been born,
some one else would have done his work; and there could have been no
Descartes before the seventeenth century. For, as he says in a later
work, [Footnote: Preface des elemens de la geometrie de l'infini
(OEuvres, x. p. 40, ed. 1790).] "there is an order which regulates our
progress. Every science develops after a certain number of preceding
sciences have developed, and only then; it has to await its turn to
burst its shell."
Fontenelle, then, was the first to formulate the idea of the progress,
of knowledge, as a complete doctrine. At the moment the import and
far-reaching effects of the idea were not realised, either by himself or
by others, and his pamphlet, which appeared in the company of a perverse
theory of pastoral poetry, was acclaimed merely as an able defence of
the Moderns.
8.
If the theory of the indefinite progress of knowledge is true, it is one
of those truths which were originally established by false reasoning. It
was established on a principle which excluded degeneration, but equally
excluded evolution; and the whole conception of nature which Fontenelle
had learned from Descartes is long since dead and buried.
But it is more important to observe that this principle, which seemed
to secure the indefinite progress of knowledge, disabled Fontenelle from
suggesting a theory of the progress of society. The invariability of
nature, as he conceived it, was true of the emotions and the will,
as well as of the intellect. It implied that man himself would be
psychically always the same--unalterable, incurable. L'ordre general
de la Nature a Fair bien constant. His opinion of the human race was
expressed in the Dialogues of the Dead, [Footnote: It may be seen too in
the Plurality of Worlds.] and it never seems to have varied. The world
consists of a multitude of fools, and a mere handful of reasonable men.
Men's passions will always be the same and will produce wars in the
future as in the past. Civilisation makes no difference; it is little
more than a veneer.
Even if theory had not stood in his way, Fontenelle was the last man who
was likely to dream dreams of social improvement. He was temperamentally
an Epicurean, of the same refined stamp as Epicurus himself, and he
enjoyed throughout his long life--he lived to the age of a hundred--the
tranquillity which was the true Epicurean ideal. He was never troubled
by domestic cares, and his own modest ambition was satisfied when, at
the age of forty, he was appointed permanent Secretary of the Academy of
Sciences. He was not the man to let his mind dwell on the woes and
evils of the world; and the follies and perversities which cause them
interested him only so far as they provided material for his wit.
It remains, however, noteworthy that the author of the theory of the
progress of knowledge, which was afterwards to expand into a general
theory of human Progress, would not have allowed that this extension was
legitimate; though it was through this extension that Fontenelle's idea
acquired human value and interest and became a force in the world.
9.
Fontenelle did a good deal more than formulate the idea. He reinforced
it by showing that the prospect of a steady and rapid increase of
knowledge in the future was certified.
The postulate of the immutability of the laws of nature, which has
been the indispensable basis for the advance of modern science, is
fundamental with Descartes. But Descartes did not explicitly insist on
it, and it was Fontenelle, perhaps more than any one else, who made it
current coin. That was a service performed by the disciple; but he seems
to have been original in introducing the fruitful idea of the sciences
as confederate and intimately interconnected [Footnote: Roger Bacon,
as we saw, had a glimpse of this principle.]; not forming a number of
isolated domains, as hitherto, but constituting a system in which the
advance of one will contribute to the advance of the others. He
exposed with masterly ability the reciprocal relations of physics and
mathematics. No man of his day had a more comprehensive view of all the
sciences, though he made no original contributions to any. His curiosity
was universal, and as Secretary of the Academy he was obliged, according
to his own high standard of his duty, to keep abreast of all that was
being done in every branch of knowledge. That was possible then; it
would be impossible now.
In the famous series of obituary discourses which he delivered on
savants who were members of the Academy, Fontenelle probably
thought that he was contributing to the realisation of this ideal of
"solidarity," for they amounted to a chronicle of scientific progress in
every department. They are free from technicalities and extraordinarily
lucid, and they appealed not only to men of science, but to those of the
educated public who possessed some scientific curiosity. This brings us
to another important role of Fontenelle--the role of interpreter of
the world of science to the world outside. It is closely related to our
subject.
For the popularisation of science, which was to be one of the features
of the nineteenth century, was in fact a condition of the success of the
idea of Progress. That idea could not insinuate itself into the public
mind and become a living force in civilised societies until the meaning
and value of science had been generally grasped, and the results of
scientific discovery had been more or less diffused. The achievements of
physical science did more than anything else to convert the imaginations
of men to the general doctrine of Progress.
Before the later part of the seventeenth century, the remarkable
physical discoveries of recent date had hardly escaped beyond academic
circles. But an interest in these subjects began to become the fashion
in the later years of Louis XIV. Science was talked in the salons;
ladies studied mechanics and anatomy. Moliere's play, Les Femmes
savantes, which appeared in 1672, is one of the first indications. In
1686 Fontenelle published his Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds,
in which a savant explains the new astronomy to a lady in the park of
a country house. [Footnote: The Marquise of the Plurality of Worlds
is supposed to be Madame de la Mesangere, who lived near Rouen,
Fontenelle's birthplace. He was a friend and a frequent visitor at her
chateau. See Maigron, Fontenelle, p. 42. The English translation of 1688
was by Glanvill. A new translation was published at Dublin as late as
1761.] It is the first book--at least the first that has any claim to be
remembered--in the literature of popular science, and it is one of
the most striking. It met with the success which it deserved. It was
reprinted again and again, and it was almost immediately translated into
English.
The significance of the Plurality of Worlds is indeed much greater
than that of a pioneer work in popularisation and a model in the art
of making technical subjects interesting. We must remember that at this
time the belief that the sun revolves round the earth still prevailed.
Only the few knew better. The cosmic revolution which is associated with
the names of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo was slow in producing its
effects. It was rejected by Bacon; and the condemnation of Galileo by
the Church made Descartes, who dreaded nothing so much as a collision
with the ecclesiastical authorities unwilling to insist on it.
[Footnote: Cp. Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartesienne, i. p.
42-3.] Milton's Raphael, in the Eighth Book of Paradise Lost (published
1667), does not venture to affirm the Copernican system; he explains
it sympathetically, but leaves the question open. [Footnote: Masson
(Milton's Poetical Works, vol. 2) observes that Milton's life (1608-74)
"coincides with the period of the struggle between the two systems"
(p. 90). Milton's friends, the Smectymnians, in answer to Bishop Hall's
Humble Remonstrance (1641), "had cited the Copernican doctrine as
an unquestionable instance of a supreme absurdity." Masson has some
apposite remarks on the influence of the Ptolemaic system "upon the
thinkings and imaginations of mankind everywhere on all subjects
whatsoever till about two hundred years ago."] Fontenelle's book was an
event. It disclosed to the general public a new picture of the universe,
to which men would have to accustom their imaginations.
We may perhaps best conceive all that this change meant by supposing
what a difference it would make to us if it were suddenly discovered
that the old system which Copernicus upset was true after all, and that
we had to think ourselves back into a strictly limited universe of which
the earth is the centre. The loss of its privileged position by our own
planet; its degradation, from a cosmic point of view, to insignificance;
the necessity of admitting the probability that there may be many other
inhabited worlds--all this had consequences ranging beyond the field of
astronomy. It was as if a man who dreamed that he was living in Paris or
London should awake to discover that he was really in an obscure island
in the Pacific Ocean, and that the Pacific Ocean was immeasurably vaster
than he had imagined. The Marquise, in the Plurality of Worlds, reacts
to the startling illumination: "Voila l'univers si grand que je m'y
perds, je ne sais plus ou je suis; je ne suis plus rien.--La terre est
si effroyablement petite!"
Such a revolution in cosmic values could not fail to exert a penetrating
influence on human thought. The privileged position of the earth had
been a capital feature of the whole doctrine, as to the universe and
man's destinies, which had been taught by the Church, and it had made
that doctrine more specious than it might otherwise have seemed. Though
the Churches could reform their teaching to meet the new situation, the
fact remained that the Christian scheme sounded less plausible when the
central importance of the human race was shown to be an illusion. Would
man, stripped of his cosmic pretensions, and finding himself lost in
the immensities of space, invent a more modest theory of his destinies
confined to his own little earth--si effroyablement petite? The
eighteenth century answered this question by the theory of Progress.
10.
Fontenelle is one of the most representative thinkers of that
period--we have no distinguishing name for it--which lies between
the characteristic thinkers of the seventeenth century and the
characteristic thinkers of the eighteenth. It is a period of over sixty
years, beginning about 1680, for though Montesquieu and Voltaire were
writing long before 1740, the great influential works of the "age of
illumination" begin with the Esprit des lois in 1748. The intellectual
task of this intervening period was to turn to account the ideas
provided by the philosophy of Descartes, and use them as solvents of
the ideas handed down from the Middle Ages. We might almost call it the
Cartesian period for, though Descartes was dead, it was in these years
that Cartesianism performed its task and transformed human thought.
When we speak of Cartesianism we do not mean the metaphysical system of
the master, or any of his particular views such as that of innate
ideas. We mean the general principles, which were to leave an abiding
impression on the texture of thought: the supremacy of reason over
authority, the stability of the laws of Nature, rigorous standards of
proof. Fontenelle was far from accepting all the views of Descartes,
whom he does not scruple to criticise; but he was a true Cartesian
in the sense that he was deeply imbued with these principles, which
generated, to use an expression of his own, "des especes de rebelles,
qui conspiraient contre l'ignorance et les prejuges dominants."
[Footnote: Eloge de M. Lemery.] And of all these rebels against ruling
prejudices he probably did more than any single man to exhibit the
consequences of the Cartesian ideas and drive them home.
The Plurality of Worlds was a contribution to the task of transforming
thought and abolishing ancient error; but the History of Oracles which
appeared in the following year was more characteristic. It was a free
adaptation of an unreadable Latin treatise by a Dutchman, which in
Fontenelle's skilful hands becomes a vehicle for applying Cartesian
solvents to theological authority. The thesis is that the Greek oracles
were a sacerdotal imposture, and not, as ecclesiastical tradition said,
the work of evil spirits, who were stricken silent at the death of Jesus
Christ. The effect was to discredit the authority of the early Fathers
of the Church, though the writer has the discretion to repudiate such
an intention. For the publication was risky; and twenty years later a
Jesuit Father wrote a treatise to confute it, and exposed the secret
poison, with consequences which might have been disastrous for
Fontenelle if he had not had powerful friends among the Jesuits
themselves. Fontenelle had none of the impetuosity of Voltaire,
and after the publication of the History of Oracles he confined his
criticism of tradition to the field of science. He was convinced that
"les choses fort etablies ne peuvent etre attaquees que par degrez."
[Footnote: Eloge de M. Lemery.]
The secret poison, of which Fontenelle prepared this remarkable dose
with a touch which reminds us of Voltaire, was being administered in
the same Cartesian period, and with similar precautions, by Bayle. Like
Fontenelle, this great sceptic, "the father of modern incredulity" as
he was called by Joseph de Maistre, stood between the two centuries and
belonged to both. Like Fontenelle, he took a gloomy view of humanity;
he had no faith in that goodness of human nature which was to be a
characteristic dogma of the age of illumination. But he was untouched
by the discoveries of science; he took no interest in Galileo or Newton;
and while the most important work of Fontenelle was the interpretation
of the positive advances of knowledge, Bayle's was entirely subversive.
The principle of unchangeable laws in nature is intimately connected
with the growth of Deism which is a note of this period. The function of
the Deity was virtually confined to originating the machine of nature,
which, once regulated, was set beyond any further interference on His
part, though His existence might be necessary for its conservation. A
view so sharply opposed to the current belief could not have made way
as it did without a penetrating criticism of the current theology.
Such criticism was performed by Bayle. His works were a school for
rationalism for about seventy years. He supplied to the thinkers of the
eighteenth century, English as well as French, a magazine of subversive
arguments, and he helped to emancipate morality both from theology and
from metaphysics.
This intellectual revolutionary movement, which was propagated in salons
as well as by books, shook the doctrine of Providence which Bossuet had
so eloquently expounded. It meant the enthronement of reason--Cartesian
reason--before whose severe tribunal history as well as opinions were
tried. New rules of criticism were introduced, new standards of proof.
When Fontenelle observed that the existence of Alexander the Great
could not be strictly demonstrated and was no more than highly probable,
[Footnote: Plurality des mondes, sixieme soir.] it was an undesigned
warning that tradition would receive short shrift at the hands of men
trained in analytical Cartesian methods.
11.
That the issue between the claims of antiquity and the modern age should
have been debated independently in England and France indicates that the
controversy was an inevitable incident in the liberation of the human
spirit from the authority of the ancients. Towards the end of the
century the debate in France aroused attention in England and led to
a literary quarrel, less important but not less acrimonious than that
which raged in France. Sir William Temple's Essay, Wotton's Reflexions,
and Swift's satire the Battle of the Books are the three outstanding
works in the episode, which is however chiefly remembered on account
of its connection with Bentley's masterly exposure of the fabricated
letters of Phalaris.
The literary debate in France, indeed, could not have failed to
reverberate across the Channel; for never perhaps did the literary world
in England follow with more interest, or appreciate more keenly the
productions of the great French writers of the time. In describing
Will's coffee-house, which was frequented by Dryden and all who
pretended to be interested in polite letters, Macaulay says, "there was
a faction for Perrault and the moderns, a faction for Boileau and the
ancients." In the discussions on this subject a remarkable Frenchman who
had long lived in England as an exile, M. de Saint Evremond, must have
constantly taken part. The disjointed pieces of which Saint Evremond's
writings consist are tedious and superficial, but they reveal a mind
of much cultivation and considerable common sense. His judgement on
Perrault's Parallel is that the author "has discovered the defects of
the ancients better than he has made out the advantage of the moderns;
his book is good and capable of curing us of abundance of errors."
[Footnote: In a letter to the Duchess of Mazarin, Works, Eng. tr., iii.
418.] He was not a partisan. But his friend, Sir William Temple, excited
by the French depreciations of antiquity, rushed into the lists with
greater courage than discretion.
Temple was ill equipped for the controversy, though his Essay on
Ancient and Modern Learning (1690) is far from deserving the disdain of
Macaulay, who describes its matter as "ludicrous and contemptible to the
last degree." [Footnote: The only point in it which need be noted here
is that the author questioned the cogency of Fontenelle's argument, that
the forces of nature being permanent human ability is in all ages
the same. "May there not," he asks, "many circumstances concur to one
production that do not to any other in one or many ages?" Fontenelle
speaks of trees. It is conceivable that various conditions and accidents
"may produce an oak, a fig, or a plane-tree, that shall deserve to
be renowned in story, and shall not perhaps be paralleled in other
countries or times. May not the same have happened in the production,
growth, and size of wit and genius in the world, or in some parts or
ages of it, and from many more circumstances that contributed towards it
than what may concur to the stupendous growth of a tree or animal?"] And
it must be confessed that the most useful result of the Essay was the
answer which it provoked from Wotton. For Wotton had a far wider
range of knowledge, and a more judicious mind, than any of the other
controversialists, with the exception of Fontenelle; and in knowledge
of antiquity he was Fontenelle's superior. His inquiry stands out as
the most sensible and unprejudiced contribution to the whole debate. He
accepts as just the reasoning of Fontenelle "as to the comparative force
of the geniuses of men in the several ages of the world and of the equal
force of men's understandings absolutely considered in all times since
learning first began to be cultivated amongst mankind." But this is not
incompatible with the thesis that in some branches the ancients excelled
all who came after them. For it is not necessary to explain such
excellence by the hypothesis that there was a particular force of genius
evidently discernible in former ages, but extinct long since, and that
nature is now worn out and spent. There is an alternative explanation.
There may have been special circumstances "which might suit with those
ages which did exceed ours, and with those things wherein they did
exceed us, and with no other age nor thing besides."
But we must begin our inquiry by sharply distinguishing two fields
of mental activity--the field of art, including poetry, oratory,
architecture, painting, and statuary; and the field of knowledge,
including mathematics, natural science, physiology, with all their
dependencies. In the case of the first group there is room for variety
of opinion; but the superiority of the Greeks and Romans in poetry and
literary style may be admitted without prejudice to the mental equality
of the moderns, for it may be explained partly by the genius of their
languages and partly by political circumstances--for example, in the
case of oratory, [Footnote: This had been noted by Fontenelle in his
Digression.] by the practical necessity of eloquence. But as regards
the other group, knowledge is not a matter of opinion or taste, and
a definite judgement is possible. Wotton then proceeds to review
systematically the field of science, and easily shows, with more
completeness and precision than Perrault, the superiority of modern
methods and the enormous strides which had been made.
As to the future, Wotton expresses himself cautiously. It is not easy to
say whether knowledge will advance in the next age proportionally to
its advance in this. He has some fears that there may be a falling away,
because ancient learning has still too great a hold over modern books,
and physical and mathematical studies tend to be neglected. But he ends
his Reflexions by the speculation that "some future age, though perhaps
not the next, and in a country now possibly little thought of, may do
that which our great men would be glad to see done; that is to say, may
raise real knowledge, upon foundations laid in this age, to the utmost
possible perfection to which it may be brought by mortal men in this
imperfect state."
The distinction, on which Wotton insisted, between the sciences which
require ages for their development and the imaginative arts which may
reach perfection in a short time had been recognised by Fontenelle,
whose argument on this point differs from that of his friend Perrault.
For Perrault contended that in literature and art, as well as in
science, later generations can, through the advantage of time and longer
experience, attain to a higher excellence than their predecessors.
Fontenelle, on the other hand, held that poetry and eloquence have a
restricted field, and that therefore there must be a time at which
they reach a point of excellence which cannot be exceeded. It was his
personal opinion that eloquence and history actually reached the highest
possible perfection in Cicero and Livy.
But neither Fontenelle nor Wotton came into close quarters with the
problem which was raised--not very clearly, it is true--by Perrault. Is
there development in the various species of literature and art? Do they
profit and enrich themselves by the general advance of civilisation?
Perrault, as we have seen, threw out the suggestion that increased
experience and psychological study enabled the moderns to penetrate more
deeply into the recesses of the human soul, and therefore to bring to a
higher perfection the treatment of the character, motives, and passions
of men. This suggestion admits of being extended. In the Introduction
to his Revolt of Islam, Shelley, describing his own intellectual and
aesthetic experiences, writes:
The poetry of ancient Greece and Rome, and modern Italy, and our
own country, has been to me like external nature, a passion and an
enjoyment.... I have considered poetry in its most comprehensive sense;
and have read the poets and the historians and the metaphysicians whose
writings have been accessible to me--and have looked upon the beautiful
and majestic scenery of the earth--as common sources of those elements
which it is the province of the Poet to embody and combine. And he
appends a note:
In this sense there may be such a thing as perfectibility in works of
fiction, notwithstanding the concession often made by the advocates
of human improvement, that perfectibility is a term applicable only to
science.
In other words, all the increases of human experience, from age to age,
all the speculative adventures of the intellect, provide the artist,
in each succeeding generation, with more abundant sources for aesthetic
treatment. As years go on, life in its widest sense offers more and more
materials "which it is the province of the Poet to embody and combine."
This is evidently true; and would it not seem to follow that literature
is not excluded from participating in the common development of
civilisation? One of the latest of the champions of the Moderns, the
Abbe Terrasson, maintained that "to separate the general view of the
progress of the human mind in regard to natural science, and in regard
to belles-lettres, would be a fitting expedient to a man who had two
souls, but it is useless to him who has only one." [Footnote: Abbe
Terrasson, 1670-1750. His Philosophie applicable a tons les objets
de l'esprit et de la raison was issued posthumously in 1754. His
Dissertation critique sur l'Iliade appeared in 1715.]He put the matter
in too abstract a way to carry conviction; but the nineteenth century
was to judge that he was not entirely wrong. For the question was, as we
shall see, raised anew by Madame de Stael, and the theory was finally
to emerge that art and literature, like laws and institutions, are an
expression of society and therefore inextricably linked with the other
elements of social development--a theory, it may be observed, which
while it has discredited the habit of considering works of art in a
vacuum, dateless and detached, as they were generally considered by
critics of the seventeenth century, leaves the aesthetic problem much
where it was.
Perrault's suggestion as to the enrichment of the material of the artist
by new acquisitions would have served to bring literature and art
into the general field of human development, without compromising the
distinction on which Wotton and others insisted between the natural
sciences and the aesthetic arts. But that distinction, emphatically
endorsed by Voltaire, had the effect of excluding literature and art
from the view of those who in the eighteenth century recognised progress
in the other activities of man.
12.
It is notable that in this literary controversy the Moderns, even
Fontenelle, seem curiously negligent of the import of the theory which
they were propounding of the intellectual progress of man. They treat
it almost incidentally, as part of the case for the defence, not as
an immensely important conclusion. Its bearings were more definitely
realised by the Abbe Terrasson, whom I have just named. A geometer and a
Cartesian, he took part in the controversy in its latest stage, when La
Motte and Madame Dacier were the principal antagonists. The human mind,
he said, has had its infancy and youth; its maturity began in the age
of Augustus; the barbarians arrested its course till the Renaissance;
in the seventeenth century, through the illuminating philosophy of
Descartes, it passed beyond the stage which it had attained in the
Augustan age, and the eighteenth century should surpass the seventeenth.
Cartesianism is not final; it has its place in a development. It was
made possible by previous speculations, and it will be succeeded by
other systems. We must not pursue the analogy of humanity with an
individual man and anticipate a period of old age. For unlike the
individual, humanity "being composed of all ages," is always gaining
instead of losing. The age of maturity will last indefinitely, because
it is a progressive, not a stationary, maturity. Later generations
will always be superior to the earlier, for progress is "a natural and
necessary effect of the constitution of the human mind."
CHAPTER VI. THE GENERAL PROGRESS OF MAN: ABBE DE SAINT-PIERRE
The revolutionary speculations on the social and moral condition of man
which were the outstanding feature of the eighteenth century in France,
and began about 1750, were the development of the intellectual movement
of the seventeenth, which had changed the outlook of speculative
thought. It was one continuous rationalistic movement. In the days
of Racine and Perrault men had been complacently conscious of the
enlightenment of the age in which they were living, and as time went on,
this consciousness became stronger and acuter; it is a note of the age
of Voltaire. In the last years of Louis XIV., and in the years which
followed, the contrast between this mental enlightenment and the dark
background--the social evils and miseries of the kingdom, the gross
misgovernment and oppression--began to insinuate itself into men's
minds. What was the value of the achievements of science, and
the improvement of the arts of life, if life itself could not be
ameliorated? Was not some radical reconstruction possible, in the social
fabric, corresponding to the radical reconstruction inaugurated by
Descartes in the principles of science and in the methods of thought?
Year by year the obscurantism of the ruling powers became more glaring,
and the most gifted thinkers, towards the middle of the century, began
to concentrate their brains on the problems of social science and to
turn the light of reason on the nature of man and the roots of society.
They wrought with unscrupulous resolution and with far-reaching effects.
With the extension of rationalism into the social domain, it came about
naturally that the idea of intellectual progress was enlarged into the
idea of the general Progress of man. The transition was easy. If
it could be proved that social evils were due neither to innate and
incorrigible disabilities of the human being nor to the nature of
things, but simply to ignorance and prejudices, then the improvement of
his state, and ultimately the attainment of felicity, would be only
a matter of illuminating ignorance and removing errors, of increasing
knowledge and diffusing light. The growth of the "universal human
reason"--a Cartesian phrase, which had figured in the philosophy of
Malebranche--must assure a happy destiny to humanity.
Between 1690 and 1740 the conception of an indefinite progress of
enlightenment had been making its way in French intellectual circles,
and must often have been a topic of discussion in the salons, for
instance, of Madame de Lambert, Madame de Tencin, and Madame Dupin,
where Fontenelle was one of the most conspicuous guests. To the same
circle belonged his friend the Abbe de Saint-Pierre, and it is in his
writings that we first find the theory widened in its compass to embrace
progress towards social perfection. [Footnote: For his life and works
the best book is J. Drouet's monograph, L'Abbe de Saint-Pierre: l'homme
et l'oeuvre (1912), but on some points Goumy's older study (1859) is
still worth consulting. I have used the edition of his works in 12
volumes published during his lifetime at Rotterdam, 1733-37.]
1.
He was brought up on Cartesian principles, and he idealised Descartes
somewhat as Lucretius idealised Epicurus. But he had no aptitude for
philosophy, and he prized physical science only as far as it directly
administered to the happiness of men. He was a natural utilitarian, and
perhaps no one was ever more consistent in making utility the criterion
of all actions and theories. Applying this standard he obliterated from
the roll of great men most of those whom common opinion places among
the greatest. Alexander, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne receive short shrift
from the Abbe de Saint-Pierre. [Footnote: Compare Voltaire, Lettres sur
les Anglais, xii., where Newton is acclaimed as the greatest man who
ever lived.] He was superficial in his knowledge both of history and of
science, and his conception of utility was narrow and a little vulgar.
Great theoretical discoverers like Newton and Leibnitz he sets in a
lower rank than ingenious persons who used their scientific skill to
fashion some small convenience of life. Monuments of art, like Notre
Dame, possessed little value in his eyes compared with a road, a bridge,
or a canal.
Like most of his distinguished contemporaries he was a Deist. On his
deathbed he received the usual rites of the Church in the presence of
his household, and then told the priest that he did not believe a word
of all that. His real views are transparent in some of his works through
the conventional disguises in which prudent writers of the time were
wont to wrap their assaults on orthodoxy. To attack Mohammedanism by
arguments which are equally applicable to Christianity was a device for
propagating rationalism in days when it was dangerous to propagate
it openly. This is what the Abbe did in his Discourse against
Mohammedanism. Again, in his Physical Explanation of an Apparition he
remarks: "To diminish our fanatical proclivities, it would be useful if
the Government were to establish an annual prize, to be awarded by the
Academy of Sciences, for the best explanation, by natural laws, of the
extraordinary effects of imagination, of the prodigies related in Greek
and Latin literature, and of the pretended miracles told by Protestants,
Schismatics, and Mohammedans." The author carefully keeps on the right
side of the fence. No Catholic authorities could take exception to
this. But no intelligent reader could fail to see that all miracles were
attacked. The miracles accepted by the Protestants were also believed in
by the Catholics.
He was one of the remarkable figures of his age. We might almost say
that he was a new type--a nineteenth century humanitarian and pacifist
in an eighteenth century environment. He was a born reformer, and he
devoted his life to the construction of schemes for increasing human
happiness. He introduced the word bienfaisance into the currency of
the French language, and beneficence was in his eyes the sovran virtue.
There were few departments of public affairs in which he did not point
out the deficiencies and devise ingenious plans for improvement. Most
of his numerous writings are projets--schemes of reform in government,
economics, finance, education, all worked out in detail, and all aiming
at the increase of pleasure and the diminution of pain. The Abbe's
nimble intelligence had a weak side, which must have somewhat
compromised his influence. He was so confident in the reasonableness of
his projects that he always believed that if they were fairly considered
the ruling powers could not fail to adopt them in their own interests.
It is the nature of a reformer to be sanguine, but the optimism of
Saint-Pierre touched naivete. Thousands might have agreed with his view
that the celibacy of the Catholic clergy was an unwholesome institution,
but when he drew up a proposal for its abolition and imagined that the
Pope, unable to resist his arguments, would immediately adopt it, they
might be excused for putting him down as a crank who could hardly be
taken seriously. The form in which he put forward his memorable scheme
for the abolition of war exhibits the same sanguine simplicity. All his
plans, Rousseau observed, showed a clear vision of what their effects
would be, "but he judged like a child of means to bring them about." But
his abilities were great, and his actual influence was considerable. It
would have been greater if he had possessed the gift of style.
2.
He was not the first to plan a definite scheme for establishing a
perpetual peace. Long ago Emeric Cruce had given to the world a proposal
for a universal league, including not only the Christian nations of
Europe, but the Turks, Persians, and Tartars, which by means of a court
of arbitration sitting at Venice should ensure the settlement of all
disputes by peaceful means. [Footnote: Le Nouveau Cynee (Paris, 1623).
It has recently been reprinted with an English translation by T. W.
Balch, Philadelphia (1909).] The consequence of universal peace, he
said, will be the arrival of "that beautiful century which the ancient
theologians promise after there have rolled by six thousand years. For
they say that then the world will live happily and in repose. Now it
happens that that time has nearly expired, and even if it is not, it
depends only on the Princes to give beforehand this happiness to their
peoples." Later in the century, others had ventilated similar projects
in obscure publications, but the Abbe does not refer to any of his
predecessors.
He was not blinded by the superficial brilliancy of the reign of Louis
XIV. to the general misery which the ambitious war-policy of that sovran
brought both upon France and upon her enemies. His Annales politiques
are a useful correction to the Siecle de Louis Quatorze. It was in the
course of the great struggle of the Spanish Succession that he
turned his attention to war and came to the conclusion that it is an
unnecessary evil and even an absurdity. In 1712 he attended the congress
at Utrecht in the capacity of secretary to Cardinal de Polignac, one
of the French delegates. His experiences there confirmed his optimistic
mind in the persuasion that perpetual peace was an aim which might
readily be realised; and in the following year he published the memoir
which he had been preparing, in two volumes, to which he added a third
four years later.
Though he appears not to have known the work of Cruce he did not claim
originality. He sheltered his proposal under an august name, entitling
it Project of Henry the Great to render Peace Perpetual, explained
by the Abbe de Saint-Pierre. The reference is to the "great design"
ascribed to Henry IV. by Sully, and aimed at the abasement of the power
of Austria: a federation of the Christian States of Europe arranged
in groups and under a sovran Diet, which would regulate international
affairs and arbitrate in all quarrels. [Footnote: It is described
in Sully's Memoires, Book XXX.] Saint-Pierre, ignoring the fact that
Sully's object was to eliminate a rival power, made it the text for
his own scheme of a perpetual alliance of all the sovrans of Europe
to guarantee to one another the preservation of their states and to
renounce war as a means of settling their differences. He drew up the
terms of such an alliance, and taking the European powers one by
one demonstrated that it was the plain interest of each to sign the
articles. Once the articles were signed the golden age would begin.
[Footnote: For Sully's grand Design compare the interesting article of
Sir Geoffrey Butler in the Edinburgh Review, October 1919.]
It is not to our present purpose to comment on this plan which the
author with his characteristic simplicity seriously pressed upon the
attention of statesmen. It is easy to criticise it in the light of
subsequent history, and to see that, if the impossible had happened and
the experiment had been tried and succeeded, it might have caused more
suffering than all the wars from that day to this. For it was based on a
perpetuation of the political status quo in Europe. It assumed that the
existing political distribution of power was perfectly satisfactory and
conformable to the best interests of all the peoples concerned. It would
have hindered the Partition of Poland, but it would have maintained the
Austrian oppression of Italians. The project also secured to the sovrans
the heritage of their authority and guarded against civil wars. This
assumed that the various existing constitutions were fundamentally just.
The realisation of the scheme would have perpetuated all the evils of
autocratic governments. Its author did not perceive that the radical
evil in France was irresponsible power. It needed the reign of Louis XV.
and the failure of attempts at reform under his successor to bring this
home. The Abbe even thought that an increase of the despotic authority
of the government was desirable, provided this were accompanied by an
increase in the enlightenment and virtue of its ministers.
In 1729 he published an abridgment of his scheme, and here he looks
beyond its immediate results to its value for distant posterity. No one,
he says, can imagine or foresee the advantages which such an alliance
of European states will yield to Europe five hundred years after its
establishment. Now we can see the first beginnings, but it is beyond the
powers of the human mind to discern its infinite effects in the future.
It may produce results more precious than anything hitherto experienced
by man. He supports his argument by observing that our primitive
ancestors could not foresee the improvements which the course of ages
would bring in their rudimentary arrangements for securing social order.
3.
It is characteristic that the Abbe de Saint-Pierre's ideas about
Progress were a by-product of his particular schemes. In 1773 he
published a Project to Perfect the Government of States, and here he
sketched his view of the progressive course of civilisation. The old
legend of the golden age, when men were perfectly happy, succeeded by
the ages of silver, bronze, and iron, exactly reverses the truth of
history. The age of iron came first, the infancy of society, when men
were poor and ignorant of the arts; it is the present condition of the
savages of Africa and America. The age of bronze ensued, in which there
was more security, better laws, and the invention of the most necessary
arts began. There followed the age of silver, and Europe has not yet
emerged from it. Our reason has indeed reached the point of considering
how war may be abolished, and is thus approaching the golden age of the
future; but the art of government and the general regulation of society,
notwithstanding all the improvements of the past, is still in its
infancy. Yet all that is needed is a short series of wise reigns in our
European states to reach the age of gold or, in other words, a paradise
on earth.
A few wise reigns. The Abbe shared the illusion of many that government
is omnipotent and can bestow happiness on men. The imperfections
of governments were, he was convinced, chiefly due to the fact that
hitherto the ablest intellects had not been dedicated to the study of
the science of governing. The most essential part of his project was the
formation of a Political Academy which should do for politics what the
Academy of Sciences did for the study of nature, and should act as
an advisory body to ministers of state on all questions of the public
welfare. If this proposal and some others were adopted, he believed that
the golden age would not long be delayed. These observations--hardly
more than obiter dicta--show that Saint-Pierre's general view of the
world was moulded by a conception of civilisation progressing towards a
goal of human happiness. In 1737 he published a special work to
explain this conception: the Observations on the Continuous Progress of
Universal Reason.
He recurs to the comparison of the life of collective humanity to that
of an individual, and, like Fontenelle and Terrasson, accentuates the
point where the analogy fails. We may regard our race as composed of all
the nations that have been and will be--and assign to it different ages.
For instance, when the race is ten thousand years old a century will be
what a single year is in the life of a centenarian. But there is this
prodigious difference. The mortal man grows old and loses his reason and
happiness through the enfeeblement of his bodily machine; whereas the
human race, by the perpetual and infinite succession of generations,
will find itself at the end of ten thousand years more capable of
growing in wisdom and happiness than it was at the end of four thousand.
At present the race is apparently not more than seven or eight thousand
years old, and is only "in the infancy of human reason," compared with
what it will be five or six thousand years hence. And when that stage is
reached, it will only have entered on what we may call its first youth,
when we consider what it will be when it is a hundred thousand years
older still, continually growing in reason and wisdom.
Here we have for the first time, expressed in definite terms, the vista
of an immensely long progressive life in front of humanity. Civilisation
is only in its infancy. Bacon, like Pascal, had conceived it to be in
its old age. Fontenelle and Perrault seem to have regarded it as in its
virility; they set no term to its duration, but they did not dwell on
future prospects. The Abbe was the first to fix his eye on the remote
destinies of the race and name immense periods of time. It did not occur
to him to consider that our destinies are bound up with those of the
solar system, and that it is useless to operate with millennial periods
of progress unless you are assured of a corresponding stability in the
cosmic environment.
As a test of the progress which reason has already made, Saint-Pierre
asserts that a comparison of the best English and French works on morals
and politics with the best works of Plato and Aristotle proves that the
human race has made a sensible advance. But that advance would have been
infinitely greater were it not that three general obstacles retarded it
and even, at some times and in some countries, caused a retrogression.
These obstacles were wars, superstition, and the Jealousy of rulers who
feared that progress in the science of politics would be dangerous to
themselves. In consequence of these impediments it was only in the time
of Bodin and Bacon that the human race began to start anew from the
point which it had reached in the days of Plato and Aristotle.
Since then the rate of progress has been accelerated, and this has been
due to several causes. The expansion of sea commerce has produced more
wealth, and wealth means greater leisure, and more writers and readers.
In the second place, mathematics and physics are more studied in
colleges, and their tendency is to liberate us from subjection to the
authority of the ancients. Again, the foundation of scientific Academies
has given facilities both for communicating and for correcting new
discoveries; the art of printing provides a means for diffusing them;
and, finally, the habit of writing in the vulgar tongue makes them
accessible. The author might also have referred to the modern efforts to
popularise science, in which his friend Fontenelle had been one of the
leaders.
He proceeds, in this connection, to lay down a rather doubtful
principle, that in any two countries the difference in enlightenment
between the lowest classes will correspond to the difference between the
most highly educated classes. At present, he says, Paris and London are
the places where human wisdom has reached the most advanced stage. It
is certain that the ten best men of the highest class at Ispahan or
Constantinople will be inferior in their knowledge of politics and
ethics to the ten most distinguished sages of Paris or London. And this
will be true in all classes. The thirty most intelligent children of the
age of fourteen at Paris will be more enlightened than the thirty most
intelligent children of the same age at Constantinople, and the same
proportional difference will be true of the lowest classes of the two
cities.
But while the progress of speculative reason has been rapid, practical
reason--the distinction is the Abbe's--has made little advance. In point
of morals and general happiness the world is apparently much the same
as ever. Our mediocre savants know twenty times as much as Socrates and
Confucius, but our most virtuous men are not more virtuous than they.
The growth of science has added much to the arts and conveniences of
life, and to the sum of pleasures, and will add more. The progress
in physical science is part of the progress of the "universal human
reason," whose aim is the augmentation of our happiness. But there are
two other sciences which are much more important for the promotion of
happiness--Ethics and Politics--and these, neglected by men of genius,
have made little way in the course of two thousand years. It is a
grave misfortune that Descartes and Newton did not devote themselves to
perfecting these sciences, so incomparably more useful for mankind
than those in which they made their great discoveries. They fell into a
prevailing error as to the comparative values of the various domains of
knowledge, an error to which we must also ascribe the fact that while
Academies of Sciences and Belles-Lettres exist there are no such
institutions for Politics or Ethics.
By these arguments he establishes to his own satisfaction that there
are no irremovable obstacles to the Progress of the human race towards
happiness, no hindrances that could not be overcome if governments only
saw eye to eye with the Abbe de Saint-Pierre. Superstition is already
on the decline; there would be no more wars if his simple scheme for
permanent peace were adopted. Let the State immediately found Political
and Ethical Academies; let the ablest men consecrate their talents to
the science of government; and in a hundred years we shall make more
progress than we should make in two thousand at the rate we are moving.
If these things are done, human reason will have advanced so far in
two or three millenniums that the wisest men of that age will be as
far superior to the wisest of to-day as these are to the wisest African
savages. This "perpetual and unlimited augmentation of reason" will one
day produce an increase in human happiness which would astonish us more
than our own civilisation would astonish the Kaffirs.
4.
The Abbe de Saint-Pierre was indeed terribly at ease in confronting the
deepest and most complex problems which challenge the intellect of man.
He had no notion of their depth and complexity, and he lightly essayed
them, treating human nature, as if it were an abstraction, by a method
which he would doubtless have described as Cartesian. He was simply
operating with the ideas which were all round him in a society
saturated with Cartesianism,--supremacy of human reason, progressive
enlightenment, the value of this life for its own sake, and the standard
of utility. Given these ideas and the particular bias of his own mind,
it required no great ingenuity to advance from the thought of the
progress of science to the thought of progress in man's moral nature
and his social conditions. The omnipotence of governments to mould the
destinies of peoples, the possibility of the creation of enlightened
governments, and the indefinite progress of enlightenment--all articles
of his belief--were the terms of an argument of the sorites form, which
it was a simple matter to develop in his brief treatise.
But we must not do him injustice. He was a much more considerable
thinker than posterity for a long time was willing to believe. It is
easy to ridicule some of his projets, and dismiss him as a crank who was
also somewhat of a bore. The truth, however, is that many of his schemes
were sound and valuable. His economic ideas, which he thought out for
himself, were in advance of his time, and he has even been described by
a recent writer as "un contemporain egare au xviii siecle." Some of
his financial proposals were put into practice by Turgot. But his
significance in the development of the revolutionary ideas which were
to gain control in the second half of the eighteenth century has
hardly been appreciated yet, and it was imperfectly appreciated by his
contemporaries.
It is easy to see why. His theories are buried in his multitudinous
projets. If, instead of working out the details of endless particular
reforms, he had built up general theories of government and society,
economics and education, they might have had no more intrinsic
value, but he would have been recognised as the precursor of the
Encyclopaedists.
For his principles are theirs. The omnipotence of government and laws to
mould the morals of peoples; the subordination of all knowledge to the
goddess of utility; the deification of human reason; and the doctrine
of Progress. His crude utilitarianism led him to depreciate the study of
mathematical and physical sciences--notwithstanding his veneration for
Descartes--as comparatively useless, and he despised the fine arts as
waste of time and toil which might be better spent. He had no
knowledge of natural science and he had no artistic susceptibility. The
philosophers of the Encyclopaedia did not go so far, but they tended
in this direction. They were cold and indifferent towards speculative
science, and they were inclined to set higher value on artisans than on
artists.
In his religious ideas the Abbe differed from Voltaire and the later
social philosophers in one important respect, but this very difference
was a consequence of his utilitarianism. Like them he was a Deist, as we
saw; he had imbibed the spirit of Bayle and the doctrine of the English
rationalists, which were penetrating French society during the later
part of his life. His God, however, was more than the creator and
organiser of the Encyclopaedists, he was also the "Dieu vengeur et
remunerateur" in whom Voltaire believed. But here his faith was larger
than Voltaire's. For while Voltaire referred the punishments and rewards
to this life, the Abbe believed in the immortality of the soul,
in heaven and hell. He acknowledged that immortality could not be
demonstrated, that it was only probable, but he clung to it firmly and
even intolerantly. It is clear from his writings that his affection for
this doctrine was due to its utility, as an auxiliary to the magistrate
and the tutor, and also to the consideration that Paradise would add to
the total of human happiness.
But though his religion had more articles, he was as determined a foe of
"superstition" as Voltaire, Diderot, and the rest. He did not go so
far as they in aggressive rationalism--he belonged to an older
generation--but his principles were the same.
The Abbe de Saint-Pierre thus represents the transition from the earlier
Cartesianism, which was occupied with purely intellectual problems, to
the later thought of the eighteenth century, which concentrated itself
on social problems. He anticipated the "humanistic" spirit of the
Encyclopaedists, who were to make man, in a new sense, the centre of
the world. He originated, or at least was the first to proclaim, the new
creed of man's destinies, indefinite social progress.
CHAPTER VII. NEW CONCEPTIONS OF HISTORY: MONTESQUIEU, VOLTAIRE, TURGOT
The theory of human Progress could not be durably established by
abstract arguments, or on the slender foundations laid by the Abbe de
Saint-Pierre. It must ultimately be judged by the evidence afforded
by history, and it is not accidental that, contemporaneously with the
advent of this idea, the study of history underwent a revolution. If
Progress was to be more than the sanguine dream of an optimist it must
be shown that man's career on earth had not been a chapter of accidents
which might lead anywhere or nowhere, but is subject to discoverable
laws which have determined its general route, and will secure his
arrival at the desirable place. Hitherto a certain order and unity had
been found in history by the Christian theory of providential design and
final causes. New principles of order and unity were needed to replace
the principles which rationalism had discredited. Just as the advance of
science depended on the postulate that physical phenomena are subject
to invariable laws, so if any conclusions were to be drawn from history
some similar postulate as to social phenomena was required.
It was thus in harmony with the general movement of thought that about
the middle of the eighteenth century new lines of investigation were
opened leading to sociology, the history of civilisation, and the
philosophy of history. Montesquieu's De l'esprit des lois, which may
claim to be the parent work of modern social science, Voltaire's Essai
sur les moeurs, and Turgot's plan of a Histoire universelle begin a new
era in man's vision of the past.
1.
Montesquieu was not among the apostles of the idea of Progress. It
never secured any hold upon his mind. But he had grown up in the same
intellectual climate in which that idea was produced; he had been
nurtured both on the dissolving, dialectic of Bayle, and on the
Cartesian enunciation of natural law. And his work contributed to the
service, not of the doctrine of the past, but of the doctrine of the
future.
For he attempted to extend the Cartesian theory to social facts. He laid
down that political, like physical, phenomena are subject to general
laws. He had already conceived this, his most striking and important
idea, when he wrote the Considerations on the Greatness and Decadence of
the Romans (1734), in which he attempted to apply it:
It is not Fortune who governs the world, as we see from the history of
the Romans. There are general causes, moral or physical, which operate
in every monarchy, raise it, maintain it, or overthrow it; all that
occurs is subject to these causes; and if a particular cause, like the
accidental result of a battle, has ruined a state, there was a general
cause which made the downfall of this state ensue from a single battle.
In a word, the principal movement (l'allure principale) draws with it
all the particular occurrences.
But if this excludes Fortune it also dispenses with Providence, design,
and final causes; and one of the effects of the Considerations which
Montesquieu cannot have overlooked was to discredit Bossuet's treatment
of history.
The Esprit des lois appeared fourteen years later. Among books which
have exercised a considerable influence on thought few are more
disappointing to a modern reader. The author had not the gift of what
might be called logical architecture, and his work produces the effect
of a collection of ideas which he was unable to co-ordinate in the
clarity of a system. A new principle, the operation of general causes,
is enthroned; but, beyond the obvious distinction of physical and moral,
they are not classified. We have no guarantee that the moral causes are
fully enumerated, and those which are original are not distinguished
from those which are derived. The general cause which Montesquieu
impresses most clearly on the reader's mind is that of physical
environment--geography and climate.
The influence of climate on civilisation was not a new idea. In modern
times, as we have seen, it was noticed by Bodin and recognised by
Fontenelle. The Abbe de Saint-Pierre applied it to explain the origin of
the Mohammedan religion, and the Abbe Du Bos in his Reflexions on Poetry
and Painting maintained that climate helps to determine the epochs
of art and science. Chardin in his Travels, a book which Montesquieu
studied, had also appreciated its importance. But Montesquieu drew
general attention to it, and since he wrote, geographical conditions
have been recognised by all inquirers as an influential factor in the
development of human societies. His own discussion of the question did
not result in any useful conclusions. He did not determine the limits of
the action of physical conditions, and a reader hardly knows whether to
regard them as fundamental or accessory, as determining the course of
civilisation or only perturbing it. "Several things govern men," he
says, "climate, religion, laws, precepts of government, historical
examples, morals, and manners, whence is formed as their result a
general mind (esprit general)." This co-ordination of climate with
products of social life is characteristic of his unsystematic thought.
But the remark which the author went on to make, that there is always
a correlation between the laws of a people and its esprit general, was
important. It pointed to the theory that all the products of social life
are closely interrelated.
In Montesquieu's time people were under the illusion that legislation
has an almost unlimited power to modify social conditions. We have seen
this in the case of Saint-Pierre. Montesquieu's conception of general
laws should have been an antidote to this belief. It had however less
effect on his contemporaries than we might have expected, and they
found more to their purpose in what he said of the influence of laws on
manners. There may be something in Comte's suggestion that he could not
give his conception any real consistency or vigour, just because he
was himself unconsciously under the influence of excessive faith in the
effects of legislative action.
A fundamental defect in Montesquieu's treatment of social phenomena is
that he abstracted them from their relations in time. It was his merit
to attempt to explain the correlation of laws and institutions with
historical circumstances, but he did not distinguish or connect stages
of civilisation. He was inclined to confound, as Sorel has observed,
all periods and constitutions. Whatever be the value of the idea of
Progress, we may agree with Comte that, if Montesquieu had grasped
it, he would have produced a more striking work. His book announces a
revolution in the study of political science, but in many ways belongs
itself to the pre-Montesquieu era.
2.
In the same years in which Montesquieu was busy on the composition of
the Esprit des lois, Voltaire was writing his Age of Louis XIV. and his
Essay on the Manners and Mind of Nations, and on the Principal Facts of
History from Charlemagne to the Death of Louis XIII. The former work,
which everybody reads still, appeared in 1751. Parts of the Essay, which
has long since fallen into neglect, were published in the Mercure de
France between 1745 and 1751; it was issued complete in 1756, along with
the Age of Louis XIV., which was its continuation. If we add the Precis
of the Reign of Louis XV. (1769), and observe that the Introduction and
first fourteen chapters of the Essay sketch the history of the world
before Charlemagne, and that China, India, and America are included
in the survey, Voltaire's work amounts to a complete survey of the
civilisation of the world from the earliest times to his own. If
Montesquieu founded social science, Voltaire created the history of
civilisation, and the Essay, for all its limitations, stands out as one
of the considerable books of the century.
In his Age of Louis XIV. he announced that his object was "to paint not
the actions of a single man, but the mind of men (l'esprit des hommes)
in the most enlightened age that had ever been," and that "the progress
of the arts and sciences" was an essential part of his subject. In
the same way he proposed in the Essay to trace "l'histoire de l'esprit
humain," not the details of facts, and to show by what steps man
advanced "from the barbarous rusticity" of the times of Charlemagne and
his successors "to the politeness of our own." To do this, he said, was
really to write the history of opinion, for all the great successive
social and political changes which have transformed the world were due
to changes of opinion. Prejudice succeeded prejudice, error followed
error; "at last, with time men came to correct their ideas and learn to
think."
The motif of the book is, briefly, that wars and religions have been
the great obstacles to the progress of humanity, and that if they were
abolished, with the prejudices which engender them, the world would
rapidly improve.
"We may believe," he says, "that reason and industry will always
progress more and more; that the useful arts will be improved; that
of the evils which have afflicted men, prejudices, which are not their
least scourge, will gradually disappear among all those who govern
nations, and that philosophy, universally diffused, will give some
consolation to human nature for the calamities which it will experience
in all ages."
This indeed is not the tone of the Abbe de Saint-Pierre. Voltaire's
optimism was always tempered with cynicism. But the idea of Progress
is there, though moderately conceived. And it is based on the same
principle--universal reason implanted in man, which "subsists in spite
of all the passions which make war on it, in spite of all the tyrants
who would drown it in blood, in spite of the imposters who would
annihilate it by superstition." And this was certainly his considered
view. His common sense prevented him from indulging in Utopian
speculations about the future; and his cynicism constantly led him to
use the language of a pessimist. But at an early stage of his career he
had taken up arms for human nature against that "sublime misanthrope"
Pascal, who "writes against human nature almost as he wrote against
the Jesuits"; and he returned to the attack at the end of his life. Now
Pascal's Pensees enshrined a theory of life--the doctrine of original
sin, the idea that the object of life is to prepare for death--which was
sternly opposed to the spirit of Progress. Voltaire instinctively felt
that this was an enemy that had to be dealt with. In a lighter vein he
had maintained in a well-known poem, Le Mondain, [Footnote: 1756.] the
value of civilisation and all its effects, including luxury, against
those who regretted the simplicity of ancient times, the golden age of
Saturn.
O le bon temps que ce siecle de fer!
Life in Paris, London, or Rome to-day is infinitely preferable to life
in the garden of Eden.
D'un bon vin frais ou la mousse ou la seve
Ne gratta point le triste gosier d'Eve.
La soie et l'or ne brillaient point chez eux.
Admirez-vous pour cela nos aieux?
Il leur manquait l'industrie et l'aisance:
Est-ce vertu? c'etait pure ignorance.
To return to the Essay, it flung down the gage of battle to that
conception of the history of the world which had been brilliantly
represented by Bossuet's Discours sur l'histoire universelle. This work
was constantly in Voltaire's mind. He pointed out that it had no claim
to be universal; it related only to four or five peoples, and especially
the little Jewish nation which "was unknown to the rest of the world or
justly despised," but which Bossuet made the centre of interest, as
if the final cause of all the great empires of antiquity lay in their
relations to the Jews. He had Bossuet in mind when he said "we will
speak of the Jews as we would speak of Scythians or Greeks, weighing
probabilities and discussing facts." In his new perspective the
significance of Hebrew history is for the first time reduced to moderate
limits.
But it was not only in this particular, though central, point that
Voltaire challenged Bossuet's view. He eliminated final causes
altogether, and Providence plays no part on his historical stage. Here
his work reinforced the teaching of Montesquieu. Otherwise Montesquieu
and Voltaire entirely differed in their methods. Voltaire concerned
himself only with the causal enchainment of events and the immediate
motives of men. His interpretation of history was confined to the
discovery of particular causes; he did not consider the operation of
those larger general causes which Montesquieu investigated. Montesquieu
sought to show that the vicissitudes of societies were subject to law;
Voltaire believed that events were determined by chance where they
were not consciously guided by human reason. The element of chance is
conspicuous even in legislation: "almost all laws have been instituted
to meet passing needs, like remedies applied fortuitously, which have
cured one patient and kill others."
On Voltaire's theory, the development of humanity might at any moment
have been diverted into a different course; but whatever course it
took the nature of human reason would have ensured a progress in
civilisation. Yet the reader of the Essay and Louis XIV. might well
have come away with a feeling that the security of Progress is frail
and precarious. If fortune has governed events, if the rise and fall
of empires, the succession of religions, the revolutions of states, and
most of the great crises of history were decided by accidents, is there
any cogent ground for believing that human reason, the principle to
which Voltaire attributes the advance of civilisation, will prevail in
the long run? Civilisation has been organised here and there, now and
then, up to a certain point; there have been eras of rapid progress,
but how can we be sure that these are not episodes, themselves also
fortuitous? For growth has been followed by decay, progress by regress;
can it be said that history, authorises the conclusion that reason will
ever gain such an ascendancy that the play of chance will no longer
be able to thwart her will? Is such a conclusion more than a hope,
unsanctioned by the data of past experience, merely one of the
characteristics of the age of illumination?
Voltaire and Montesquieu thus raised fundamental questions of great
moment for the doctrine of Progress, questions which belong to what
was soon to be known as the Philosophy of History, a name invented by
Voltaire, though hardly meant by him in the sense which it afterwards
assumed.
3.
Six years before Voltaire's Essay was published in its complete form a
young man was planning a work on the same subject. Turgot is honourably
remembered as an economist and administrator, but if he had ever written
the Discourses on Universal History which he designed at the age
of twenty-three his position in historical literature might have
overshadowed his other claims to be remembered. We possess a partial
sketch of its plan, which is supplemented by two lectures he delivered
at the Sorbonne in 1750; so that we know his general conceptions.
He had assimilated the ideas of the Esprit des lois, and it is probable
that he had read the parts of Voltaire's work which had appeared in
a periodical. His work, like Voltaire's, was to be a challenge to
Bossuet's view of history; his purpose was to trace the fortunes of the
race in the light of the idea of Progress. He occasionally refers to
Providence but this is no more than a prudent lip-service. Providence
has no functions in his scheme. The part which it played in Bossuet is
usurped by those general causes which he had learned from Montesquieu.
But his systematic mind would have organised and classified the ideas
which Montesquieu left somewhat confused. He criticised the inductions
drawn in the Esprit des lois concerning the influence of climate as
hasty and exaggerated; and he pointed out that the physical causes can
only produce their effects by acting on "the hidden principles which
contribute to form our mind and character." It follows that the
psychical or moral causes are the first element to consider, and it is
a fault of method to try to evaluate physical causes till we have
exhausted the moral, and are certain that the phenomena cannot be
explained by these alone. In other words, the study of the development
of societies must be based on psychology; and for Turgot, as for all his
progressive contemporaries, psychology meant the philosophy of Locke.
General necessary causes, therefore, which we should rather call
conditions, have determined the course of history--the nature of man,
his passions, and his reason, in the first place; and in the second, his
environment,--geography and climate. But its course is a strict sequence
of particular causes and effects, "which bind the state of the world (at
a given moment) to all those which have preceded it." Turgot does not
discuss the question of free-will, but his causal continuity does not
exclude "the free action of great men." He conceives universal history
as the progress of the human race advancing as an immense whole
steadily, though slowly, through alternating periods of calm and
disturbance towards greater perfection. The various units of the entire
mass do not move with equal steps, because nature is not impartial with
her gifts. Some men have talents denied to others, and the gifts of
nature are sometimes developed by circumstances, sometimes left buried
in obscurity. The inequalities in the march of nations are due to the
infinite variety of circumstances; and these inequalities may be taken
to prove that the world had a beginning, for in an eternal duration they
would have disappeared.
But the development of human societies has not been guided by human
reason. Men have not consciously made general happiness the end of their
actions. They have been conducted by passion and ambition and have
never known to what goal they were moving. For if reason had presided,
progress would soon have been arrested. To avoid war peoples would have
remained in isolation, and the race would have lived divided for ever
into a multitude of isolated groups, speaking different tongues. All
these groups would have been limited in the range of their ideas,
stationary in science, art, and government, and would never have risen
above mediocrity. The history of China is an example of the results of
restricted intercourse among peoples. Thus the unexpected conclusion
emerges, that without unreason and injustice there would have been no
progress.
It is hardly necessary to observe that this argument is untenable.
The hypothesis assumes that reason is in control among the primitive
peoples, and at the same time supposes that its power would completely
disappear if they attempted to engage in peaceful intercourse. But
though Turgot has put his point in an unconvincing form, his purpose was
to show that as a matter of fact "the tumultuous and dangerous passions"
have been driving-forces which have moved the world in a desirable
direction till the time should come for reason to take the helm.
Thus, while Turgot might have subscribed to Voltaire's assertion that
history is largely "un ramas de crimes, de folies, et de malheurs," his
view of the significance of man's sufferings is different and almost
approaches the facile optimism of Pope--"whatever is, is right." He
regards all the race's actual experiences as the indispensable mechanism
of Progress, and does not regret its mistakes and calamities. Many
changes and revolutions, he observes, may seem to have had most
mischievous effects; yet every change has brought some advantage, for
it has been a new experience and therefore has been instructive.
Man advances by committing errors. The history of science shows (as
Fontenelle had pointed out) that truth is reached over the ruins of
false hypotheses.
The difficulty presented by periods of decadence and barbarism
succeeding epochs of enlightenment is met by the assertion that in
such dark times the world has not stood still; there has really been a
progression which, though relatively inconspicuous, is not unimportant.
In the Middle Ages, which are the prominent case, there were
improvements in mechanical arts, in commerce, in some of the habits of
civil life, all of which helped to prepare the way for happier times.
Here Turgot's view of history is sharply opposed to Voltaire's. He
considers Christianity to have been a powerful agent of civilisation,
not a hinderer or an enemy. Had he executed his design, his work might
well have furnished a notable makeweight to the view held by Voltaire,
and afterwards more judicially developed by Gibbon, that "the triumph of
barbarism and religion" was a calamity for the world.
Turgot also propounded two laws of development. He observed that when a
people is progressing, every step it takes causes an acceleration in the
rate of progress. And he anticipated Comte's famous "law" of the three
stages of intellectual evolution, though without giving it the extensive
and fundamental significance which Comte claimed for it. "Before man
understood the causal connection of physical phenomena, nothing was
so natural as to suppose they were produced by intelligent beings,
invisible and resembling ourselves; for what else would they have
resembled?" That is Comte's theological stage. "When philosophers
recognised the absurdity of the fables about the gods, but had not yet
gained an insight into natural history, they thought to explain the
causes of phenomena by abstract expressions such as essences and
faculties." That is the metaphysical stage. "It was only at a later
period, that by observing the reciprocal mechanical action of bodies
hypotheses were formed which could be developed by mathematics and
verified by experience." There is the positive stage. The observation
assuredly does not possess the far-reaching importance which Comte
attached to it; but whatever value it has, Turgot deserves the credit of
having been the first to state it.
The notes which Turgot made for his plan permit us to conjecture that
his Universal History would have been a greater and more profound work
than the Essay of Voltaire. It would have embodied in a digested form
the ideas of Montesquieu to which Voltaire paid little attention, and
the author would have elaborated the intimate connection and mutual
interaction among all social phenomena--government and morals, religion,
science, and arts. While his general thesis coincided with that
of Voltaire--the gradual advance of humanity towards a state of
enlightenment and reasonableness,--he made the idea of Progress more
vital; for him it was an organising conception, just as the idea of
Providence was for St. Augustine and Bossuet an organising conception,
which gave history its unity and meaning. The view that man has
throughout been blindly moving in the right direction is the counterpart
of what Bossuet represented as a divine plan wrought out by the actions
of men who are ignorant of it, and is sharply opposed to the views, of
Voltaire and the other philosophers of the day who ascribed Progress
exclusively to human reason consciously striving against ignorance and
passion.
CHAPTER VIII. THE ENCYCLOPAEDISTS AND ECONOMISTS
1.
The intellectual movement which prepared French opinion for the
Revolution and supplied the principles for reconstituting society may
be described as humanistic in the sense that man was the centre of
speculative interest.
"One consideration especially that we ought never to lose from sight,"
says Diderot, "is that, if we ever banish a man, or the thinking and
contemplative being, from above the surface of the earth, this pathetic
and sublime spectacle of nature becomes no more than a scene of
melancholy and silence... It is the presence of man that gives its
interest to the existence of other beings... Why should we not make him
a common centre?... Man is the single term from which we ought to set
out." [Footnote: The passage from Diderot's article Encyclopedie is
given as translated by Morley, Diderot, i, 145.] Hence psychology,
morals, the structure of society, were the subjects which riveted
attention instead of the larger supra-human problems which had occupied
Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibnitz. It mattered little whether the
universe was the best that could be constructed; what mattered was the
relation of man's own little world to his will and capacities.
Physical science was important only in so far as it could help social
science and minister to the needs of man. The closest analogy to this
development of thought is not offered by the Renaissance, to which the
description HUMANISTIC has been conventionally appropriated, but rather
by the age of illumination in Greece in the latter half of the fifth
century B.C., represented by Protagoras, Socrates, and others who turned
from the ultimate problems of the cosmos, hitherto the main study of
philosophers, to man, his nature and his works.
In this revised form of "anthropo-centrism" we see how the general
movement of thought has instinctively adapted itself to the astronomical
revolution. On the Ptolemaic system it was not incongruous or absurd
that man, lord of the central domain in the universe, should regard
himself as the most important cosmic creature. This is the view,
implicit in the Christian scheme, which had been constructed on the old
erroneous cosmology. When the true place of the earth was shown and
man found himself in a tiny planet attached to one of innumerable solar
worlds, his cosmic importance could no longer be maintained. He was
reduced to the condition of an insect creeping on a "tas de boue," which
Voltaire so vividly illustrated in Micromegas. But man is resourceful;
[words in Greek]. Displaced, along with his home, from the centre of
things, he discovers a new means of restoring his self-importance;
he interprets his humiliation as a deliverance. Finding himself in an
insignificant island floating in the immensity of space, he decides that
he is at last master of his own destinies; he can fling away the old
equipment of final causes, original sin, and the rest; he can construct
his own chart and, bound by no cosmic scheme, he need take the universe
into account only in so far as he judges it to be to his own profit. Or,
if he is a philosopher, he may say that, after all, the universe for
him is built out of his own sensations, and that by virtue of this
relativity "anthropo-centrism" is restored in a new and more effective
form.
Built out of his own sensations: for the philosophy of Locke was now
triumphant in France. I have used the term Cartesianism to designate,
not the metaphysical doctrines of Descartes (innate ideas, two
substances, and the rest), but the great principles which survived the
passing of his metaphysical system--the supremacy of reason, and the
immutability of natural laws, not subject to providential interventions.
These principles still controlled thought, but the particular views
of Descartes on mental phenomena were superseded in France by the
psychology of Locke, whose influence was established by Voltaire and
Condillac. The doctrine that all our ideas are derived from the senses
lay at the root of the whole theory of man and society, in the light of
which the revolutionary thinkers, Diderot, Helvetius, and their fellows,
criticised the existing order and exposed the reigning prejudices. This
sensationalism (which went beyond what Locke himself had really meant)
involved the strict relativity of knowledge and led at once to the old
pragmatic doctrine of Protagoras, that man is the measure of all things.
And the spirit of the French philosophers of the eighteenth century was
distinctly pragmatic. The advantage of man was their principle, and the
value of speculation was judged by its definite service to humanity.
"The value and rights of truth are founded on its utility," which is
"the unique measure of man's judgements," one thinker asserts; another
declares that "the useful circumscribes everything," l'utile circonscrit
tout; another lays down that "to be virtuous is to be useful; to be
vicious is to be useless or harmful; that is the sum of morality."
Helvetius, anticipating Bentham, works out the theory that utility is
the only possible basis of ethics. Bacon, the utilitarian, was
extolled like Locke. [Footnote: The passages quoted on utility are
from d'Holbach, Systems de la nature, i. c. 12, p. 224; c. 15, p. 312;
Diderot, De I'interpretation de la nature in OEuvres, ii. p. 13; Raynal,
Histoire des deux Indes, vii. p. 416. The effectiveness of the teaching
may be illustrated from the Essay on Man, by Antoine Rivarol, whom Burke
called the Tacitus of the Revolution. "The virtues are only virtues
because they are useful to the human race." OEuvres choisis (ed. de
Lescure), i. p. 211.] As, a hundred years before, his influence had
inspired the foundation of the Royal Society, so now his name
was invoked by the founders of the Encyclopaedia. [Footnote: See
d'Alembert's tribute to him in the Discours preliminaire.]
Beneath all philosophical speculation there is an undercurrent of
emotion, and in the French philosophers of the eighteenth century this
emotional force was strong and even violent. They aimed at practical
results. Their work was a calculated campaign to transform the
principles and the spirit of governments and to destroy sacerdotalism.
The problem for the human race being to reach a state of felicity by its
own powers, these thinkers believed that it was soluble by the gradual
triumph of reason over prejudice and knowledge over ignorance. Violent
revolution was far from their thoughts; by the diffusion of knowledge
they hoped to create a public opinion which would compel governments to
change the tenor of their laws and administration and make the happiness
of the people their guiding principle. The optimistic confidence that
man is perfectible, which means capable of indefinite improvement,
inspired the movement as a whole, however greatly particular thinkers
might differ in their views.
Belief in Progress was their sustaining faith, although, occupied by
the immediate problems of amelioration, they left it rather vague and
ill-defined. The word itself is seldom pronounced in their writings. The
idea is treated as subordinate to the other ideas in the midst of which
it had grown up: Reason, Nature, Humanity, Illumination (lumieres). It
has not yet entered upon an independent life of its own and received a
distinct label, though it is already a vital force.
In reviewing the influences which were forming a new public opinion
during the forty years before the Revolution, it is convenient for the
present purpose to group together the thinkers (including Voltaire)
associated with the Encyclopaedia, who represented a critical and
consciously aggressive force against traditional theories and existing
institutions. The constructive thinker Rousseau was not less
aggressive, but he stands apart and opposed, by his hostility to modern
civilisation. Thirdly, we must distinguish the school of Economists,
also reformers and optimists, but of more conservative temper than the
typical Encyclopaedists.
2.
The Encyclopaedia (1751-1765) has rightly been pronounced the central
work of the rationalistic movement which made the France of 1789 so
different from the France of 1715. [Footnote: The general views which
governed the work may be gathered from d'Alembert's introductory
discourse and from Diderot's article Encyclopedie. An interesting sketch
of the principal contributors will be found in Morley's Diderot, i.
chap. v. Another modern study of the Encyclopaedic movement is the
monograph of L. Ducros, Les Encyclopidistes (1900). Helvetius has
recently been the subject of a study by Albert Keim (Helvetius, sa vie
et son oeuvre, 1907). Among other works which help the study of the
speculations of this age from various points of view may be mentioned:
Marius Roustan, Les Philosophes et la societe francaise au xviii
siecle(1906); Espinas, La Philosophie sociale du xviii siecle et la
Revolution (1898); Lichtenberger, Le Socialisme au xviii siecle(1895).
I have not mentioned in the text Boullanger (1722-1758), who contributed
to the Encyclopaedia the article on Political Economy (which has nothing
to do with economics but treats of ancient theocracies); the emphasis
laid on his views on progress by Buchez (op. cit. i. III sqq.) is
quite excessive.] It was the organised section of a vast propaganda,
speculative and practical, carried on by men of the most various
views, most of whom were associated directly with it. As has well been
observed, it did for the rationalism of the eighteenth century in France
much what the Fortnightly Review, under the editorship of Mr. Morley
(from 1868 to 1882) did for that of the nineteenth in England, as an
organ for the penetrating criticism of traditional beliefs. If Diderot,
who directed the Encyclopaedia with the assistance of d'Alembert the
mathematician, had lived a hundred years later he would probably have
edited a journal.
We saw that the "solidarity" of the sciences was one of the conceptions
associated with the theory of intellectual progress, and that the
popularisation of knowledge was another. Both these conceptions
inspired the Encyclopaedia, which was to gather up and concentrate
the illumination of the modern age. It was to establish the lines of
communication among all departments, "to enclose in the unity of a
system the infinitely various branches of knowledge." And it was to be a
library of popular instruction. But it was also intended to be an organ
of propaganda. In the history of the intellectual revolution it is
in some ways the successor of the Dictionary of Bayle, which,
two generations before, collected the material of war to demolish
traditional doctrines. The Encyclopaedia carried on the campaign against
authority and superstition by indirect methods, but it was the work of
men who were not sceptics like Bayle, but had ideals, positive purposes,
and social hopes. They were not only confident in reason and in
science, but most of them had also a more or less definite belief in the
possibility of an advance of humanity towards perfection.
As one of their own band afterwards remarked, they were less occupied in
enlarging the bounds of knowledge than in spreading the light and making
war on prejudice. [Footnote: Condorcet, Esquisse, p. 206 (ed. 1822).]
The views of the individual contributors differed greatly, and they
cannot be called a school, but they agreed so far in common tendencies
that they were able to form a co-operative alliance.
The propaganda of which the Encyclopaedia was the centre was reinforced
by the independent publications of some of the leading men who
collaborated or were closely connected with their circle, notably those
of Diderot himself, Baron d'Holbach, and Helvetius.
3.
The optimism of the Encyclopaedists was really based on an intense
consciousness of the enlightenment of their own age. The progressiveness
of knowledge was taken as axiomatic, but was there any guarantee that
the light, now confined to small circles, could ever enlighten the world
and regenerate mankind? They found the guarantee they required, not in
an induction from the past experience of the race, but in an a priori
theory: the indefinite malleability of human nature by education
and institutions. This had been, as we saw, assumed by the Abbe de
Saint-Pierre. It pervaded the speculation of the age, and was formally
deduced from the sensational psychology of Locke and Condillac. It was
developed, in an extreme form, in the work of Helvetius, De l'esprit
(1758).
In this book, which was to exert a large influence in England, Helvetius
sought, among other things, to show that the science of morals is
equivalent to the science of legislation, and that in a well-organised
society all men are capable of rising to the highest point of mental
development. Intellectual and moral inequalities between man and man
arise entirely from differences in education and social circumstances.
Genius itself is not a gift of nature; the man of genius is a product of
circumstances--social, not physical, for Helvetius rejects the
influence of climate. It follows that if you change education and social
institutions you can change the character of men.
The error of Helvetius in ignoring the irremovable physical differences
between individuals, the varieties of cerebral organisation, was at once
pointed out by Diderot. This error, however, was not essential to the
general theory of the immeasurable power of social institutions over
human character, and other thinkers did not fall into it. All alike,
indeed, were blind to the factor of heredity. But the theory in its
collective application contains a truth which nineteenth century
critics, biassed by their studies in heredity, have been prone to
overlook. The social inheritance of ideas and emotions to which
the individual is submitted from infancy is more important than the
tendencies physically transmitted from parent to child. The power
of education and government in moulding the members of a society
has recently been illustrated on a large scale in the psychological
transformation of the German people in the life of a generation.
It followed from the theory expounded by Helvetius that there is no
impassable barrier between the advanced and the stationary or retrograde
races of the earth. [Footnote: The most informing discussion of the
relations between the Advanced and Backward races is Bryce's Romanes
Lecture (1902).] "True morality," Baron d'Holbach wrote, "should be
the same for all the inhabitants of the globe. The savage man and
the civilised; the white man, the red man, the black man; Indian and
European, Chinaman and Frenchman, Negro and Lapp have the same nature.
The differences between them are only modifications of the common nature
produced by climate, government, education, opinions, and the various
causes which operate on them. Men differ only in the ideas they form
of happiness and the means which they have imagined to obtain it." Here
again the eighteenth century theorists held a view which can no longer
be dismissed as absurd. Some are coming round to the opinion that
enormous differences in capacity which seem fundamental are a result of
the differences in social inheritance, and that these again are due to
a long sequence of historical circumstances; and consequently that there
is no people in the world doomed by nature to perpetual inferiority
or irrevocably disqualified by race from playing a useful part in the
future of civilisation.
4.
This doctrine of the possibility of indefinitely moulding the characters
of men by laws and institutions--whether combined or not with a belief
in the natural equality of men's faculties--laid a foundation on which
the theory of the perfectibility of humanity could be raised. It marked,
therefore, an important stage in the development of the doctrine of
Progress.
It gave, moreover, a new and larger content to that doctrine by its
applicability, not only to the peoples which are at present in the van
of civilisation, but also to those which have lagged far behind and may
appear irreclaimably barbarous--thus potentially including all humanity
in the prospect of the future. Turgot had already conceived "the total
mass of the human race moving always slowly forward"; he had declared
that the human mind everywhere contains the germs of progress and
that the inequality of peoples is due to the infinite variety of their
circumstances. This enlarging conception was calculated to add strength
to the idea of Progress, by raising it to a synthesis comprehending not
merely the western civilised nations but the whole human world.
Interest in the remote peoples of the earth, in the unfamiliar
civilisations of the East, in the untutored races of America and Africa,
was vivid in France in the eighteenth century. Everyone knows how
Voltaire and Montesquieu used Hurons or Persians to hold up the glass to
Western manners and morals, as Tacitus used the Germans to criticise the
society of Rome. But very few ever look into the seven volumes of the
Abbe Raynal's History of the Two Indies which appeared in 1772. It
is however, one of the remarkable books of the century. Its immediate
practical importance lay in the array of facts which it furnished to the
friends of humanity in the movement against negro slavery. But it was
also an effective attack on the Church and the sacerdotal system. The
author's method was the same which his greater contemporary Gibbon
employed on a larger scale. A history of facts was a more formidable
indictment than any declamatory attack.
Raynal brought home to the conscience of Europeans the miseries
which had befallen the natives of the New World through the Christian
conquerors and their priests. He was not indeed an enthusiastic preacher
of Progress. He is unable to decide between the comparative advantages
of the savage state of nature and the most highly cultivated society.
But he observes that "the human race is what we wish to make it," that
the felicity of man depends entirely on the improvement of legislation;
and in the survey of the history of Europe to which the last Book of
his work is devoted, his view is generally optimistic. [Footnote:
cp. Raynal, Histoire, vii. 214, 256. This book was first published
anonymously; the author's name appeared in the edition of 1780.]
5. Baron d'Holbach had a more powerful brain than Helvetius, but his
writings had probably less influence, though he was the spiritual father
of two prominent Revolutionaries, Hebert and Chaumette. His System of
Nature (1770) develops a purely naturalistic theory of the universe, in
which the prevalent Deism is rejected: there is no God; material Nature
stands out alone, self-sufficing, dominis privata superbis. The book
suggests how the Lucretian theory of development might have led to the
idea of Progress. But it sent a chilly shock to the hearts of many
and probably convinced few. The effective part was the outspoken and
passionate indictment of governments and religions as causes of most of
the miseries of mankind.
It is in other works, especially in his Social System, that his views
of Progress are to be sought. Man is simply a part of nature; he has
no privileged position, and he is born neither good nor bad. Erras, as
Seneca said, si existumas vitia nobiscum esse: supervenerunt, ingesta
sunt. [Footnote: Seneca, Ep. 124.] We are made good or bad by education,
public opinion, laws, government; and here the author points to the
significance of the instinct of imitation as a social force, which a
modern writer, M. Tarde, has worked into a system.
The evils, which are due to the errors of tyranny and superstition, the
force of truth will gradually diminish if it cannot completely banish
them; for our governments and laws may be perfected by the progress
of useful knowledge. But the process will be a long one: centuries of
continuous mental effort in unravelling the causes of social ill-being
and repeated experiments to determine the remedies (des experiences
reiterees de la societe). In any case we cannot look forward to the
attainment of an unchangeable or unqualified felicity. That is a mere
chimera "incompatible with the nature of a being whose feeble machine
is subject to derangement and whose ardent imagination will not always
submit to the guidance of reason. Sometimes to enjoy, sometimes to
suffer, is the lot of man; to enjoy more often than to suffer is what
constitutes well-being."
D'Holbach was a strict determinist; he left no room for freewill in
the rigorous succession of cause and effect, and the pages in which he
drives home the theory of causal necessity are still worth reading. From
his naturalistic principles he inferred that the distinction between
nature and art is not fundamental; civilisation is as rational as the
savage state. Here he was at one with Aristotle.
All the successive inventions of the human mind to change or perfect
man's mode of existence and render it happier were only the necessary
consequence of his essence and that of the existences which act upon
him. All we do or think, all we are or shall be, is only an effect of
what universal nature has made us. Art is only nature acting by the aid
of the instruments which she has fashioned. [Footnote: The passages of
d'Holbach specially referred to are: Systeme social, i. 1, p. 13; Syst.
de la nature, i. 6, p. 88; Syst. soc. i. 15, p. 271; Syst. de la n. i.
1, p. 3.]
Progress, therefore, is natural and necessary, and to criticise or
condemn it by appealing to nature is only to divide the house of nature
against itself.
If d'Holbach had pressed his logic further, he would have taken a more
indulgent and calmer view of the past history of mankind. He would have
acknowledged that institutions and opinions to which modern reason may
give short shrift were natural and useful in their day, and would have
recognised that at any stage of history the heritage of the past is no
less necessary to progress than the solvent power of new ideas. Most
thinkers of his time were inclined to judge the past career of humanity
anachronistically. All the things that had been done or thought which
could not be justified in the new age of enlightenment, were regarded
as gratuitous and inexcusable errors. The traditions, superstitions, and
customs, the whole "code of fraud and woe" transmitted from the past,
weighed then too heavily in France to allow the school of reform to
do impartial justice to their origins. They felt a sort of resentment
against history. D'Alembert said that it would be well if history could
be destroyed; and the general tendency was to ignore the social memory
and the common heritage of past experiences which mould a human
society and make it something very different from a mere collection of
individuals.
Belief in Progress, however, took no extravagant form. It did
not beguile d'Holbach or any other of the leading thinkers of the
Encyclopaedia epoch into optimistic dreams of the future which might
await mankind. They had a much clearer conception of obstacles than the
good Abbe de Saint-Pierre. Helvetius agrees with d'Holbach that progress
will be slow, and Diderot is wavering and sceptical of the question of
indefinite social improvement. [Footnote: De l'esprit, Disc. ii. cc. 24,
25.]
6.
The reformers of the Encyclopaedia group were not alone in disseminating
the idea of Progress. Another group of thinkers, who widely differed in
their principles, though some of them had contributed articles to
the Encyclopaedia, [Footnote: Quesnay and Turgot, who, though not
professedly a Physiocrat, held the same views as the sect.] also did
much to make it a power. The rise of the special study of Economics
was one of the most significant facts in the general trend of thought
towards the analysis of civilisation. Economical students found that in
seeking to discover a true theory of the production, distribution, and
employment of wealth, they could not avoid the consideration of the
constitution and purpose of society. The problems of production and
distribution could not be divorced from political theory: production
raises the question of the functions of government and the limits of its
intervention in trade and industry; distribution involve questions of
property, justice, and equality. The employment of riches leads into the
domain of morals.
The French Economists or "Physiocrats," as they were afterwards called,
who formed a definite school before 1760--Quesnay the master, Mirabeau,
Mercier de la Riviere, and the rest--envisaged their special subject
from a wide philosophical point of view; their general economic theory
was equivalent to a theory of human society. They laid down the doctrine
of a Natural Order in political communities, and from it they deduced
their economic teaching.
They assumed, like the Encyclopaedists, that the end of society is the
attainment of terrestrial happiness by its members, and that this is the
sole purpose of government. The object of a treatise by Mercier de la
Riviere [Footnote: L'ordre naturel et essentiel des societes politiqes,
1767.] (a convenient exposition of the views of the sect) is, in his own
words, to discover the natural order for the government of men living in
organised communities, which will assure to them temporal felicity: an
order in which everything is well, necessarily well, and in which the
interests of all are so perfectly and intimately consolidated that all
are happy, from the ruler to the least of his subjects.
But in what does this happiness consist? His answer is that "humanly
speaking, the greatest happiness possible for us consists in the
greatest possible abundance of objects suitable to our enjoyment and in
the greatest liberty to profit by them." And liberty is necessary not
only to enjoy them but also to produce them in the greatest abundance,
since liberty stimulates human efforts. Another condition of abundance
is the multiplication of the race; in fact, the happiness of men and
their numbers are closely bound up together in the system of nature.
From these axioms may be deduced the Natural Order of a human society,
the reciprocal duties and rights whose enforcement is required for the
greatest possible multiplication of products, in order to procure to the
race the greatest sum of happiness with the maximum population.
Now, individual property is the indispensable condition for full
enjoyment of the products of human labour; "property is the measure
of liberty, and liberty is the measure of property." Hence, to realise
general happiness it is only necessary to maintain property and
consequently liberty in all their natural extent. The fatal error which
has made history what it is has been the failure to recognise this
simple fact; for aggression and conquest, the causes of human miseries,
violate the law of property which is the foundation of happiness.
The practical inference was that the chief function of government was
to protect property and that complete freedom should be left to private
enterprise to exploit the resources of the earth. All would be well if
trade and industry were allowed to follow their natural tendencies. This
is what was meant by Physiocracy, the supremacy of the Natural Order. If
rulers observed the limits of their true functions, Mercier thought that
the moral effect would be immense. "The public system of government
is the true education of moral man. Regis ad exemplum totus componitur
orbis." [Footnote: The particulars of the Physiocratic doctrine as to
the relative values of agriculture and commerce which Adam Smith was
soon to criticise do not concern us; nor is it necessary to repeat the
obvious criticisms on a theory which virtually reduced the science of
society to a science of production and distribution.]
While they advocated a thorough reform of the principles which ruled the
fiscal policy of governments, the Economists were not idealists, like
the Encyclopaedic philosophers; they sowed no seeds of revolution. Their
starting-point was that which is, not that which ought to be. And, apart
from their narrower point of view, they differed from the philosophers
in two very important points. They did not believe that society was of
human institution, and therefore they did not believe that there could
be any deductive science of society based simply on man's nature.
Moreover, they held that inequality of condition was one of its
immutable features, immutable because it is a consequence of the
inequality of physical powers.
But they believed in the future progress of society towards a state of
happiness through the increase of opulence which would itself depend on
the growth of justice and "liberty"; and they insisted on the importance
of the increase and diffusion of knowledge. Their influence in promoting
a belief in Progress is vouched for by Condorcet, the friend and
biographer of Turgot. As Turgot stands apart from the Physiocrats
(with whom indeed he did not identify himself) by his wider views on
civilisation, it might be suspected that it is of him that Condorcet was
chiefly thinking. Yet we need not limit the scope of his statement
when we remember that as a sect the Economists assumed as their first
principle the eudaemonic value of civilisation, declared that temporal
happiness is attainable, and threw all their weight into the scales
against the doctrine of Regress which had found a powerful advocate in
Rousseau.
7.
By liberty the Economists meant economic liberty. Neither they nor the
philosophers nor Rousseau, the father of modern democracy, had any just
conception of what political liberty means. They contributed much to its
realisation, but their own ideas of it were narrow and imperfect. They
never challenged the principle of a despotic government, they only
contended that the despotism must be enlightened. The paternal rule of
a Joseph or a Catherine, acting under the advice of philosophers, seemed
to them the ideal solution of the problem of government; and when the
progressive and disinterested Turgot, whom they might regard as one of
themselves, was appointed financial minister on the accession of Louis
XVI., it seemed that their ideal was about to be realised. His speedy
fall dispelled their hopes, but did not teach them the secret of
liberty. They had no quarrel with the principle of the censorship,
though they writhed under its tyranny; they did not want to abolish it.
They only complained that it was used against reason and light, that is
against their own writings; and, if the Conseil d'Etat or the Parlement
had suppressed the works of their obscurantist opponents, they would
have congratulated themselves that the world was marching quickly
towards perfection. [Footnote: The principle that intolerance on the
part of the wise and strong towards the ignorant and weak is a good
thing is not alien to the spirit of the French philosophers, though I do
not think any of them expressly asserted it. In the following century
it was formulated by Colins, a Belgian (author of two works on
social science, 1857-60), who believed that an autocratic government
suppressing liberty of conscience is the most effective instrument of
Progress. It is possible that democracy may yet try the experiment.]
CHAPTER IX. WAS CIVILISATION A MISTAKE? ROUSSEAU, CHASTELLUX. 1.
The optimistic theory of civilisation was not unchallenged by
rationalists. In the same year (1750) in which Turgot traced an outline
of historical Progress at the Sorbonne, Rousseau laid before the Academy
of Dijon a theory of historical Regress. This Academy had offered a
prize for the best essay on the question whether the revival of sciences
and arts had contributed to the improvement of morals. The prize was
awarded to Rousseau. Five years later the same learned body proposed
another subject for investigation, the origin of Inequality among men.
Rousseau again competed but failed to win the prize, though this second
essay was a far more remarkable performance.
The view common to these two discourses, that social development has
been a gigantic mistake, that the farther man has travelled from
a primitive simple state the more unhappy has his lot become, that
civilisation is radically vicious, was not original. Essentially the
same issue had been raised in England, though in a different form,
by Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, the scandalous book which aimed at
proving that it is not the virtues and amiable qualities of man that are
the cement of civilised society, but the vices of its members which
are the support of all trades and employments. [Footnote: The expanded
edition was published in 1723.] In these vices, he said, "we must look
for the true origin of all arts and sciences"; "the moment evil ceases
the society must be spoiled, if not totally dissolved."
The significance of Mandeville's book lay in the challenge it flung to
the optimistic doctrines of Lord Shaftesbury, that human nature is good
and all is for the best in this harmonious world. "The ideas he had
formed," wrote Mandeville, "of the goodness and excellency of our nature
were as romantic and chimerical as they are beautiful and amiable;
he laboured hard to unite two contraries that can never be reconciled
together, innocence of manners and worldly greatness."
Of these two views Rousseau accepted one and rejected the other. He
agreed with Shaftesbury as to the natural goodness of man; he agreed
with Mandeville that innocence of manners is incompatible with the
conditions of a civilised society. He was an optimist in regard to human
nature, a pessimist in regard to civilisation.
In his first Discourse he begins by appreciating the specious splendour
of modern enlightenment, the voyages of man's intellect among the stars,
and then goes on to assever that in the first place men have lost,
through their civilisation, the original liberty for which they were
born, and that arts and science, flinging garlands of flowers on the
iron chains which bind them, make them love their slavery; and secondly
that there is a real depravity beneath the fair semblance and "our souls
are corrupted as our sciences and arts advance to perfection." Nor is
this only a modern phenomenon; "the evils due to our vain curiosity are
as old as the world." For it is a law of history that morals fall and
rise in correspondence with the progress and decline of the arts and
sciences as regularly as the tides answer to the phases of the moon.
This "law" is exemplified by the fortunes of Greece, Rome, and China, to
whose civilisations the author opposes the comparative happiness of
the ignorant Persians, Scythians, and ancient Germans. "Luxury,
dissoluteness, and slavery have been always the chastisement of the
ambitious efforts we have made to emerge from the happy ignorance
in which the Eternal Wisdom had placed us." There is the theological
doctrine of the tree of Eden in a new shape.
Rousseau's attempt to show that the cultivation of science produces
specific moral evils is feeble, and has little ingenuity; it is a
declamation rather than an argument; and in the end he makes concessions
which undo the effect of his impeachment. The essay did not establish
even a plausible case, but it was paradoxical and suggestive, and
attracted more attention than Turgot's thoughtful discourse in the
Sorbonne. D'Alembert deemed it worthy of a courteous expression of
dissent; [Footnote: In the Disc. Prel. to the Encyclopaedia.] and
Voltaire satirised it in his Timon.
2.
In the Discourse on Inequality Rousseau dealt more directly with the
effect of civilisation on happiness. He proposed to explain how it came
about that right overcame the primitive reign of might, that the strong
were induced to serve the weak, and the people to purchase a fancied
tranquillity at the price of a real felicity. So he stated his problem;
and to solve it he had to consider the "state of nature" which Hobbes
had conceived as a state of war and Locke as a state of peace. Rousseau
imagines our first savage ancestors living in isolation, wandering in
the forests, occasionally co-operating, and differing from the animals
only by the possession of a faculty for improving themselves (la faculte
de se perfectionner). After a stage in which families lived alone in
a more or less settled condition, came the formation of groups of
families, living together in a definite territory, united by a common
mode of life and sustenance, and by the common influence of climate, but
without laws or government or any social organisation.
It is this state, which was reached only after a long period, not the
original state of nature, that Rousseau considers to have been the
happiest period of the human race.
This period of the development of human faculties, holding a just mean
between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity
of our self-love, must be the happiest and most durable epoch. The more
we reflect on it, the more we find that this state was the least exposed
to revolutions and the best for man; and that he can have left it only
through some fatal chance which, for the common advantage, should never
have occurred. The example of the savages who have almost all been found
in this state seems to bear out the conclusion that humanity was made to
remain in it for ever, that it was the true youth of the world, and that
all further progresses have been so many steps, apparently towards the
perfection of the individual, and really towards the decrepitude of the
species.
He ascribes to metallurgy and agriculture the fatal resolution which
brought this Arcadian existence to an end. Agriculture entailed the
origin of property in land. Moral and social inequality were introduced
by the man who first enclosed a piece of land and said, This is mine,
and found people simple enough to believe him. He was the founder of
civil society.
The general argument amounts to this: Man's faculty of improving himself
is the source of his other faculties, including his sociability, and
has been fatal to his happiness. The circumstances of his primeval life
favoured the growth of this faculty, and in making man sociable they
made him wicked; they developed the reason of the individual and thereby
caused the species to deteriorate. If the process had stopped at
a certain point, all would have been well; but man's capacities,
stimulated by fortuitous circumstances, urged him onward, and leaving
behind him the peaceful Arcadia where he should have remained safe and
content, he set out on the fatal road which led to the calamities of
civilisation. We need not follow Rousseau in his description of those
calamities which he attributes to wealth and the artificial conditions
of society. His indictment was too general and rhetorical to make much
impression. In truth, a more powerful and comprehensive case against
civilised society was drawn up about the same time, though with a very
different motive, by one whose thought represented all that was opposed
to Rousseau's teaching. Burke's early work, A Vindication of Natural
Society, [Footnote: A.D. 1756.] was written to show that all the
objections which Deists like Bolingbroke urged against artificial
religion could be brought with greater force against artificial society,
and he worked out in detail a historical picture of the evils of
civilisation which is far more telling than Rousseau's generalities.
[Footnote: In his admirable edition of The Political Writings of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1915), p. 89, Vaughan suggests that in Rousseau's
later works we may possibly detect "the first faint beginnings" of
a belief in Progress, and attributes this to the influence of
Montesquieu.]
3.
If civilisation has been the curse of man, it might seem that the
logical course for Rousseau to recommend was its destruction. This was
the inference which Voltaire drew in Timon, to laugh the whole theory
out of court. But Rousseau did not suggest a movement to destroy all
the libraries and all the works of art in the world, to put to death or
silence all the savants, to pull down the cities, and burn the ships.
He was not a mere dreamer, and his Arcadia was no more than a Utopian
ideal, by the light of which he conceived that the society of his
own day might be corrected and transformed. He attached his hopes to
equality, democracy, and a radical change in education.
Equality: this revolutionary idea was of course quite compatible with
the theory of Progress, and was soon to be closely associated with
it. But it is easy to understand that the two ideas should first have
appeared in antagonism to each other. The advance of knowledge and
the increase of man's power over nature had virtually profited only a
minority. When Fontenelle or Voltaire vaunted the illumination of their
age and glorified the modern revolution in scientific thought, they took
account only of a small class of privileged people. Higher education,
Voltaire observed, is not for cobblers or kitchenmaids; "on n'a jamais
pretendu eclairer les cordonniers et les servantes." The theory of
Progress had so far left the masses out of account. Rousseau contrasted
the splendour of the French court, the luxury of the opulent, the
enlightenment of those who had the opportunity of education, with the
hard lot of the ignorant mass of peasants, whose toil paid for the
luxury of many of the idle enlightened people who amused themselves at
Paris. The horror of this contrast, which left Voltaire cold, was
the poignant motive which inspired Rousseau, a man of the people,
in constructing his new doctrine. The existing inequality seemed an
injustice which rendered the self-complacency of the age revolting. If
this is the result of progressive civilisation, what is progress worth?
The next step is to declare that civilisation is the causa malorum and
that what is named progress is really regress. But Rousseau found a
way of circumventing pessimism. He asked himself, cannot equality be
realised in an organised state, founded on natural right? The Social
Contract was his answer, and there we can see the living idea of
equality detaching itself from the dead theory of degradation.
[Footnote: The consistency of the Social Contract with the Discourse on
Inequality has been much debated. They deal with two distinct problems,
and the Social Contract does not mark any change in the author's views.
Though it was not published till 1762 he had been working at it since
1753.]
Arcadianism, which was thus only a side-issue for Rousseau, was the
extreme expression of tendencies which appear in the speculations of
other thinkers of the day. Morelly and Mably argued in favour of a
reversion to simpler forms of life. They contemplated the foundation
of socialistic communities by reviving institutions and practices which
belonged to a past period of social evolution. Mably, inspired by Plato,
thought it possible by legislation to construct a state of antique
pattern. [Footnote: For Mably's political doctrines see Guerrier's
monograph, L'Abbe de Mably (1886), where it is shown that among "the
theories which determined in advance the course of the events of 1789"
the Abbe's played a role which has not been duly recognised.] They
ascribed evils of civilisation to inequality arising from the existence
of private property, but Morelly rejected the view of the "bold sophist"
Rousseau that science and art were to blame. He thought that aided
by science and learning man might reach a state based on communism,
resembling the state of nature but more perfect, and he planned an ideal
constitution in his romance of the Floating Islands. [Footnote: Naufrage
des isles flottantes ou Basiliade du celebre Pilpai (1753). It begins:
"je chante le regne aimable de la Verite et de la Nature." Morelly's
other work, Code de la Nature, appeared in 1755.] Different as
these views were, they represent the idea of regress; they imply
a condemnation of the tendencies of actual social development and
recommend a return to simpler and more primitive conditions.
Even Diderot, though he had little sympathy with Utopian speculations,
was attracted by the idea of the simplification of society, and met
Rousseau so far as to declare that the happiest state was a mean between
savage and civilised life.
"I am convinced," he wrote, "that the industry of man has gone too far
and that if it had stopped long ago and if it were possible to simplify
the results, we should not be the worse. I believe there is a limit in
civilisation, a limit more conformable to the felicity of man in general
and far less distant from the savage state than is imagined; but how to
return to it, having left it, or how to remain in it, if we were there?
I know not." [Footnote: Refutation de l'ouvrage d'Helvetius in OEuvres
ii. p. 431. Elsewhere (p. 287) he argues that in a community without
arts and industries there are fewer crimes than in a civilised state,
but men are not so happy.]
His picture of the savages of Tahiti in the Supplement au voyage de
Bougainville was not seriously meant, but it illustrates the fact that
in certain moods he felt the fascination of Rousseau's Arcadia.
D'Holbach met all these theories by pointing out that human development,
from the "state of nature" to social life and the ideas and commodities
of civilisation, is itself natural, given the innate tendency of man to
improve his lot. To return to the simpler life of the forests--or to
any bygone stage--would be denaturer l'homme, it would be contrary to
nature; and if he could do so, it would only be to recommence the career
begun by his ancestors and pass again through the same successive phases
of history. [Footnote: Syst. soc. i. 16, p. 190.]
There was, indeed, one question which caused some embarrassment to
believers in Progress. The increase of wealth and luxury was evidently
a salient feature in modern progressive states; and it was clear that
there was an intimate connection between the growth of knowledge and the
growth of commerce and industrial arts, and that the natural progress of
these meant an ever-increasing accumulation of riches and the practice
of more refined luxury. The question, therefore, whether luxury is
injurious to the general happiness occupied the attention of the
philosophers. [Footnote: D'Holbach, ib. iii. 7; Diderot, art. Luxe in
the Encylopaedia; Helvetius, De l'esprit, i. 3.] If it is injurious,
does it not follow that the forces on which admittedly Progress depends
are leading in an undesirable direction? Should they be obstructed, or
is it wiser to let things follow their natural tendency (laisser aller
les choses suivant leur pente naturelle)? Voltaire accepted wealth with
all its consequences. D'Holbach proved to his satisfaction that luxury
always led to the ruin of nations. Diderot and Helvetius arrayed
the arguments which could be urged on both sides. Perhaps the most
reasonable contribution to the subject was an essay of Hume.
4.
It is obvious that Rousseau and all other theorists of Regress would be
definitely refuted if it could be proved by an historical investigation
that in no period in the past had man's lot been happier than in the
present. Such an inquiry was undertaken by the Chevalier de Chastellux.
His book On Public Felicity, or Considerations on the lot of Men in the
various Epochs of History, appeared in 1772 and had a wide circulation.
[Footnote: There was a new edition in 1776 with an important additional
chapter.] It is a survey of the history of the western world and aims at
proving the certainty of future Progress. It betrays the influence both
of the Encyclopaedists and of the Economists. Chastellux is convinced
that human nature can be indefinitely moulded by institutions; that
enlightenment is a necessary condition of general happiness; that war
and superstition, for which governments and priests are responsible, are
the principal obstacles.
But he attempted to do what none of his masters had done, to test the
question methodically from the data of history. Turgot, and Voltaire
in his way, had traced the growth of civilisation; the originality of
Chastellux lay in concentrating attention on the eudaemonic issue, in
examining each historical period for the purpose of discovering whether
people on the whole were happy and enviable. Has there ever been a time,
he inquired, in which public felicity was greater than in our own, in
which it would have been desirable to remain for ever, and to which it
would now be desirable to return?
He begins by brushing away the hypothesis of an Arcadia. We know
really nothing about primitive man, there is not sufficient evidence to
authorise conjectures. We know man only as he has existed in organised
societies, and if we are to condemn modern civilisation and its
prospects, we must find our term of comparison not in an imaginary
golden age but in a known historical epoch. And we must be careful not
to fall into the mistakes of confusing public prosperity with general
happiness, and of considering only the duration or aggrandisement of
empires and ignoring the lot of the common people.
His survey of history is summary and superficial enough. He gives
reasons for believing that no peoples from the ancient Egyptians and
Assyrians to the Europeans of the Renaissance can be judged happy. Yet
what about the Greeks? Theirs was an age of enlightenment. In a few
pages he examines their laws and history, and concludes, "We are
compelled to acknowledge that what is called the bel age of Greece was
a time of pain and torture for humanity." And in ancient history,
generally, "slavery alone sufficed to make man's condition a hundred
times worse than it is at present." The miseries of life in the Roman
period are even more apparent than in the Greek. What Englishman
or Frenchman would tolerate life as lived in ancient Rome? It is
interesting to remember that four years later an Englishman who had an
incomparably wider and deeper knowledge of history declared it to be
probable that in the age of the Antonines civilised Europe enjoyed
greater happiness than at any other period.
Rome declined and Christianity came. Its purpose was not to render men
happy on earth, and we do not find that it made rulers less avaricious
or less sanguinary, peoples more patient or quiet, crimes rarer,
punishments less cruel, treaties more faithfully observed, or wars
waged more humanely. The conclusion is that it is only those who are
profoundly ignorant of the past who can regret "the good old times."
Throughout this survey Chastellux does not, like Turgot, make any
attempt to show that the race was progressing, however slowly. On
the contrary, he sets the beginning of continuous Progress in
the Renaissance--here agreeing with d'Alembert and Voltaire. The
intellectual movement, which originated then and resulted in the
enlightenment of his own day, was a condition of social progress. But
alone it would not have been enough, as is proved by the fact that the
intellectual brilliancy of the great age of Greece exerted no beneficent
effects on the well-being of the people. Nor indeed was there any
perceptible improvement in the prospect of happiness for the people at
large during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, notwithstanding
the progress of science and the arts. But the terrible wars of this
period exhausted Europe, and this financial exhaustion has supplied the
requisite conditions for attaining a measure of felicity never realised
in the past.
Peace is an advantageous condition for the progress of reason, but
especially when it is the result of the exhaustion of peoples and their
satiety of fighting. Frivolous ideas disappear; political bodies, like
organisms, have the care of self-preservation impressed upon them by
pain; the human mind, hitherto exercised on agreeable objects, falls
back with more energy on useful objects; a more successful appeal can be
made to the rights of humanity; and princes, who have become creditors
and debtors of their subjects, permit them to be happy in order that
they may be more solvent or more patient.
This is not very lucid or convincing; but the main point is that
intellectual enlightenment would be ineffective without the co-operation
of political events, and no political events would permanently help
humanity without the progress of knowledge.
Public felicity consists--Chastellux follows the Economists--in external
and domestic peace, abundance and liberty, the liberty of tranquil
enjoyment of one's own; and ordinary signs of it are flourishing
agriculture, large populations, and the growth of trade and industry.
He is at pains to show the superiority of modern to ancient agriculture,
and he avails himself of the researches of Hume to prove the
comparatively greater populousness of modern European countries. As for
the prospect of peace, he takes a curiously optimistic view. A system
of alliances has made Europe a sort of confederated republic, and the
balance of power has rendered the design of a universal monarchy, such
as that which Louis XIV. essayed, a chimera. [Footnote: So Rivarol,
writing in 1783 (OEuvres, i. pp. 4 and 52): "Never did the world offer
such a spectacle. Europe has reached such a high degree of power that
history has nothing to compare with it. It is virtually a federative
republic, composed of empires and kingdoms, and the most powerful that
has ever existed."] All the powerful nations are burdened with debt.
War, too, is a much more difficult enterprise than it used to be; every
campaign of the king of Prussia has been more arduous than all the
conquests of Attila. It looks as if the Peace of 1762-3 possessed
elements of finality. The chief danger he discerns in the overseas
policy of the English--auri sacra fames. Divination of this kind has
never been happy; a greater thinker, Auguste Comte, was to venture on
more dogmatic predictions of the cessation of wars, which the event was
no less utterly to belie. As for equality among men, Chastellux admits
its desirability, but observes that there is pretty much the same amount
of happiness (le bonheur se compense assez) in the different classes of
society. "Courtiers and ministers are not happier than husbandmen and
artisans." Inequalities and disportions in the lots of individuals
are not incompatible with a positive measure of felicity. They are
inconveniences incident to the perfectibility of the species, and they
will be eliminated only when Progress reaches its final term. The best
that can be done to remedy them is to accelerate the Progress of the
race which will conduct it one day to the greatest possible happiness;
not to restore a state of ignorance and simplicity, from which it would
again escape.
The general argument of the book may be resumed briefly. Felicity has
never been realised in any period of the past. No government, however
esteemed, set before itself to achieve what ought to be the sole
object of government, "the greatest happiness of the greatest number
of individuals." Now, for the first time in human history, intellectual
enlightenment, other circumstances fortunately concurring, has brought
about a condition of things, in which this object can no longer be
ignored, and there is a prospect that it will gradually gain the
ascendant. In the meantime, things have improved; the diffusion of
knowledge is daily ameliorating men's lot, and far from envying any
age in the past we ought to consider ourselves much happier than the
ancients.
We may wonder at this writer's easy confidence in applying the criterion
of happiness to different societies. Yet the difficulty of such
comparisons was, I believe, first pointed out by Comte. [Footnote: Cours
de philosophie positive, iv. 379.] It is impossible, he says, to compare
two states of society and determine that in one more happiness was
enjoyed than in the other. The happiness of an individual requires a
certain degree of harmony between his faculties and his environment. But
there is always a natural tendency towards the establishment of such
an equilibrium, and there is no means of discovering by argument or by
direct experience the situation of a society in this respect. Therefore,
he concludes, the question of happiness must be eliminated from any
scientific treatment of civilisation.
Chastellux won a remarkable success. His work was highly praised by
Voltaire, and was translated into English, Italian, and German.
It condensed, on a single issue, the optimistic doctrines of the
philosophers, and appeared to give them a more solid historical
foundation than Voltaire's Essay on Manners had supplied. It provided
the optimists with new arguments against Rousseau, and must have done
much to spread and confirm faith in perfectibility. [Footnote: Soon
after the publication of the book of Chastellux--though I do not
suggest any direct connection--a society of Illuminati, who also called
themselves the Perfectibilists, was founded at Ingoldstadt, who proposed
to effect a pacific transformation of humanity. See Javary, De l'idee de
progres, p. 73.]
CHAPTER X. THE YEAR 2440
1.
The leaders of thought in France did not look far forward into the
future or attempt to trace the definite lines on which the human race
might be expected to develop. They contented themselves with principles
and vague generalities, and they had no illusions as to the slowness of
the process of social amelioration; a rational morality, the condition
of improvement, was only in its infancy. A passage in a work of the Abbe
Morellet probably reflects faithfully enough the comfortable though not
extravagant optimism which was current. [Footnote: Reflexions sur les
avantages d'ecrire et d'imprimer sur les matieres de l'administration
(1764); in Melanges, vol. iii. p. 55. Morellet held, like d'Holbach,
that society is only the development and improvement of nature itself
(ib. p. 6).]
Let us hope for the amelioration of man's lot as a consequence of the
progress of the enlightenment (des lumieres) and labours of the
educated (des gens instruits); let us trust that the errors and even the
injustices of our age may not rob us of this consoling hope. The history
of society presents a continuous alternation of light and darkness,
reason and extravagance, humanity and barbarism; but in the succession
of ages we can observe good gradually increasing in ever greater
proportion. What educated man, if he is not a misanthrope or misled by
vain declamations, would really wish he had lived in the barbarous and
poetical time which Homer paints in such fair and terrifying colours?
Who regrets that he was not born at Sparta among those pretended heroes
who made it a virtue to insult nature, practised theft, and gloried in
the murder of a Helot; or at Carthage, the scene of human sacrifices,
or at Rome amid the proscriptions or under the rule of a Nero or a
Caligula? Let as agree that man advances, though slowly, towards light
and happiness.
But though the most influential writers were sober in speculating about
the future, it is significant of their effectiveness in diffusing the
idea of Progress that now for the first time a prophetic Utopia was
constructed. Hitherto, as I have before observed, ideal states
were either projected into the remote past or set in some distant,
vaguely-known region, where fancy could build freely. To project them
into the future was a new thing, and when in 1770 Sebastien Mercier
described what human civilisation would be in A.D. 2440, it was a
telling sign of the power which the idea of Progress was beginning to
exercise.
2.
Mercier has been remembered, or rather forgotten, as an inferior
dramatist. He was a good deal more, and the researches of M. Beclard
into his life and works enable us to appreciate him. If it is an
overstatement to say that his soul reflected in miniature the very
soul of his age, [Footnote: L. Beclard, Sebastien Mercier, sa vie,
son oeuvre, son temps (1903), p. vii.] he was assuredly one of its
characteristic products. He reminds us in some ways of the Abbe de
Saint-Pierre, who was one of his heroes. All his activities were urged
by the dream of a humanity regenerated by reason, all his energy devoted
to bringing about its accomplishment. Saint-Pierre's idea of perpetual
peace inspired an early essay on the scourge of war.
The theories of Rousseau exercised at first an irresistible attraction,
but modern civilisation had too strong a hold on him; he was too
Parisian in temper to acquiesce for long in the doctrine of Arcadianism.
He composed a book on The Savage to illustrate the text that the true
standard of morality is the heart of primitive man, and to prove that
the best thing we could do is to return to the forest; but in the
process of writing it he seems to have come to the conclusion that the
whole doctrine was fallacious. [Footnote: Mercier's early essay: Des
malheurs de la guerre et des avantages de la paix (1766). On the
savage: L'homme sauvage (1767). For the opposite thesis see the Songes
philosophiques (1768). He describes a state of perfect happiness in a
planet where beings live in perpetual contemplation of the infinite.
He appreciates the work of philosophers from Socrates to Leibnitz, and
describes Rousseau as standing before the swelling stream, but cursing
it. It may be suspected that the writings of Leibnitz had much to do
with Mercier's conversion.] The transformation of his opinions was the
work of a few months. He then came forward with the opposite thesis that
all events have been ordered for man's felicity, and he began to work on
an imaginary picture of the state to which man might find his way within
seven hundred years.
L'an 2440 was published anonymously at Amsterdam in 1770. [Footnote: The
author's name first appeared in the 3rd ed., 1799. A German translation,
by C. F. Weisse, was published in London in 1772. The English version,
by Dr. Hooper, appeared in the same year, and a new edition in 1802; the
translator changed the title to Memoirs of the year Two thousand five
hundred.] Its circulation in France was rigorously forbidden, because it
implied a merciless criticism of the administration. It was reprinted in
London and Neuchatel, and translated into English and German.
3.
As the motto of his prophetic vision Mercier takes the saying of
Leibnitz that "the present is pregnant of the future." Thus the phase of
civilisation which he imagines is proposed as the outcome of the natural
and inevitable march of history. The world of A.D. 2440 in which a man
born in the eighteenth century who has slept an enchanted sleep awakes
to find himself, is composed of nations who live in a family concord
rarely interrupted by war. But of the world at large we hear little;
the imagination of Mercier is concentrated on France, and particularly
Paris. He is satisfied with knowing that slavery has been abolished;
that the rivalry of France and England has been replaced by an
indestructible alliance; that the Pope, whose authority is still august,
has renounced his errors and returned to the customs of the primitive
Church; that French plays are performed in China. The changes in Paris
are a sufficient index of the general transformation.
The constitution of France is still monarchical. Its population has
increased by one half; that of the capital remains about the same. Paris
has been rebuilt on a scientific plan; its sanitary arrangements have
been brought to perfection; it is well lit; and every provision has been
made for the public safety. Private hospitality is so large that inns
have disappeared, but luxury at table is considered a revolting crime.
Tea, coffee, and tobacco are no longer imported. [Footnote: In the
first edition of the book commerce was abolished.] There is no system of
credit; everything is paid for in ready money, and this practice has
led to a remarkable simplicity in dress. Marriages are contracted only
through mutual inclination; dowries have been abolished. Education is
governed by the ideas of Rousseau, and is directed, in a narrow spirit,
to the promotion of morality. Italian, German, English, and Spanish
are taught in schools, but the study of the classical languages has
disappeared; Latin does not help a man to virtue. History too is
neglected and discouraged, for it is "the disgrace of humanity, every
page being crowded with crimes and follies." Theatres are government
institutions, and have become the public schools of civic duties and
morality. [Footnote: In 1769 Mercier began to carry out his programme of
composing and adapting plays for instruction and edification. His theory
of the true functions of the theatre he explained in a special treatise,
Du theatre ou Nouvel Essai sur l'art dramatique (1773).]
The literary records of the past had been almost all deliberately
destroyed by fire. It was found expedient to do away with useless
and pernicious books which only obscured truth or contained perpetual
repetitions of the same thing. A small closet in the public library
sufficed to hold the ancient books which were permitted to escape the
conflagration, and the majority of these were English. The writings of
the Abbe de Saint-Pierre were placed next those of Fenelon. "His pen was
weak, but his heart was sublime. Seven ages have given to his great and
beautiful ideas a just maturity. His contemporaries regarded him as a
visionary; his dreams, however, have become realities."
The importance of men of letters as a social force was a favourite theme
of Mercier, and in A.D. 2440 this will be duly recognised. But the State
control which weighed upon them so heavily in 1770 is not to be entirely
abolished. There is no preventive censorship to hinder publication, but
there are censors. There are no fines or imprisonment, but there are
admonitions. And if any one publishes a book defending principles which
are considered dangerous, he is obliged to go about in a black mask.
There is a state religion, Deism. There is probably no one who does
not believe in God. But if any atheist were discovered, he would be put
through a course of experimental physics. If he remained obdurate in his
rejection of a "palpable and salutary truth," the nation would go into
mourning and banish him from its borders.
Every one has to work, but labour no longer resembles slavery. As there
are no monks, nor numerous domestics, nor useless valets, nor work-men
employed on the production of childish luxuries, a few daily hours of
labour are sufficient for the public wants. Censors inquire into men's
capacities, assign tasks to the unemployed, and if man be found fit for
nothing but the consumption of food he is banished from the city.
These are some of the leading features of the ideal future to which
Mercier's imagination reached. He did not put it forward as a final
term. Later ages, he said, will go further, for "where can the
perfectibility of man stop, armed with geometry and the mechanical
arts and chemistry?" But in his scanty prophecies of what science might
effect he showed curiously little resource. The truth is that this
had not much interest for him, and he did not see that scientific
discoveries might transmute social conditions. The world of 2440, its
intolerably docile and virtuous society, reflects two capital weaknesses
in the speculation of the Encyclopaedist period: a failure to allow
for the strength of human passions and interests, and a deficient
appreciation of the meaning of liberty. Much as the reformers acclaimed
and fought for toleration, they did not generally comprehend the value
of the principle. They did not see that in a society organised and
governed by Reason and Justice themselves, the unreserved toleration
of false opinions would be the only palladium of progress; or that
a doctrinaire State, composed of perfectly virtuous and deferential
people, would arrest development and stifle origiality, by its ungenial
if mild tyranny. Mercier's is no exception to the rule that ideal
societies are always repellent; and there are probably few who would
not rather be set down in Athens in the days of the "vile" Aristophanes,
whose works Mercier condemned to the flames, than in his Paris of 2440.
4.
That Bohemian man of letters, Restif de la Bretonne, whose unedifying
novels the Parisians of 2440 would assuredly have rejected from their
libraries, published in 1790 a heroic comedy representing how marriages
would be arranged in "the year 2000," by which epoch he conceived that
all social equalities would have disappeared in a fraternal society
and twenty nations be allied to France under the wise supremacy of "our
well-beloved monarch Louis Francois XXII." It was the Revolution that
converted Restif to the conception of Progress, for hitherto his master
had been Rousseau; but it can hardly be doubted that the motif and title
of his play were suggested by the romance of Mercier. L'an 2440 and L'an
2000 are the first examples of the prophetic fiction which Mr. Edward
Bellamy's Looking Backward was to popularise a hundred years later.
The Count de Volney's Ruins was another popular presentation of the
hopes which the theory of Progress had awakened in France. Although
the work was not published till after the outbreak of the Revolution,
[Footnote: Les Ruines des empires, 1789. An English translation ran to
a second edition (1795).] the plan had been conceived some years before.
Volney was a traveller, deeply interested in oriental and classical
antiquities, and, like Louis Le Roy, he approached the problem of man's
destinies from the point of view of a student of the revolutions of
empires.
The book opens with melancholy reflections amid the ruins of Palmyra.
"Thus perish the works of men, and thus do nations and empires vanish
away... Who can assure us that desolation like this will not one day be
the lot of our own country?" Some traveller like himself will sit by the
banks of the Seine, the Thames, or the Zuyder Zee, amid silent ruins,
and weep for a people inurned and their greatness changed into an empty
name. Has a mysterious Deity pronounced a secret malediction against the
earth?
In this disconsolate mood he is visited by an apparition, who unveils
the causes of men's misfortunes and shows that they are due to
themselves. Man is governed by natural invariable laws, and he has only
to study them to know the springs of his destiny, the causes of his
evils and their remedies. The laws of his nature are self-love, desire
of happiness, and aversion to pain; these are the simple and prolific
principles of everything that happens in the moral world. Man is the
artificer of his own fate. He may lament his weakness and folly; but "he
has perhaps still more reason to be confident in his energies when he
recollects from what point he has set out and to what heights he has
been capable of elevating himself."
The supernatural visitant paints a rather rosy picture of the ancient
Egyptian and Assyrian kingdoms. But it would be a mistake to infer from
their superficial splendour that the inhabitants generally were wise
or happy. The tendency of man to ascribe perfection to past epochs is
merely "the discoloration of his chagrin." The race is not degenerating;
its misfortunes are due to ignorance and the mis-direction of self-love.
Two principal obstacles to improvement have been the difficulty of
transmitting ideas from age to age, and that of communicating them
rapidly from man to man. These have been removed by the invention of
printing. The press is "a memorable gift of celestial genius." In time
all men will come to understand the principles of individual happiness
and public felicity. Then there will be established among the peoples of
the earth an equilibrium of forces; there will be no more wars, disputes
will be decided by arbitration, and "the whole species will become one
great society, a single family governed by the same spirit and by common
laws, enjoying all the felicity of which human nature is capable." The
accomplishment of this will be a slow process, since the same leaven
will have to assimilate an enormous mass of heterogeneous elements, but
its operation will be effectual.
Here the genius interrupts his prophecy and exclaims, turning toward the
west, "The cry of liberty uttered on the farther shores of the Atlantic
has reached to the old continent." A prodigious movement is then visible
to their eyes in a country at the extremity of the Mediterranean;
tyrants are overthrown, legislators elected, a code of laws is drafted
on the principles of equality, liberty, and justice. The liberated
nation is attacked by neighbouring tyrants, but her legislators propose
to the other peoples to hold a general assembly, representing the whole
world, and weigh every religious system in the balance. The proceedings
of this congress follow, and the book breaks off incomplete.
It is not an arresting book; to a reader of the present day it is
positively tedious; but it suited contemporary taste, and, appearing
when France was confident that her Revolution would renovate the earth,
it appealed to the hopes and sentiments of the movement. It made no
contribution to the doctrine of Progress, but it undoubtedly helped to
popularise it.
CHAPTER XI. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: CONDORCET
I.
The authority which the advanced thinkers of France gained among the
middle classes during the third quarter of the eighteenth century was
promoted by the influence of fashion. The new ideas of philosophers,
rationalists, and men of science had interested the nobles and higher
classes of society for two generations, and were a common subject of
discussion in the most distinguished salons. Voltaire's intimacy with
Frederick the Great, the relations of d'Alembert and Diderot with the
Empress Catherine, conferred on these men of letters, and on the ideas
for which they stood, a prestige which carried great weight with the
bourgeoisie. Humbler people, too, were as amenable as the great to
the seduction of theories which supplied simple keys to the universe
[Footnote: Taine said of the Contrat Social that it reduces political
science to the strict application of an elementary axiom which renders
all study unnecessary (La Revolution, vol. i. c. iv. Sec. iii.).] and
assumed that everybody was capable of judging for himself on the most
difficult problems. As well as the Encyclopaedia, the works of nearly
all the leading thinkers were written for the general public not merely
for philosophers. The policy of the Government in suppressing these
dangerous publications did not hinder their diffusion, and gave them
the attraction of forbidden fruit. In 1770 the avocat general (Seguier)
acknowledged the futility of the policy. "The philosophers," he said,
"have with one hand sought to shake the throne, with the other to upset
the altars. Their purpose was to change public opinion on civil and
religious institutions, and the revolution has, so to speak, been
effected. History and poetry, romances and even dictionaries, have
been infected with the poison of incredulity. Their writings are hardly
published in the capital before they inundate the provinces like
a torrent. The contagion has spread into workshops and cottages."
[Footnote: Rocquain, L'Esprit revolutionnaire avant la Revolution, p.
278.]
The contagion spread, but the official who wrote these words did not see
that it was successful because it was opportune, and that the minds
of men were prepared to receive the seed of revolutionary ideas by the
unspeakable corruption of the Government and the Church. As Voltaire
remarked about the same time, France was becoming Encyclopaedist, and
Europe too.
2.
The influence of the subversive and rationalistic thinkers in bringing
about the events of 1789 has been variously estimated by historians.
The truth probably lies in the succinct statement of Acton that "the
confluence of French theory with American example caused the Revolution
to break out" when it did. The theorists aimed at reform, not at
political revolution; and it was the stimulus of the Declaration
of Rights of 1774 and the subsequent victory of the Colonies that
precipitated the convulsion, at a time when the country had a better
prospect of improvement than it ever had before 1774, when Louis XVI.
came to the throne. But the theories had prepared France for radical
changes, and they guided the phases of the Revolution. The leaders had
all the optimism of the Encyclopaedists; yet the most powerful single
force was Rousseau, who, though he denied Progress and blasphemed
civilisation, had promulgated the doctrine of the sovereignty of the
people, giving it an attractive appearance of mathematical precision;
and to this doctrine the revolutionaries attached their optimistic
hopes. [Footnote: It is interesting to observe how Robespierre, to whom
the doctrines of Rousseau were oracles, could break out into admiration
of the progress of civilised man, as he did in the opening passage of
his speech of 7th May 1794. proposing the decree for the worship of
the Supreme Being (see the text in Stephen, Orators of the French
Revolution, ii. 391-92).] The theory of equality seemed no longer merely
speculative; for the American constitution was founded on democratic
equality, whereas the English constitution, which before had seemed
the nearest approximation to the ideal of freedom, was founded on
inequality. The philosophical polemic of the masters was waged with
weapons of violence by the disciples. Chaumette and Hebert, the
followers of d'Holbach, were destroyed by the disciples of Rousseau. In
the name of the creed of the Vicaire Savoyard the Jacobin Club shattered
the bust of Helvetius. Mably and Morelly had their disciples in Babeuf
and the socialists.
A naive confidence that the political upheaval meant regeneration and
inaugurated a reign of justice and happiness pervaded France in the
first period of the Revolution, and found a striking expression in the
ceremonies of the universal "Federation" in the Champ-de-Mars on 14th
July 1790. The festival was theatrical enough, decreed and arranged by
the Constituent Assembly, but the enthusiasm and optimism of the people
who gathered to swear loyalty to the new Constitution were genuine and
spontaneous. Consciously or subconsciously they were under the influence
of the doctrine of Progress which leaders of opinion had for several
decades been insinuating into the public mind. It did not occur to them
that their oaths and fraternal embraces did not change their minds
or hearts, and that, as Taine remarked, they remained what ages of
political subjection and one age of political literature had made them.
The assumption that new social machinery could alter human nature and
create a heaven upon earth was to be swiftly and terribly confuted.
Post uarios casus et tot discrimina rerum
uenimus in Latium,
but Latium was to be the scene of sanguinary struggles.
Another allied and fundamental fallacy, into which all the philosophers
and Rousseau had more or less fallen, was reflected and exposed by the
Revolution. They had considered man in vacuo. They had not seen that
the whole development of a society is an enormous force which cannot be
talked or legislated away; they had ignored the power of social memory
and historical traditions, and misvalued the strength of the links which
bind generations together. So the Revolutionaries imagined that they
could break abruptly with the past, and that a new method of government,
constructed on mathematical lines, a constitution (to use words of
Burke) "ready made and ready armed, mature in its birth, a perfect
goddess of wisdom and of war, hammered by our blacksmith midwives out
of the brain of Jupiter himself," would create a condition of idyllic
felicity in France, and that the arrival of the millennium depended only
on the adoption of the same principles by other nations. The illusions
created by the Declaration of the Rights of Man on the 4th of August
died slowly under the shadow of the Terror; but though the hopes of
those who believed in the speedy regeneration of the world were belied,
some of the thoughtful did not lose heart. There was one at least who
did not waver in his faith that the movement was a giant's step on
the path of man towards ultimate felicity, however far he had still to
travel. Condorcet, one of the younger Encyclopaedists, spent the last
months of his life, under the menace of the guillotine, in projecting a
history of human Progress.
3.
Condorcet was the friend and biographer of Turgot, and it was not
unfitting that he should resume the design of a history of civilisation,
in the light of the idea of Progress, for which Turgot had only left
luminous suggestions. He did not execute the plan, but he completed an
elaborate sketch in which the controlling ideas of the scheme are fully
set forth. His principles are to be found almost entirely in Turgot. But
they have a new significance for Condorcet. He has given them wings. He
has emphasised, and made deductions. Turgot wrote in the calm spirit
of an inquirer. Condorcet spoke with the verve of a prophet. He was
prophesying under the shadow of death. It is amazing that the optimistic
Sketch of a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind
should have been composed when he was hiding from Robespierre in 1793.
[Footnote: Published in 1795.]
Condorcet was penetrated with the spirit of the Encyclopaedists, of whom
he had been one, and his attitude to Christianity was that of Voltaire
and Diderot. Turgot had treated the received religion respectfully. He
had acknowledged Providence, and, though the place which he assigned to
Providence was that of a sort of honorary President of the development
of civilisation who might disappear without affecting the proceedings,
there was a real difference between his views and those of his friend as
to the role of Christianity and the civilisation of the Middle Ages.
A more important difference between the two thinkers is connected with
the different circumstances in which they wrote. Turgot did not believe
in the necessity of violent changes; he thought that steady reforms
under the existing regime would do wonders for France. Before
the Revolution Condorcet had agreed, but he was swept away by its
enthusiasm. The victory of liberty in America and the increasing volume
of the movement against slavery--one of the causes which most deeply
stirred his heart--had heightened his natural optimism and confirmed his
faith in the dogma of Progress. He felt the exhilaration of the belief
that he was living through "one of the greatest revolutions of the human
race," and he deliberately designed his book to be opportune to a crisis
of mankind, at which "a picture of revolutions of the past will be the
best guide."
Feeling that he is personally doomed, he consoles himself with brooding
on the time, however remote, when the sun will shine "on an earth of
none but freemen, with no master save reason; for tyrants and
slaves, priests and their stupid or hypocritical tools, will all have
disappeared." He is not satisfied with affirming generally the certainty
of an indefinite progress in enlightenment and social welfare. He
sets himself to think out its nature, to forecast its direction, and
determine its goal, and insists, as his predecessors had never done, on
the prospects of the distant future.
4.
His ambitious design is, in his own words, to show "the successive
changes in human society, the influence which each instant exerts on
the succeeding instant, and thus, in its successive modifications,
the advance of the human species towards truth or happiness." Taken
literally, this is an impossible design, and to put it forward as a
practical proposition is as if a man were to declare his intention of
writing a minute diary of the life of Julius Caesar from his birth to
his death. By stating his purpose in such terms, Condorcet reveals that
he had no notion of the limitations which confine our knowledge of the
past, and that even if he had conceived a more modest and practicable
programme he would have been incapable of executing it. His formula,
however, is worth remembering. For the unattainable ideal which it
expresses reminds us how many periods and passages of human experience
must always remain books with seven seals.
Condorcet distinguished ten periods of civilisation, of which the tenth
lies in the future, but he has not justified his divisions and his
epochs are not co-ordinate in importance. Yet his arrangement of the map
of history is remarkable as an attempt to mark its sections not by great
political changes but by important steps in knowledge. The first three
periods--the formation of primitive societies, followed by the pastoral
age, and the agricultural age--conclude with the invention of alphabetic
writing in Greece. The fourth is the history of Greek thought, to the
definite division of the sciences in the time of Aristotle. In the fifth
knowledge progresses and suffers obscuration under Roman rule, and the
sixth is the dark age which continues to the time of the Crusades. The
significance of the seventh period is to prepare the human mind for the
revolution which would be achieved by the invention of printing, with
which the eighth period opens. Some of the best pages of the book
develop the vast consequences of this invention. The scientific
revolution effected by Descartes begins a new period, which is now
closed by the creation of the French Republic.
The idea of the progress of knowledge had created the idea of social
Progress and remained its foundation. It was therefore logical and
inevitable that Condorcet should take advance in knowledge as the clew
to the march of the human race. The history of civilisation is the
history of enlightenment. Turgot had justified this axiom by formulating
the cohesion of all modes of social activity. Condorcet insists on "the
indissoluble union" between intellectual progress and that of liberty,
virtue, and the respect for natural rights, and on the effect of science
in the destruction of prejudice. All errors in politics and ethics have
sprung, he asserts, from false ideas which are closely connected with
errors in physics and ignorance of the laws of nature. And in the new
doctrine of Progress he sees an instrument of enlightenment which is to
give "the last blow to the tottering edifice of prejudices."
It would not be useful to analyse Condorcet's sketch or dwell on his
obsolete errors and the defects of his historical knowledge. His
slight picture of the Middle Ages reflects the familiar view of all
the eighteenth century philosophers. The only contribution to social
amelioration which he can discover in a period of nearly a millennium
is the abolition of domestic slavery. And so this period appears as
an interruption of the onward march. His inability to appreciate the
historical role of the Roman Empire exhibits more surprising ignorance
and prejudice. But these particular defects are largely due to a
fundamental error which runs through his whole book and was inherent in
the social speculations of the Encyclopaedists. Condorcet, like all his
circle, ignored the preponderant part which institutions have played in
social development. So far as he considered them at all, he saw in
them obstacles to the free play of human reason; not the spontaneous
expression of a society corresponding to its needs or embodying its
ideals, but rather machinery deliberately contrived for oppressing the
masses and keeping them in chains. He did not see that if the Progress
in which he believed is a reality, its possibility depends on the
institutions and traditions which give to societies their stability. In
the following generation, it would be pointed out that he fell into a
manifest contradiction when he praised the relative perfection reached
in some European countries in the eighteenth century, and at the
same time condemned as eminently retrograde all the doctrines and
institutions which had been previously in control. [Footnote: Comte.
Cours de philosophie positive, iv. 228.] This error is closely connected
with the other error, previously noticed, of conceiving man abstracted
from his social environment and exercising his reason in vacuo.
5.
The study of the history of civilisation has, in Condorcet's eyes, two
uses. It enables us to establish the fact of Progress, and it should
enable us to determine its direction in the future, and thereby to
accelerate the rate of progression.
By the facts of history and the arguments they suggest, he undertakes
to show that nature has set no term to the process of improving human
faculties, and that the advance towards perfection is limited only by
the duration of the globe. The movement may vary in velocity, but it
will never be retrograde so long as the earth occupies its present place
in the cosmic system and the general laws of this system do not produce
some catastrophe or change which would deprive the human race of the
faculties and resources which it has hitherto possessed. There will be
no relapse into barbarism. The guarantees against this danger are the
discovery of true methods in the physical sciences, their application to
the needs of men, the lines of communication which have been established
among them, the great number of those who study them, and finally
the art of printing. And if we are sure of the continuous progress of
enlightenment, we may be sure of the continuous improvement of social
conditions.
It is possible to foresee events, if the general laws of social
phenomena are known, and these laws can be inferred from the history
of the past. By this statement Condorcet justifies his bold attempt to
sketch his tenth period of human history which lies in the future; and
announces the idea which was in the next generation to be worked out by
Comte. But he cannot be said to have deduced himself any law of social
development. His forecast of the future is based on the ideas and
tendencies of his own age. [Footnote: It is interesting to notice
that the ablest of medieval Arabic historians, Ibn Khaldun (fourteenth
century), had claimed that if history is scientifically studied future
events may be predicted.]
Apart from scientific discoveries and the general diffusion of a
knowledge of the laws of nature on which moral improvement depends,
he includes in his prophetic vision the cessation of war and the
realisation of the less familiar idea of the equality of the sexes. If
he were alive to-day, he could point with triumph to the fact that of
these far-reaching projects one is being accomplished in some of the
most progressive countries and the other is looked upon as an attainable
aim by statesmen who are not visionaries. The equality of the sexes was
only a logical inference from the general doctrine of equality to which
Condorcet's social theory is reducible. For him the goal of political
progress is equality; equality is to be the aim of social effort--the
ideal of the Revolution.
For it is the multitude of men that must be considered--the mass of
workers, not the minority who live on their labours. Hitherto they have
been neglected by the historian as well as by the statesman. The true
history of humanity is not the history of some men. The human race is
formed by the mass of families who subsist almost entirely on the fruits
of their own work, and this mass is the proper subject of history, not
great men.
You may establish social equality by means of laws and institutions,
yet the equality actually enjoyed may be very incomplete. Condorcet
recognises this and attributes it to three principal causes: inequality
in wealth; inequality in position between the man whose means of
subsistence are assured and can be transmitted to his family and the man
whose means depend on his work and are limited by the term of his own
life [Footnote: He looked forward to the mitigation of this inequality
by the development of life insurance which was then coming to the
front.]; and inequality in education. He did not propose any radical
methods for dealing with these difficulties, which he thought would
diminish in time, without, however, entirely disappearing. He was too
deeply imbued with the views of the Economists to be seduced by the
theories of Rousseau, Mably, Babeuf, and others, into advocating
communism or the abolition of private property.
Besides equality among the individuals composing a civilised society,
Condorcet contemplated equality among all the peoples of the earth,--a
uniform civilisation throughout the world, and the obliteration of the
distinction between advanced and retrograde races. The backward peoples,
he prophesied, will climb up to the condition of France and the United
States of America, for no people is condemned never to exercise its
reason. If the dogma of the perfectibility of human nature, unguarded by
any restrictions, is granted, this is a logical inference, and we
have already seen that it was one of the ideas current among the
philosophers.
Condorcet does not hesitate to add to his picture adventurous
conjectures on the improvement of man's physical organisation, and a
considerable prolongation of his life by the advance of medical science.
We need only note this. More interesting is the prediction that, even
if the compass of the human being's cerebral powers is inalterable,
the range, precision, and rapidity of his mental operations will be
augmented by the invention of new instruments and methods.
The design of writing a history of human civilisation was premature, and
to have produced a survey of any durable value would have required
the equipment of a Gibbon. Condorcet was not even as well equipped as
Voltaire. [Footnote: But as he wrote without books the Sketch was a
marvellous tour de force.] The significance of his Sketch lies in this,
that towards the close of an intellectual movement it concentrated
attention on the most important, though hitherto not the most prominent,
idea which that movement had disseminated, and as it were officially
announced human Progress as the leading problem that claimed the
interest of mankind. With him Progress was associated intimately with
particular eighteenth century doctrines, but these were not essential
to it. It was a living idea; it survived the compromising theories which
began to fall into discredit after the Revolution, and was explored from
new points of view. Condorcet, however, wedded though his mind was to
the untenable views of human nature current in his epoch and his circle,
did not share the tendency of leading philosophers to regard history
as an unprofitable record of folly and crime which it would be well to
obliterate or forget. He recognised the interpretation of history as
the key to human development, and this principle controlled subsequent
speculations on Progress in France.
6.
Cabanis, the physician, was Condorcet's literary executor, and a no less
ardent believer in human perfectibility. Looking at life and man from
his own special point of view, he saw in the study of the physical
organism the key to the intellectual and moral improvement of the race.
It is by knowledge of the relations between his physical states and
moral states that man can attain happiness, through the enlargement of
his faculties and the multiplication of enjoyments, and that he will
be able to grasp, as it were, the infinite in his brief existence by
realising the certainty of indefinite progress. His doctrine was
a logical extension of the theories of Locke and Condillac. If our
knowledge is wholly derived from sensations, our sensations depend on
our sensory organs, and mind becomes a function of the nervous system.
The events of the Revolution quenched in him as little as in Condorcet
the sanguine confidence that it was the opening of a new era for science
and art, and thereby for the general Progress of man. "The present is
one of those great periods of history to which posterity will often
look back" with gratitude. [Footnote: Picavet, Les Ideologues, p. 203.
Cabanis was born in 1757 and died in 1808.] He took an active part in
the coup d'etat of the 18th of Brumaire (1799) which was to lead to the
despotism of Napoleon. He imagined that it would terminate oppression,
and was as enthusiastic for it as he and Condorcet had been for the
Revolution ten years before. "You philosophers," he wrote, [Footnote:
Ib. p. 224.] "whose studies are directed to the improvement and
happiness of the race, you no longer embrace vain shadows. Having
watched, in alternating moods of hope and sadness, the great spectacle
of our Revolution, you now see with joy the termination of its last act;
you will see with rapture this new era, so long promised to the French
people, at last open, in which all the benefits of nature, all the
creations of genius, all the fruits of time, labour, and experience will
be utilised, an era of glory and prosperity in which the dreams of your
philanthropic enthusiasm should end by being realised."
It was an over-sanguine and characteristic greeting of the eighteenth to
the nineteenth century. Cabanis was one of the most important of those
thinkers who, living into the new period, took care that the ideas of
their own generation should not be overwhelmed in the rising flood of
reaction.
CHAPTER XII. THE THEORY OF PROGRESS IN ENGLAND
1.
The idea of Progress could not help crossing the Channel. France and
England had been at war in the first year of the eighteenth century,
they were at war in the last, and their conflict for supremacy was the
leading feature of the international history of the whole century.
But at no period was there more constant intellectual intimacy or
more marked reciprocal influence between the two countries. It was
a commonplace that Paris and London were the two great foci of
civilisation, and they never lost touch of each other in the
intellectual sphere. Many of the principal works of literature that
appeared in either country were promptly translated, and some of the
French books, which the censorship rendered it dangerous to publish in
Paris, were printed in London.
It was not indeed to be expected that the theory should have the same
kind of success, or exert the same kind of effect in England as in
France. England had her revolution behind her, France had hers
before her. England enjoyed what were then considered large political
liberties, the envy of other lands; France groaned under the tyranny of
worthless rulers. The English constitution satisfied the nation, and
the serious abuses which would now appear to us intolerable were not
sufficient to awaken a passionate desire for reforms. The general
tendency of British thought was to see salvation in the stability
of existing institutions, and to regard change with suspicion. Now
passionate desire for reform was the animating force which propagated
the idea of Progress in France. And when this idea is translated from
the atmosphere of combat, in which it was developed by French men
of letters, into the calm climate of England, it appears like a cold
reflection.
Again, English thinkers were generally inclined to hold, with Locke,
that the proper function of government is principally negative, to
preserve order and defend life and property, not to aim directly at the
improvement of society, but to secure the conditions in which men may
pursue their own legitimate aims. Most of the French theorists believed
in the possibility of moulding society indefinitely by political action,
and rested their hopes for the future not only on the achievements of
science, but on the enlightened activity of governments. This difference
of view tended to give to the doctrine of Progress in France more
practical significance than in England.
But otherwise British soil was ready to receive the idea. There was the
same optimistic temper among the comfortable classes in both countries.
Shaftesbury, the Deist, had struck this note at the beginning of the
century by his sanguine theory, which was expressed in Pope's banal
phrase: "Whatever is, is right," and was worked into a system by
Hutcheson. This optimism penetrated into orthodox circles. Progress, far
from appearing as a rival of Providence, was discussed in the interests
of Christianity by the Scotch theologian, Turnbull. [Footnote: The
Principles of Modern Philosophy, 1740.]
2.
The theory of the indefinite progress of civilisation left Hume cold.
There is little ground, he argued, to suppose that "the world" is
eternal or incorruptible. It is probably mortal, and must therefore,
with all things in it, have its infancy, youth, manhood, and old age;
and man will share in these changes of state. We must then expect that
the human species should, when the world is in the age of manhood,
possess greater bodily and mental vigour, longer life, and a stronger
inclination and power of generation. But it is impossible to determine
when this stage is reached. For the gradual revolutions are too slow to
be discernible in the short period known to us by history and tradition.
Physically and in mental powers men have been pretty much the same in
all known ages. The sciences and arts have flourished now and have again
decayed, but when they reached the highest perfection among one people,
the neighbouring peoples were perhaps wholly unacquainted with them. We
are therefore uncertain whether at present man is advancing to his point
of perfection or declining from it. [Footnote: Essay on the Populousness
of Ancient Nations, ad init. ]
The argument is somewhat surprising in an eighteenth century thinker
like Hume, but it did not prevent him from recognising the superiority
of modern to ancient civilisation. This superiority forms indeed the
minor premiss in the general argument by which he confuted the commonly
received opinion as to the populousness of ancient nations. He insisted
on the improvements in art and industry, on the greater liberty and
security enjoyed by modern men. "To one who considers coolly on the
subject," he remarked, "it will appear that human nature in general
really enjoys more liberty at present in the most arbitrary government
of Europe than it ever did during the most flourishing period of ancient
times." [Footnote: The justification of this statement was the abolition
of slavery in Europe.]
He discussed many of the problems of civilisation, especially the
conditions in which the arts and sciences flourish, [Footnote: Essay on
the Rise of Arts and Sciences.] and drew some general conclusions, but
he was too sceptical to suppose that any general synthesis of history is
possible, or that any considerable change for the better in the manners
of mankind is likely to occur. [Footnote: Cf. Essay on the Idea of a
Perfect Commonwealth, ad init.]
The greatest work dealing with social problems, that Britain produced
in the eighteenth century, was Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, and his
luminous exposition of the effects of the division of labour was the
most considerable contribution made by British thinkers of the age
to the study of human development. It is much more than a treatise
on economic principles; it contains a history of the gradual economic
progress of human society, and it suggests the expectation of an
indefinite augmentation of wealth and well-being. Smith was entirely
at one with the French Economists on the value of opulence for the
civilisation and happiness of mankind. But it was indirectly perhaps
that his work contributed most effectively to the doctrine of the
Progress of collective mankind. [Footnote: It has been observed by
Mr. Leslie Stephen that the doctrine of the rights of man lies in the
background of Adam Smith's speculations.] His teaching that the free
commercial intercourse of all the peoples of the world, unfettered by
government policies, was to the greatest advantage of each, presented an
ideal of the economic "solidarity" of the race, which was one element in
the ideal of Progress. And this principle soon began to affect practice.
Pitt assimilated it when he was a young man, and it is one of the
distinctions of his statesmanship that he endeavoured to apply the
doctrines of his master so far as the prevailing prejudices would allow
him.
3.
A few writers of less weight and fame than Hume or Smith expressly
studied history in the light of Progress. It would not help us, in
following the growth of the idea, to analyse the works of Ferguson,
Dunbar, or Priestley. [Footnote: In his Essay on the History of Civil
Society Adam Ferguson treated the growth of civilisation as due to the
progressive nature of man, which insists on carrying him forward to
limits impossible to ascertain. He formulated the process as a
movement from simplicity to complexity, but contributed little to its
explanation.] But I will quote one passage from Priestley, the most
eminent of the three, and the most enthusiastic for the Progress of man.
As the division of labour--the chief principle of organised society--is
carried further he anticipates that
... nature, including both its materials and its laws, will be more at
our command; men will make their situation in this world abundantly more
easy and comfortable; they will probably prolong their existence in it
and will grow daily more happy.... Thus, whatever was the beginning of
this world, the end will be glorious and paradisiacal beyond what our
imaginations can now conceive. Extravagant as some people may suppose
these views to be, I think I could show them to be fairly suggested by
the true theory of human nature and to arise from the natural course of
human affairs.
[Footnote: This passage of Priestley occurs in his Essay on the First
Principles of Government and on the Nature of Political, Civil, and
Religious Liberty (1768, 2nd ed. 1771), pp. 2-4. His Lectures on History
and General Policy appeared in 1788.
Priestley was a strict utilitarian, who held that there is nothing
intrinsically excellent in justice and veracity apart from their
relation to happiness. The degree of public happiness is measured by
the excellence of religion, science, government, laws, arts, commerce,
conveniences of life, and especially by the degrees of personal security
and personal liberty. In all these the ancients were inferior, and
therefore they enjoyed less happiness. The present state of Europe is
vastly preferable to what it was in any former period. And "the plan of
this divine drama is opening more and more." In the future, Knowledge
will increase and accumulate and diffuse itself to the lower ranks of
society, who, by degrees, will find leisure for speculation; and looking
beyond their immediate employment, they will consider the complex
machine of society, and in time understand it better than those who now
write about it.
See his Lectures, pp. 371, 388 sqq., 528-53.
The English thinker did not share all the views of his French masters.
As a Unitarian, he regarded Christianity as a "great remedy of vice and
ignorance," part of the divine plan; and he ascribed to government
a lesser role than they in the improvement of humanity. He held, for
instance, that the state should not interfere in education, arguing that
this art was still in the experimental stage, and that the intervention
of the civil power might stereotype a bad system.
Not less significant, though less influential, than the writings of
Priestley and Ferguson was the work of James Dunbar, Professor of
Philosophy at Aberdeen, entitled Essays on the History of Mankind
in Rude and Cultivated Ages (2nd ed., 1781). He conceived history as
progressive, and inquired into the general causes which determine
the gradual improvements of civilisation. He dealt at length with
the effects of climate and local circumstances, but unlike the French
philosophers did not ignore heredity. While he did not enter upon any
discussion of future developments, he threw out incidentally the idea
that the world may be united in a league of nations.
Posterity, he wrote, "may contemplate, from a concurrence of various
causes and events, some of which are hastening into light, the greater
part, or even the whole habitable globe, divided among nations free and
independent in all the interior functions of government, forming one
political and commercial system" (p. 287).
Dunbar's was an optimistic book, but his optimism was more cautious than
Priestley's. These are his final words:
If human nature is liable to degenerate, it is capable of proportionable
improvement from the collected wisdom of ages. It is pleasant to infer
from the actual progress of society, the glorious possibilities of human
excellence. And, if the principles can be assembled into view, which
most directly tend to diversify the genius and character of nations,
some theory may be raised on these foundations that shall account
more systematically for past occurrences and afford some openings and
anticipations into the eventual history of the world.]
The problem of dark ages, which an advocate of Progress must explain,
was waved away by Priestley in his Lectures on History with the
observation that they help the subsequent advance of knowledge by
"breaking the progress of authority." [Footnote: This was doubtless
suggested to him by some remarks of Hume in The Rise of Arts and
Sciences.] This is not much of a plea for such periods viewed as
machinery in a Providential plan. The great history of the Middle Ages,
which in the words of its author describes "the triumph of barbarism and
religion," had been completed before Priestley's Lectures appeared, and
it is remarkable that he takes no account of it, though it might seem to
be a work with which a theory of Progress must come to terms.
Yet the sceptical historian of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, who was more at home in French literature than any of his
fellow-countrymen, was not opposed to the theory of Progress, and he
even states it in a moderate form. Having given reasons for believing
that civilised society will never again be threatened by such
an irruption of barbarians as that which oppressed the arms and
institutions of Rome, he allows us to "acquiesce in the pleasing
conclusion that every age of the world has increased, and still
increases, the real wealth, the happiness, the knowledge and perhaps the
virtue of the human race."
"The discoveries of ancient and modern navigators, and the domestic
history or tradition of the most enlightened nations, represent the
HUMAN SAVAGE, naked both in mind and body, and destitute of laws, of
arts, of ideas, and almost of language. From this abject condition,
perhaps the primitive and universal state of man, he has gradually
arisen to command the animals, to fertilise the earth, to traverse the
ocean, and to measure the heavens. His progress in the improvement and
exercise of his mental and corporeal faculties has been irregular and
various, infinitely slow in the beginning, and increasing by degrees
with redoubled velocity; ages of laborious ascent have been followed by
a moment of rapid downfall; and the several climates of the globe have
felt the vicissitudes of light and darkness. Yet the experience of four
thousand years should enlarge our hopes and diminish our apprehensions;
we cannot determine to what height the human species may aspire in
their advances towards perfection; but it may safely be presumed that
no people, unless the face of nature is changed, will relapse into their
original barbarism." [Footnote: Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
ch. xxxviii. ad fin.]
But Gibbon treats the whole subject as a speculation, and he treats
it without reference to any of the general principles on which French
thinkers had based their theory. He admits that his reasons for holding
that civilisation is secure against a barbarous cataclysm may be
considered fallacious; and he also contemplates the eventuality that
the fabric of sciences and arts, trade and manufacture, law and policy,
might be "decayed by time." If so, the growth of civilisation would have
to begin again, but not ab initio. For "the more useful or at least
more necessary arts," which do not require superior talents or national
subordination for their exercise, and which war, commerce, and religious
zeal have spread among the savages of the world, would certainly
survive.
These remarks are no more than obiter dicta but they show how the
doctrine of Progress was influencing those who were temperamentally the
least likely to subscribe to extravagant theories.
4.
The outbreak of the French Revolution evoked a sympathetic movement
among English progressive thinkers which occasioned the Government
no little alarm. The dissenting minister Dr. Richard Price, whose
Observations on Civil Liberty (1776), defending the action of the
American colonies, had enjoyed an immense success, preached the sermon
which provoked Burke to write his Reflections; and Priestley, no
less enthusiastic in welcoming the Revolution, replied to Burke. The
Government resorted to tyrannous measures; young men who sympathised
with the French movement and agitated for reforms at home were sent to
Botany Bay. Paine was prosecuted for his Rights of Man, which directly
preached revolution. But the most important speculative work of the
time, William Godwin's Political Justice, escaped the censorship because
it was not published at a popular price. [Footnote: Godwin had helped to
get Paine's book published in 1791, and he was intimate with the group
of revolutionary spirits who were persecuted by the Government. A good
account of the episode will be found in Brailsford's Shelley, Godwin,
and their Circle.]
The Enquiry concerning Political Justice, begun in 1791, appeared in
1793. The second edition, three years later, shows the influence of
Condorcet's Sketch, which had appeared in the meantime. Godwin says
that his original idea was to produce a work on political science to
supersede Montesquieu. The note of Montesquieu's political philosophy
was respect for social institutions. Godwin's principle was that social
institutions are entirely pernicious, that they perpetuate harmful
prejudices, and are an almost insuperable obstacle to improvement. If
he particularly denounced monarchical government, he regarded all
government as evil, and held that social progress would consist, not in
the reformation of government, but in its abolition. While he recognised
that man had progressed in the past, he considered history mainly a
sequence of horrors, and he was incapable of a calm survey of the course
of civilisation. In English institutions he saw nothing that did not
outrage the principles of justice and benevolence. The present state of
humanity is about as bad as it could be.
It is easy to see the deep influence which the teaching of Rousseau
exercised on Godwin. Without accepting the theory of Arcadia Godwin
followed him in unsparing condemnation of existing conditions. Rousseau
and Godwin are the two great champions in the eighteenth century of the
toiling and suffering masses. But Godwin drew the logical conclusion
from Rousseau's premisses which Rousseau hesitated to draw himself. The
French thinker, while he extolled the anarchical state of uncivilised
society, and denounced government as one of the sources of its
corruption, nevertheless sought the remedy in new social and political
institutions. Godwin said boldly, government is the evil; government
must go. Humanity can never be happy until all political authority and
social institutions disappear.
Now the peculiarity of Godwin's position as a doctrinaire of Progress
lies in the fact that he entertained the same pessimistic view of
some important sides of civilisation as Rousseau, and at the same time
adopted the theories of Rousseau's opponents, especially Helvetius. His
survey of human conditions seems to lead inevitably to pessimism; then
he turns round and proclaims the doctrine of perfectibility.
The explanation of this argument was the psychological theory of
Helvetius. He taught, as we saw, and Godwin developed the view in his
own way, that the natures and characters of men are moulded entirely by
their environment--not physical, but intellectual and moral environment,
and therefore can be indefinitely modified. A man is born into the world
without innate tendencies. His conduct depends on his opinions. Alter
men's opinions and they will act differently. Make their opinions
conformable to justice and benevolence, and you will have a just and
benevolent society. Virtue, as Socrates taught, is simply a question of
knowledge. The situation, therefore, is not hopeless. For it is not due
to the radical nature of man; it is caused by ignorance and prejudice,
by governments and institutions, by kings and priests. Transform the
ideas of men, and society will be transformed. The French philosopher
considered that a reformed system of educating children would be one of
the most powerful means for promoting progress and bringing about the
reign of reason; and Condorcet worked out a scheme of universal state
education. This was entirely opposed to Godwin's principles. State
schools would only be another instrument of power in the hands of a
government, worse even than a state Church. They would strengthen the
poisonous influence of kings and statesmen, and establish instead of
abolishing prejudices. He seems to have relied entirely on the private
efforts of enlightened thinkers to effect a gradual conversion of public
opinion.
In his study of the perfectibility of man and the prospect of a future
reign of general justice and benevolence, Godwin was even more visionary
than Condorcet, as in his political views he was more radical than the
Revolutionists. Condorcet had at least sought to connect his picture of
the future with a reasoned survey of the past, and to find a chain of
connection, but the perfectibility of Godwin hung in the air, supported
only by an abstract theory of the nature of man.
It can hardly be said that he contributed anything to the theoretical
problem of civilisation. His significance is that he proclaimed in
England at an opportune moment, and in a more impressive and startling
way than a sober apostle like Priestley, the creed of progress taught by
French philosophers, though considerably modified by his own anarchical
opinions.
5.
Perfectibility, as expounded by Condorcet and Godwin, encountered
a drastic criticism from Malthus, whose Essay on the Principle of
Population appeared in its first form anonymously in 1798. Condorcet had
foreseen an objection which might be raised as fatal to the realisation
of his future state. Will not the progress of industry and happiness
cause a steady increase in population, and must not the time come when
the number of the inhabitants of the globe will surpass their means of
subsistence? Condorcet did not grapple with this question. He contented
himself with saying that such a period must be very far away, and that
by then "the human race will have achieved improvements of which we can
now scarcely form an idea." Similarly Godwin, in his fancy picture of
the future happiness of mankind, notices the difficulty and shirks it.
"Three-fourths of the habitable globe are now uncultivated. The parts
already cultivated are capable of immeasurable improvement. Myriads of
centuries of still increasing population may pass away and the earth be
still found sufficient for the subsistence of its inhabitants."
Malthus argued that these writers laboured under an illusion as to the
actual relations between population and the means of subsistence. In
present conditions the numbers of the race are only kept from increasing
far beyond the means of subsistence by vice, misery, and the fear of
misery. [Footnote: This observation had been made (as Hazlitt pointed
out) before Malthus by Robert Wallace (see A Dissertation on the Numbers
of Mankind, p. 13, 1753). It was another book of Wallace that suggested
the difficulty to Godwin.] In the conditions imagined by Condorcet and
Godwin these checks are removed, and consequently the population would
increase with great rapidity, doubling itself at least in twenty-five
years. But the products of the earth increase only in an arithmetical
progression, and in fifty years the food supply would be too small for
the demand. Thus the oscillation between numbers and food supply would
recur, and the happiness of the species would come to an end.
Godwin and his adherents could reply that one of the checks on
over-population is prudential restraint, which Malthus himself
recognised, and that this would come more extensively into operation
with that progress of enlightenment which their theory assumed.
[Footnote: This is urged by Hazlitt in his criticism of Malthus in the
Spirit of the Age.] But the criticisms of Malthus dealt a trenchant
blow to the doctrine that human reason, acting through legislation and
government, has a virtually indefinite power of modifying the condition
of society. The difficulty, which he stated so vividly and definitely,
was well calculated to discredit the doctrine, and to suggest that the
development of society could be modified by the conscious efforts of man
only within restricted limits. [Footnote: The recent conclusions of Mr.
Knibbs, statistician to the Commonwealth of Australia, in vol. i. of
his Appendix to the Census of the Commonwealth, have an interest in this
connection. I quote from an article in the Times of August 5, 1918: "An
eminent geographer, the late Mr. E. G. Ravenstein, some years ago, when
the population of the earth was estimated at 1400 million, foretold that
about the middle of this century population would have reached a
limit beyond which increase would be disastrous. Mr. Knibbs is not so
pessimistic and is much more precise; though he defers the disastrous
culmination, he has no doubt as to its inevitability. The limits of
human expansion, he assures us, are much nearer than popular opinion
imagines; the difficulty of food supplies will soon be most grave; the
exhaustion of sources of energy necessary for any notable increase of
population, or advance in the standards of living, or both combined, is
perilously near. The present rate of increase in the world's population
cannot continue for four centuries."]
6.
The Essay of Malthus afterwards became one of the sacred books of the
Utilitarian sect, and it is interesting to notice what Bentham himself
thought of perfectibility. Referring to the optimistic views of
Chastellux and Priestley on progressive amelioration he observed that
"these glorious expectations remind us of the golden age of poetry."
For perfect happiness "belongs to the imaginary region of philosophy and
must be classed with the universal elixir and the philosopher's stone."
There will always be jealousies through the unequal gifts of nature and
of fortune; interests will never cease to clash and hatred to ensue;
"painful labour, daily subjection, a condition nearly allied to
indigence, will always be the lot of numbers"; in art and poetry the
sources of novelty will probably be exhausted. But Bentham was far from
being a pessimist. Though he believes that "we shall never make this
world the abode of happiness," he asserts that it may be made a most
delightful garden "compared with the savage forest in which men so long
have wandered." [Footnote: Works, vol. i. p. 193 seq.]
7.
The book of Malthus was welcomed at the moment by all those who had been
thoroughly frightened by the French Revolution and saw in the "modern
philosophy," as it was called, a serious danger to society. [Footnote:
Both Hazlitt and Shelley thought that Malthus was playing to the
boxes, by sophisms "calculated to lull the oppressors of mankind into
a security of everlasting triumph" (Revolt of Islam, Preface). Bentham
refers in his Book of Fallacies (Works, ii. p. 462) to the unpopularity
of the views of Priestley, Godwin, and Condorcet: "to aim at perfection
has been pronounced to be utter folly or wickedness."] Vice and misery
and the inexorable laws of population were a godsend to rescue the state
from "the precipice of perfectibility." We can understand the alarm
occasioned to believers in the established constitution of things, for
Godwin's work--now virtually forgotten, while Malthus is still appealed
to as a discoverer in social science--produced an immense effect on
impressionable minds at the time. All who prized liberty, sympathised
with the downtrodden, and were capable of falling in love with social
ideals, hailed Godwin as an evangelist. "No one," said a contemporary,
"was more talked of, more looked up to, more sought after; and wherever
liberty, truth, justice was the theme, his name was not far off." Young
graduates left the Universities to throw themselves at the feet of the
new Gamaliel; students of law and medicine neglected their professional
studies to dream of "the renovation of society and the march of
mind." Godwin carried with him "all the most sanguine and fearless
understandings of the time." [Footnote: Hazlitt, Spirit of the Age:
article on Godwin (written in 1814).]
The most famous of his disciples were the poets Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Southey, and afterwards Shelley. Wordsworth had been an ardent
sympathiser with the French Revolution. In its early days he had visited
Paris:
An emporium then
Of golden expectations and receiving
Freights every day from a new world of hope.
He became a Godwinian in 1795, when the Terror had destroyed his faith
in Revolutionary France. Southey, who had come under the influence of
Rousseau, was initiated by Coleridge into Godwin's theories, and
in their utopian enthusiasm they formed the design of founding a
"pantisocratic" settlement in America, to show how happiness could be
realised in a social environment in which duty and interest coincide and
consequently all are virtuous. The plan anticipated the experiments
of Owen and Cabet; but the pantisocrats did not experience the
disappointments of the socialists, for it was never carried out.
Coleridge and Southey as well as Wordsworth soon abandoned their
Godwinian doctrines. [Footnote: In letters of 1797 and 1798 Coleridge
repudiated the French doctrines and Godwin's philosophy. See Cestre, La
Revolution francaise et les poetes anglais (1789-1809), pp. 389, 414.]
They had, to use a phrase of Hazlitt, lost their way in Utopia, and they
gave up the abstract and mechanical view of society which the French
philosophy of the eighteenth century taught, for an organic conception
in which historic sentiment and the wisdom of our ancestors had their
due place. Wordsworth could presently look back and criticise his
Godwinian phase as that of
A proud and most presumptuous confidence
In the transcendent wisdom of the age
And its discernment. [Footnote: Excursion, Book ii.]
He and Southey became conservative pillars of the state. Yet Southey,
reactionary as he was in politics, never ceased to believe in social
Progress. [Footnote: See his Colloquies; and Shelley, writing in 1811,
says that Southey "looks forward to a state when all shall be perfected
and matter become subjected to the omnipotence of mind" (Dowden, Life of
Shelley, i. p. 212). Compare below, p. 325.] Amelioration was indeed to
be effected by slow and cautious reforms, with the aid of the Church,
but the intellectual aberrations of his youth had left an abiding
impression.
While these poets were sitting at Godwin's feet, Shelley was still a
child. But he came across Political Justice at Eton; in his later life
he reread it almost every year; and when he married Godwin's daughter he
was more Godwinian than Godwin himself. Hazlitt, writing in 1814, says
that Godwin's reputation had "sunk below the horizon," but Shelley
never ceased to believe in his theory, though he came to see that the
regeneration of man would be a much slower process than he had at first
imagined. In the immature poem Queen Mab the philosophy of Godwin was
behind his description of the future, and it was behind the longer and
more ambitious poems of his maturer years. The city of gold, of the
Revolt of Islam, is Godwin's future society, and he describes that
poem as "an experiment on the temper of the public mind as to how far a
thirst for a happier condition of moral and political society survives,
among the enlightened and refined, the tempests which have shaken the
age in which we live." As to Prometheus Unbound his biographer observes:
[Footnote: Dowden, ib. ii. p. 264. Elsewhere Dowden remarks on the
singular insensibility of Shelley's mind "to the wisdom or sentiment of
history" (i. p. 55).]
All the glittering fallacies of "Political Justice"--now sufficiently
tarnished--together with all its encouraging and stimulating truths,
may be found in the caput mortuum left when the critic has reduced the
poetry of the "Prometheus" to a series of doctrinaire statements.
The same dream inspired the final chorus of Hellas. Shelley was the poet
of perfectibility.
8.
The attraction of perfectibility reached beyond the ranks of men of
letters, and in Robert Owen, the benevolent millowner of Lanark, it
had an apostle who based upon it a very different theory from that of
Political Justice and became one of the founders of modern socialism.
The success of the idea of Progress has been promoted by its association
with socialism. [Footnote: The word was independently invented in
England and France. An article in the Poor Man's Guardian (a periodical
edited by H. Hetherington, afterwards by Bronterre O'Brien), Aug. 24,
1833, is signed "A Socialist"; and in 1834 socialisme is opposed to
individualism by P. Leroux in an article in the Revue Encyclopedique.
The word is used in the New Moral World, and from 1836 was applied to
the Owenites. See Dolleans, Robert Owen (1907), p. 305.] The first phase
of socialism, what has been called its sentimental phase, was originated
by Saint-Simon in France and Owen in England at about the same time;
Marx was to bring it down from the clouds and make it a force in
practical politics. But both in its earlier and in its later forms the
economical doctrines rest upon a theory of society depending on the
assumption, however disguised, that social institutions have been solely
responsible for the vice and misery which exist, and that institutions
and laws can be so changed as to abolish misery and vice. That is
pure eighteenth century doctrine; and it passed from the revolutionary
doctrinaires of that period to the constructive socialists of the
nineteenth century.
Owen learned it probably from Godwin, and he did not disguise it. His
numerous works enforce it ad nauseam. He began the propagation of his
gospel by his "New View of Society, or Essays on the formation of the
human character, preparatory to the development of a plan for gradually
ameliorating the condition of mankind," which he dedicated to the Prince
Regent. [Footnote: 3rd ed. 1817. The Essays had appeared separately in
1813-14.] Here he lays down that "any general character, from the best
to the worst, may be given to any community, even to the world at large,
by the application of proper means; which means are to a great extent
at the command and under the control of those who have influence in the
affairs of men." [Footnote: P. 19.] The string on which he continually
harps is that it is the cardinal error in government to suppose that
men are responsible for their vices and virtues, and therefore for their
actions and characters. These result from education and institutions,
and can be transformed automatically by transforming those agencies.
Owen founded several short-lived journals to diffuse his theories. The
first number of the New Moral World (1834-36) [Footnote: This was not
a journal, but a series of pamphlets which appeared in 1836-1844. Other
publications of Owen were: Outline of the Rational System of Society
(6th ed., Leeds, 1840); The Revolution in the Mind and Practice of
the Human Race, or the coming change from Irrationality to Rationality
(1849); The Future of the Human Race, or a great, glorious and peaceful
Revolution, near at hand, to be effected through the agency of departed
spirits of good and superior men and women (1853); The New Existence of
Man upon Earth, Parts i.-viii., 1854-55.] proclaimed the approach of an
ideal society in which there will be no ignorance, no poverty, and no
charity--a system "which will ensure the happiness of the human race
throughout all future ages," to replace one "which, so long as it shall
be maintained, must produce misery to all." His own experimental
attempt to found such a society on a miniature scale in America proved a
ludicrous failure.
It is to be observed that in these socialist theories the conception of
Progress as indefinite tends to vanish or to lose its significance. If
the millennium can be brought about at a stroke by a certain arrangement
of society, the goal of development is achieved; we shall have reached
the term, and shall have only to live in and enjoy the ideal state--a
menagerie of happy men. There will be room for further, perhaps
indefinite, advance in knowledge, but civilisation in its social
character becomes stable and rigid. Once man's needs are perfectly
satisfied in a harmonious environment there is no stimulus to cause
further changes, and the dynamic character of history disappears.
Theories of Progress are thus differentiating into two distinct types,
corresponding to two radically opposed political theories and appealing
to two antagonistic temperaments. The one type is that of constructive
idealists and socialists, who can name all the streets and towers
of "the city of gold," which they imagine as situated just round a
promontory. The development of man is a closed system; its term is known
and is within reach. The other type is that of those who, surveying
the gradual ascent of man, believe that by the same interplay of forces
which have conducted him so far and by a further development of
the liberty which he has fought to win, he will move slowly towards
conditions of increasing harmony and happiness. Here the development
is indefinite; its term is unknown, and lies in the remote future.
Individual liberty is the motive force, and the corresponding political
theory is liberalism; whereas the first doctrine naturally leads to a
symmetrical system in which the authority of the state is preponderant,
and the individual has little more value than a cog in a well-oiled
wheel: his place is assigned; it is not his right to go his own way. Of
this type the principal example that is not socialistic is, as we shall
see, the philosophy of Comte.
CHAPTER XIII. GERMAN SPECULATIONS ON PROGRESS
1.
The philosophical views current in Germany during the period in which
the psychology of Locke was in fashion in France and before the genius
of Kant opened a new path, were based on the system of Leibnitz. We
might therefore expect to find a theory of Progress developed there,
parallel to the development in France though resting on different
principles. For Leibnitz, as we saw, provided in his cosmic optimism
a basis for the doctrine of human Progress, and he had himself
incidentally pointed to it. This development, however, was delayed. It
was only towards the close of the period--which is commonly known as
the age of "Illumination"--that Progress came to the front, and it is
interesting to observe the reason.
Wolf was the leading successor and interpreter of Leibnitz. He
constrained that thinker's ideas into a compact logical system which
swayed Germany till Kant swept it away. In such cases it usually
happens that some striking doctrines and tendencies of the master are
accentuated and enforced, while others are suffered to drop out of
sight.
So it was here. In the Wolfian system, Leibnitz's conception of
development was suffered to drop out of sight, and the dynamic element
which animated his speculation disappeared. In particular, he had laid
down that the sum of motive forces in the physical world is constant.
His disciples proceeded to the inference that the sum of morality in
the ethical world is constant. This dogma obviously eliminates the
possibility of ethical improvement for collective humanity. And so we
find Mendelssohn, who was the popular exponent of Wolf's philosophy,
declaring that "progress is only for the individual; but that the whole
of humanity here below in the course of time shall always progress and
perfect itself seems to me not to have been the purpose of Providence."
[Footnote: See Bock, Jakob Wegelin als Geschichtstheoretiker, in
Leipsiger Studien, ix. 4, pp. 23-7 (1902).]
The publication of the Nouveaux Essais in 1765 induced some thinkers to
turn from the dry bones of Wolf to the spirit of Leibnitz himself. And
at the same time French thought was penetrating. In consequence of these
influences the final phase of the German "Illumination" is marked by the
appearance of two or three works in which Progress is a predominating
idea.
We see this reaction against Wolf and his static school in a little
work published by Herder in 1774--"a philosophy of history for the
cultivation of mankind." There is continuous development, he declares,
and one people builds upon the work of another. We must judge past ages,
not by the present, but relatively to their own particular conditions.
What exists now was never possible before, for everything that man
accomplishes is conditioned by time, climate, and circumstances.
Six years later Lessing's pamphlet on the Education of the Human Race
appeared, couched in the form of aphoristic statements, and to a modern
reader, one may venture to say, singularly wanting in argumentative
force. The thesis is that the drama of history is to be explained as the
education of man by a progressive series of religions, a series not yet
complete, for the future will produce another revelation to lift him
to a higher plane than that to which Christ has drawn him up. This
interpretation of history proclaimed Progress, but assumed an ideal and
applied a measure very different from those of the French philosophers.
The goal is not social happiness, but a full comprehension of God.
Philosophy of religion is made the key to the philosophy of history. The
work does not amount to more than a suggestion for a new synthesis, but
it was opportune and arresting.
Herder meanwhile had been thinking, and in 1784 he gave the German world
his survey of man's career--Ideas of the Philosophy of the History of
Humanity. In this famous work, in which we can mark the influence of
French thinkers, especially Montesquieu, as well as of Leibnitz, he
attempted, though on very different lines, the same task which Turgot
and Condorcet planned, a universal history of civilisation.
The Deity designed the world but never interferes in its process,
either in the physical cosmos or in human history. Human history itself,
civilisation, is a purely natural phenomenon. Events are strictly
enchained; continuity is unbroken; what happened at any given time could
have happened only then, and nothing else could have happened.
Herder's rigid determinism not only excludes Voltaire's chance but also
suppresses the free play of man's intelligent will. Man cannot guide his
own destinies; his actions and fortunes are determined by the nature
of things, his physical organisation and physical environment. The
fact that God exists in inactive ease hardly affects the fatalistic
complexion of this philosophy; but it is perhaps a mitigation that the
world was made for man; humanity is its final cause.
The variety of the phases of civilisation that have appeared on earth
is due to the fact that the possible manifestations of human nature are
very numerous and that they must all be realised. The lower forms are
those in which the best, which means the most human, faculties of our
nature are undeveloped. The highest has not yet been realised. "The
flower of humanity, captive still in its germ, will blossom out one
day into the true form of man like unto God, in a state of which no
terrestrial man can imagine the greatness and the majesty." [Footnote:
Ideen, v. 5.]
Herder is not a systematic thinker--indeed his work abounds in
contradictions--and he has not made it clear how far this full epiphany
results from the experiences of mankind in preceding phases. He believes
that life is an education for humanity (he has taken the phrase of
Lessing), that good progressively develops, that reason and justice
become more powerful. This is a doctrine of Progress, but he distinctly
opposes the hypothesis of a final and unique state of perfection as the
goal of history, which would imply that earlier generations exist for
the sake of the later and suffer in order to ensure the felicity of
remote posterity--a theory which offends his sense of justice and
fitness. On the contrary, man can realise happiness equally in every
stage of civilisation. All forms of society are equally legitimate, the
imperfect as well as the perfect; all are ends in themselves, not mere
stages on the way to something better. And a people which is happy in
one of these inferior states has a perfect right to remain in it.
Thus the Progress which Herder sees is, to use his own geometrical
illustration, a sequence of unequal and broken curves, corresponding
to different maxima and minima. Each curve has its own equation, the
history of each people is subject to the laws of its own environment;
but there is no general law controlling the whole career of humanity.
[Footnote: Ib. xv. 3. The power of ideas in history, which Herder failed
to appreciate, was recognised by a contemporary savant from whom he
might have learned. Jakob Wegelin, a Swiss, had, at the invitation of
Frederick the Great, settled in Berlin, where he spent the last years of
his life and devoted his study to the theory of history. His merit was
to have perceived that "external facts are penetrated and governed by
spiritual forces and guiding ideas, and that the essential and permanent
in history is conditioned by the nature and development of ideas."
(Dierauer, quoted by Bock, op. cit. p. 13.) He believed in the
progressive development of mankind as a whole, but as his learned
brochures seem to have exerted no influence, it would be useless here to
examine more closely his views, which are buried in the transactions
of the Prussian Academy of Science. In Switzerland he came under the
influence of Rousseau and d'Alembert. After he moved to Berlin (1765)
he fell under that of Leibnitz. It may be noted (1) that he deprecated
attempts at writing a universal history as premature until an adequate
knowledge of facts had been gained, and this would demand long
preliminary labours; (2) that he discussed the question whether history
is an indefinite progression or a series of constant cycles, and decided
for the former view. (Memoire sur le cours periodique, 1785).
Bock's monograph is the best study of Wegelin; but see also Flint's
observations in Philosophy of History, vol. i. (1874).]
Herder brought down his historical survey only as far as the sixteenth
century. It has been suggested [Footnote: Javary, De l'idee de progres,
p. 69.] that if he had come down further he might have comprehended
the possibility of a deliberate transformation of societies by the
intelligent action of the human will--an historical force to which he
does not do justice, apparently because he fancied it incompatible
with strict causal sequence. The value of his work does not lie in
the philosophical principles which he applied. Nor was it a useful
contribution to history; of him it has been said, as of Bossuet, that
facts bent like grass under his feet. [Footnote: Jouffroy, Melanges,
p. 81.] But it was a notable attempt to do for human phenomena what
Leibnitz in his Theodicy sought to do for the cosmos, and it pointed
the way to the rationalistic philosophies of history which were to be a
feature of the speculations of the following century.
2.
The short essay of Kant, which he clumsily called the Idea of a
Universal History on a Cosmopolitical Plan, [Footnote: 1784. This work
of Kant was translated by De Quincey (Works, vol. ix. 428 sqq., ed.
Masson), who is responsible for cosmopolitical as the rendering of
weltburgerlich.] approaches the problems raised by the history of
civilisation from a new point of view.
He starts with the principle of invariable law. On any theory of free
will, he says, human actions are as completely under the control of
universal-laws of nature as any other physical phenomena. This is
illustrated by statistics. Registers of births, deaths, and marriages
show that these events occur with as much conformity to laws of nature
as the oscillations of the weather.
It is the same with the great sequence of historical events. Taken alone
and individually, they seem incoherent and lawless; but viewed in their
connection, as due to the action not of individuals but of the human
species, they do not fail to reveal "a regular stream of tendency."
Pursuing their own often contradictory purposes, individual nations and
individual men are unconsciously promoting a process to which if they
perceived it they would pay little regard.
Individual men do not obey a law. They do not obey the laws of instinct
like animals, nor do they obey, as rational citizens of the world would
do, the laws of a preconcerted plan. If we look at the stage of history
we see scattered and occasional indications of wisdom, but the general
sum of men's actions is "a web of folly, childish vanity, and often even
of the idlest wickedness and spirit of destruction."
The problem for the philosopher is to discover a meaning in this
senseless current of human actions, so that the history of creatures who
pursue no plan of their own may yet admit of a systematic form. The clew
to this form is supplied by the predispositions of human nature.
I have stated this problem almost in Kant's words, and as he might have
stated it if he had not introduced the conception of final causes. His
use of the postulate of final causes without justifying it is a defect
in his essay. He identifies what he well calls a stream of tendency with
"a natural purpose." He makes no attempt to show that the succession of
events is such that it cannot be explained without the postulate of a
purpose. His solution of the problem is governed by this conception of
finality, and by the unwarranted assumption that nature does nothing in
vain.
He lays down that all the tendencies to which any creature is
predisposed by its nature must in the end be developed perfectly and
agreeably to their final purpose. Those predispositions in man
which serve the use of his reason are therefore destined to be fully
developed. This destiny, however, cannot be realised in the individual;
it can only be realised in the species. For reason works tentatively,
by progress and regress. Each man would require an inordinate length of
time to make a perfect use of his natural tendencies. Therefore, as life
is short, an incalculable series of generations is needed.
The means which nature employs to develop these tendencies is the
antagonism which in man's social state exists between his gregarious
and his antigregarious tendencies. His antigregarious nature expresses
itself in the desire to force all things to comply to his own humour.
Hence ambition, love of honour, avarice. These were necessary to raise
mankind from the savage to the civilised state. But for these antisocial
propensities men would be gentle as sheep, and "an Arcadian life would
arise, of perfect harmony and mutual love, such as must suffocate and
stifle all talents in their very germs." Nature, knowing better than man
what is good for the species, ordains discord. She is to be thanked
for competition and enmity, and for the thirst of power and wealth. For
without these the final purpose of realising man's rational nature would
remain unfulfilled. This is Kant's answer to Rousseau.
The full realisation of man's rational nature is possible only in
a "universal civil society" founded on political justice. The
establishment of such a society is the highest problem for the human
species. Kant contemplates, as the political goal, a confederation of
states in which the utmost possible freedom shall be united with the
most rigorous determination of the boundaries of freedom.
Is it reasonable to suppose that a universal or cosmopolitical society
of this kind will come into being; and if so, how will it be brought
about? Political changes in the relations of states are generally
produced by war. Wars are tentative endeavours to bring about new
relations and to form new political bodies. Are combinations and
recombinations to continue until by pure chance some rational
self-supporting system emerges? Or is it possible that no such condition
of society may ever arrive, and that ultimately all progress may be
overwhelmed by a hell of evils? Or, finally, is Nature pursuing her
regular course of raising the species by its own spontaneous efforts
and developing, in the apparently wild succession of events, man's
originally implanted tendencies?
Kant accepts the last alternative on the ground that it is not
reasonable to assume a final purpose in particular natural processes and
at the same time to assume that there is no final purpose in the whole.
Thus his theory of Progress depends on the hypothesis of final causes.
It follows that to trace the history of mankind is equivalent to
unravelling a hidden plan of Nature for accomplishing a perfect civil
constitution for a universal society; since a universal society is
the sole state in which the tendencies of human nature can be fully
developed. We cannot determine the orbit of the development, because the
whole period is so vast and only a small fraction is known to us, but
this is enough to show that there is a definite course.
Kant thinks that such a "cosmopolitical" history, as he calls it, is
possible, and that if it were written it would give us a clew opening up
"a consolatory prospect into futurity, in which at a remote distance we
shall discover the human species seated upon an eminence won by infinite
toil, where all the germs are unfolded which nature has implanted and
its own destination upon this earth accomplished."
3.
But to see the full bearing of Kant's discussion we must understand its
connection with his ethics. For his ethical theory is the foundation and
the motive of his speculation on Progress. The progress on which he lays
stress is moral amelioration; he refers little to scientific or material
progress. For him morality was an absolute obligation founded in the
nature of reason. Such an obligation presupposes an end to be attained,
and this end is a reign of reason under which all men obeying the moral
law mutually treat each other as ends in themselves. Such an ideal state
must be regarded as possible, because it is a necessary postulate of
reason. From this point of view it may be seen that Kant's speculation
on universal history is really a discussion whether the ideal state,
which is required as a subjective postulate in the interest of ethics,
is likely to be realised objectively.
Now, Kant does not assert that because our moral reason must assume the
possibility of this hypothetical goal civilisation is therefore moving
towards it. That would be a fallacy into which he was incapable of
falling. Civilisation is a phenomenon, and anything we know about it can
only be inferred from experience. His argument is that there are actual
indications of progress in this desirable direction. He pointed to the
contemporary growth of civil liberty and religious liberty, and these
are conditions of moral improvement. So far his argument coincides in
principle with that of French theorists of Progress. But Kant goes on
to apply to these data the debatable conception of final causes, and to
infer a purpose in the development of humanity. Only this inference is
put forward as a hypothesis, not as a dogma.
It is probable that what hindered Kant from broaching his theory of
Progress with as much confidence as Condorcet was his perception that
nothing could be decisively affirmed about the course of civilisation
until the laws of its movement had been discovered. He saw that this was
a matter for scientific investigation. He says expressly that the laws
are not yet known, and suggests that some future genius may do for
social phenomena what Kepler and Newton did for the heavenly bodies. As
we shall see, this is precisely what some of the leading French thinkers
of the next generation will attempt to do.
But cautiously though he framed the hypothesis Kant evidently considered
Progress probable. He recognised that the most difficult obstacle to the
moral advance of man lies in war and the burdens which the possibility
of war imposes. And he spent much thought on the means by which war
might be abolished. He published a philosophical essay on Perpetual
Peace, in which he formulated the articles of an international treaty to
secure the disappearance of war. He considered that, while a universal
republic would be the positive ideal, we shall probably have to be
contented with what he calls a negative substitute, consisting in
a federation of peoples bound by a peace-alliance guaranteeing the
independence of each member. But to assure the permanence of this system
it is essential that each state should have a democratic constitution.
For such a constitution is based on individual liberty and civil
equality. All these changes should be brought about by legal reforms;
revolutions--he was writing in 1795---cannot be justified.
We see the influence of Rousseau's Social Contract and that of the Abbe
de Saint-Pierre, with whose works Kant was acquainted. There can be
little doubt that it was the influence of French thought, so powerful
in Germany at this period, that turned Kant's mind towards these
speculations, which belong to the latest period of his life and form a
sort of appendix to his philosophical system. The theory of Progress,
the idea of universal reform, the doctrine of political equality--Kant
examined all these conceptions and appropriated them to the service of
his own highly metaphysical theory of ethics. In this new association
their spirit was changed.
In France, as we saw, the theory of Progress was generally associated
with ethical views which could find a metaphysical basis in the
sensationalism of Locke. A moral system which might be built on
sensation, as the primary mental fact, was worked out by Helvetius. But
the principle that the supreme law of conduct is to obey nature had
come down as a practical philosophy from Rabelais and Montaigne through
Moliere to the eighteenth century. It was reinforced by the theory of
the natural goodness of man. Jansenism had struggled against it and was
defeated. After theology it was the turn of metaphysics. Kant's moral
imperative marked the next stage in the conflict of the two opposite
tendencies which seek natural and ultra-natural sanctions for morality.
Hence the idea of progress had a different significance for Kant and for
its French exponents, though his particular view of the future possibly
in store for the human species coincided in some essential points with
theirs. But his theory of life gives a different atmosphere to the idea.
In France the atmosphere is emphatically eudaemonic; happiness is the
goal. Kant is an uncompromising opponent of eudaemonism. "If we take
enjoyment or happiness as the measure, it is easy," he says, "to
evaluate life. Its value is less than nothing. For who would begin one's
life again in the same conditions, or even in new natural conditions, if
one could choose them oneself, but of which enjoyment would be the sole
end?"
There was, in fact, a strongly-marked vein of pessimism in Kant. One
of the ablest men of the younger generation who were brought up on his
system founded the philosophical pessimism--very different in range and
depth from the sentimental pessimism of Rousseau--which was to play a
remarkable part in German thought in the nineteenth century. [Footnote:
Kant's pessimism has been studied at length by von Hartmann, in Zur
Geschichte und Begrundung des Pessimismus (1880).] Schopenhauer's
unpleasant conclusion that of all conceivable worlds this is the
worst, is one of the speculations for which Kant may be held ultimately
responsible. [Footnote: Schopenhauer recognised progress social,
economic, and political, but as a fact that contains no guarantee
of happiness; on the contrary, the development of the intelligence
increases suffering. He ridiculed the optimistic ideals of comfortable,
well-regulated states. His views on historical development have been
collected by G. Sparlinsky, Schopenhauers Verhaltnis zur Geschichte, in
Berner Studien s. Philosophie, Bd. lxxii. (1910).]
4.
Kant's considerations on historical development are an appendix to his
philosophy; they are not a necessary part, wrought into the woof of his
system. It was otherwise with his successors the Idealists, for whom his
system was the point of departure, though they rejected its essential
feature, the limitation of human thought. With Fichte and Hegel
progressive development was directly deduced from their principles. If
their particular interpretations of history have no permanent value, it
is significant that, in their ambitious attempts to explain the universe
a priori, history was conceived as progressive, and their philosophies
did much to reinforce a conception which on very different principles
was making its way in the world. But the progress which their systems
involved was not bound up with the interest of human happiness, but
stood out as a fact which, whether agreeable or not, is a consequence of
the nature of thought.
The process of the universe, as it appeared to Fichte, [Footnote:
Fichte's philosophy of history will be found in Die Grundzuge des
gegenwartigen Zeitalters (1806), lectures which he delivered at Berlin
in 1804-5.] tends to a full realisation of "freedom"; that is its end
and goal, but a goal that always recedes. It can never be reached; for
its full attainment would mean the complete suppression of Nature. The
process of the world, therefore, consists in an indefinite approximation
to an unattainable ideal: freedom is being perpetually realised more and
more; and the world, as it ascends in this direction, becomes more and
more a realm of reason.
What Fichte means by freedom may be best explained by its opposition to
instinct. A man acting instinctively may be acting quite reasonably,
in a way which any one fully conscious of all the implications and
consequences of the action would judge to be reasonable. But in order
that his actions should be free he must himself be fully conscious of
all those implications and consequences.
It follows that the end of mankind upon earth is to reach a state in
which all the relations of life shall be ordered according to reason,
not instinctively but with full consciousness and deliberate purpose.
This end should govern the ethical rules of conduct, and it determines
the necessary stages of history.
It gives us at once two main periods, the earliest and the latest: the
earliest, in which men act reasonably by instinct, and the latest, in
which they are conscious of reason and try to realise it fully. But
before reaching this final stage they must pass through an epoch in
which reason is conscious of itself, but not regnant. And to reach this
they must have emancipated themselves from instinct, and this process
of emancipation means a fourth epoch. But they could not have wanted
to emancipate themselves unless they had felt instinct as a servitude
imposed by an external authority, and therefore we have to distinguish
yet another epoch wherein reason is expressed in authoritarian
institutions to which men blindly submit. In this way Fichte deduces
five historical epochs: two in which progress is blind, two in which it
is free, and an intermediate in which it is struggling to consciousness.
[Footnote: First Epoch: that of instinctive reason; the age of
innocence. Second: that of authoritarian reason. Third: that of
enfranchisement; the age of scepticism and unregulated liberty. Fourth:
that of conscious reason, as science. Fifth: that of regnant reason, as
art.] But there are no locked gates between these periods; they overlap
and mingle; each may have some of the characteristics of another; and in
each there is a vanguard leading the way and a rearguard lagging behind.
At present (1804) we are in the third age; we have broken with
authority, but do not yet possess a clear and disciplined knowledge of
reason. [Footnote: Three years later, however, Fichte maintained in his
patriotic Discourses to the German Nation (1807) that in 1804 man had
crossed the threshold of the fourth epoch. He asserted that the progress
of "culture" and science will depend henceforward chiefly on Germany.]
Fichte has deduced this scheme purely a priori without any reference
to actual experience. "The philosopher," he says, "follows the a priori
thread of the world-plan which is clear to him without any history;
and if he makes use of history, it is not to prove anything, since his
theses are already proved independently of all history."
Historical development is thus presented as a necessary progress towards
a goal which is known but cannot be reached. And this fact as to the
destiny of the race constitutes the basis of morality, of which
the fundamental law is to act in such a way as to promote the free
realisation of reason upon earth. It has been claimed by a recent critic
that Fichte was the first modern philosopher to humanise morals. He
completely rejected the individualistic conception which underlay
Kantian as well as Christian ethics. He asserted that the true motive of
morality is not the salvation of the individual man but the Progress of
humanity. In fact, with Fichte Progress is the principle of ethics. That
the Christian ideal of ascetic saintliness detached from society has
no moral value is a plain corollary from the idea of earthly Progress.
[Footnote: X. Leon, La Philosophie de Fichte (1902), pp. 477-9.]
One other point in Fichte's survey of history deserves notice--the
social role of the savant. It is the function of the savant to discover
the truths which are a condition of moral progress; he may be said
to incarnate reason in the world. We shall see how this idea played
a prominent part in the social schemes of Saint-Simon and Comte.
[Footnote: Fichte, Ueber die Bestimmung des Gelehrten (1794).]
5.
Hegel's philosophy of history is better known than Fichte's. Like
Fichte, he deduced the phases a priori from his metaphysical principles,
but he condescended to review in some detail the actual phenomena. He
conceived the final cause of the world as Spirit's consciousness of its
own freedom. The ambiguous term "freedom" is virtually equivalent
to self-consciousness, and Hegel defines Universal History as the
description of the process by which Spirit or God comes to the
consciousness of its own meaning. This freedom does not mean that Spirit
could choose at any moment to develop in a different way; its actual
development is necessary and is the embodiment of reason. Freedom
consists in fully recognising the fact.
Of the particular features which distinguish Hegel's treatment, the
first is that he identifies "history" with political history, the
development of the state. Art, religion, philosophy, the creations
of social man, belong to a different and higher stage of Spirit's
self-revelation. [Footnote: The three phases of Spirit are (1)
subjective; (2) objective; (3) absolute. Psychology, e.g., is included
in (1), law and history in (2), religion in (3).] In the second place,
Hegel ignores the primitive prehistoric ages of man, and sets the
beginning of his development in the fully-grown civilisation of China.
He conceives the Spirit as continually moving from one nation to another
in order to realise the successive stages of its self-consciousness:
from China to India, from India to the kingdoms of Western Asia; then
from the Orient to Greece, then to Rome, and finally to the Germanic
world. In the East men knew only that ONE is free, the political
characteristic was despotism; in Greece and Rome they knew that SOME
are free, and the political forms were aristocracy and democracy; in
the modern world they know that ALL are free, and the political form
is monarchy. The first period, he compared to childhood, the second to
youth (Greece) and manhood (Rome), the third to old age, old but not
feeble. The third, which includes the medieval and modern history of
Europe, designated by Hegel as the Germanic world--for "the German
spirit is the spirit of the modern world"--is also the final period. In
it God realises his freedom completely in history, just as in Hegel's
own absolute philosophy, which is final, God has completely understood
his own nature.
And here is the most striking difference between the theories of Fichte
and Hegel. Both saw the goal of human development in the realisation of
"freedom," but, while with Fichte the development never ends as the goal
is unattainable, with Hegel the development is already complete, the
goal is not only attainable but has now been attained. Thus Hegel's is
what we may call a closed system. History has been progressive, but no
path is left open for further advance. Hegel views this conclusion
of development with perfect complacency. To most minds that are not
intoxicated with the Absolute it will seem that, if the present is the
final state to which the evolution of Spirit has conducted, the result
is singularly inadequate to the gigantic process. But his system is
eminently inhuman. The happiness or misery of individuals is a matter of
supreme indifference to the Absolute, which, in order to realise itself
in time, ruthlessly sacrifices sentient beings.
The spirit of Hegel's philosophy, in its bearing on social life, was
thus antagonistic to Progress as a practical doctrine. Progress there
had been, but Progress had done its work; the Prussian monarchical state
was the last word in history. Kant's cosmopolitical plan, the liberalism
and individualism which were implicit in his thought, the democracies
which he contemplated in the future, are all cast aside as a
misconception. Once the needs of the Absolute Spirit have been
satisfied, when it has seen its full power and splendour revealed in
the Hegelian philosophy, the world is as good as it can be. Social
amelioration does not matter, nor the moral improvement of men, nor the
increase of their control over physical forces.
6.
The other great representative of German idealism, who took his
departure from Kant, also saw in history a progressive revelation of
divine reason. But it was the processes of nature, not the career
of humanity, that absorbed the best energies of Schelling, and the
elaboration of a philosophical idea of organic evolution was the
prominent feature of his speculation. His influence--and it was wide,
reaching even scientific biologists--lay chiefly in diffusing this
idea, and he thus contributed to the formation of a theory which was
afterwards to place the idea of Progress on a more imposing base.
[Footnote: Schelling's views notoriously varied at various stages of his
career. In his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) he distinguished
three historical periods, in the first of which the Absolute reveals
itself as Fate, in the second as Nature, in the third as Providence, and
asserted that we are still living in the second, which began with the
expansion of Rome (Werke, i. 3, p. 603). In this context he says
that the conception of an infinite "progressivity" is included in the
conception of "history," but adds that the perfectibility of the race
cannot be directly inferred. For it may be said that man has no
proper history but turns round on a wheel of Ixion. The difficulty of
establishing the fact of Progress from the course of events lies in
discovering a criterion. Schelling rejects the criterion of moral
improvement and that of advance in science and arts as unpractical
or misleading. But if we see the sole object of history in a gradual
realisation of the ideal state, we have a measure of Progress which can
be applied; though it cannot be proved either by theory or by experience
that the goal will be attained. This must remain an article of faith
(ib. 592 sqq.).]
Schelling influenced, among others, his contemporary Krause, a less
familiar name, who worked out a philosophy of history in which this idea
is fundamental. Krause conceived history, which is the expression of the
Absolute, as the development of life; society as an organism; and
social growth as a process which can be deduced from abstract biological
principles.
[Footnote: Krause divided man's earthly career into three Ages--infancy,
growth, and maturity. The second of these falls into three periods
characterised by (1) polytheism, (2) monotheism (Middle Ages), (3)
scepticism and liberty, and we are now in the third of these periods.
The third Age will witness the union of humanity in a single social
organism, and the universal acceptance of "panentheism" (the doctrine of
the unity of all in God), which is the principle of Krause's philosophy
and religion. But though this will be the final stage on the earth,
Krause contemplates an ulterior career of humanity in other solar
systems.
Krause never attracted attention in England, but he exerted
some influence in France and Spain, and especially in Belgium,
notwithstanding the grotesque jargon in which he obscured his thoughts.
See Flint, Philosophy of History, pp. 474-5. Flint's account of his
speculations is indulgent. The main ideas of his philosophy of history
will be found in the Introduction a la philosophie (ed. 2, 1880) of G.
Tiberghien, a Belgian disciple.]
All these transcendent speculations had this in common that they
pretended to discover the necessary course of human history on
metaphysical principles, independent of experience. But it has been
rightly doubted whether this alleged independence was genuine. We may
question whether any of them would have produced the same sequence of
periods of history, if the actual facts of history had been to them a
sealed book. Indeed we may be sure that they were surreptitiously and
subconsciously using experience as a guide, while they imagined that
abstract principles were entirely responsible for their conclusions. And
this is equivalent to saying that their ideas of progressive movement
were really derived from that idea of Progress which the French thinkers
of the eighteenth century had attempted to base on experience.
The influence, direct and indirect, of these German philosophers reached
far beyond the narrow circle of the bacchants or even the wandbearers
of idealism. They did much to establish the notion of progressive
development as a category of thought, almost as familiar and
indispensable as that of cause and effect. They helped to diffuse the
idea of "an increasing purpose" in history. Augustine or Bossuet might
indeed have spoken of an increasing purpose, but the "purpose" of their
speculations was subsidiary to a future life. The purpose of the German
idealists could be fulfilled in earthly conditions and required no
theory of personal immortality.
This atmosphere of thought affected even intelligent reactionaries who
wrote in the interest of orthodox Christianity and the Catholic Church.
Progressive development is admitted in the lectures on the Philosophy of
History of Friedrich von Schlegel. [Footnote: Translated into English
in 2 vols., 1835.] He denounced Condorcet, and opposed to perfectibility
the corruptible nature of man. But he asserted that the philosophy
of history is to be found in "the principles of social progress."
[Footnote: Op. cit. ii, p. 194, sqq.] These principles are three: the
hidden ways of Providence emancipating the human race; the freewill of
man; and the power which God permits to the agents of evil,--principles
which Bossuet could endorse, but the novelty is that here they are
arrayed as forces of Progress. In fact, the point of von Schlegel's
pretentious, unilluminating book is to rehabilitate Christianity by
making it the key to that new conception of life which had taken shape
among the enemies of the Church.
7.
As biological development was one of the constant preoccupations of
Goethe, whose doctrine of metamorphosis and "types" helped to prepare
the way for the evolutionary hypothesis, we might have expected to find
him interested in theories of social progress, in which theories
of biological development find a logical extension. But the French
speculations on Progress did not touch his imagination; they left him
cool and sceptical. Towards the end of his life, in conversation with
Eckermann, he made some remarks which indicate his attitude. [Footnote:
Gesprache mit Goethe, 23 Oktober 1828.] "'The world will not reach its
goal so quickly as we think and wish. The retarding demons are always
there, intervening and resisting at every point, so that, though there
is an advance on the whole, it is very slow. Live longer and you will
find that I am right.'
"'The development of humanity,' said Eckermann, 'appears to be a matter
of thousands of years.'
"'Who knows?' Goethe replied, 'perhaps of millions. But let humanity
last as long as it will, there will always be hindrances in its way, and
all kinds of distress, to make it develop its powers. Men will become
more clever and discerning, but not better nor happier nor more
energetic, at least except for limited periods. I see the time coming
when God will take no more pleasure in the race, and must again proceed
to a rejuvenated creation. I am sure that this will happen and that the
time and hour in the distant future are already fixed for the beginning
of this epoch of rejuvenation. But that time is certainly a long
way off, and we can still for thousands and thousands of years enjoy
ourselves on this dear old playing-ground, just as it is.'"
That is at once a plain rejection of perfectibility, and an opinion that
intellectual development is no highroad to the gates of a golden city.
CHAPTER XIV. CURRENTS OF THOUGHT IN FRANCE AFTER THE REVOLUTION
1.
The failure of the Revolution to fulfil the visionary hopes which had
dazzled France for a brief period--a failure intensified by the horrors
that had attended the experiment--was followed by a reaction against the
philosophical doctrines and tendencies which had inspired its leaders.
Forces, which the eighteenth century had underrated or endeavoured to
suppress, emerged in a new shape, and it seemed for a while as if the
new century might definitely turn its back on its predecessor. There
was an intellectual rehabilitation of Catholicism, which will always
be associated with the names of four thinkers of exceptional talent,
Chateaubriand, De Maistre, Bonald, and Lamennais.
But the outstanding fame of these great reactionaries must not mislead
us into exaggerating the reach of this reaction. The spirit and
tendencies of the past century still persisted in the circles which were
most permanently influential. Many eminent savants who had been imbued
with the ideas of Condillac and Helvetius, and had taken part in
the Revolution and survived it, were active under the Empire and the
restored Monarchy, still true to the spirit of their masters, and
commanding influence by the value of their scientific work. M. Picavet's
laborious researches into the activities of this school of thinkers has
helped us to understand the transition from the age of Condorcet to
the age of Comte. The two central figures are Cabanis, the friend of
Condorcet, [Footnote: He has already claimed our notice, above, p. 215.]
and Destutt de Tracy. M. Picavet has grouped around them, along with
many obscurer names, the great scientific men of the time, like Laplace,
Bichat, Lamarck, as all in the direct line of eighteenth century
thought. "Ideologists" he calls them. [Footnote: Ideology is now
sometimes used to convey a criticism; for instance, to contrast the
methods of Lamarck with those of Darwin.] Ideology, the science
of ideas, was the word invented by de Tracy to distinguish the
investigation of thought in accordance with the methods of Locke and
Condillac from old-fashioned metaphysics. The guiding principle of the
ideologists was to apply reason to observed facts and eschew a priori
deductions. Thinkers of this school had an influential organ, the Decade
philosophique, of which J. B. Say the economist was one of the founders
in 1794. The Institut, which had been established by the Convention, was
crowded with "ideologists," and may be said to have continued the work
of the Encyclopaedia. [Footnote: Picavet, op. cit. p. 69. The members of
the 2nd Class of the Institut, that of moral and political science, were
so predominantly Ideological that the distrust of Napoleon was excited,
and he abolished it in 1803, distributing its members among the other
Classes.] These men had a firm faith in the indefinite progress of
knowledge, general enlightenment, and "social reason."
2.
Thus the ideas of the "sophists" of the age of Voltaire were alive
in the speculative world, not withstanding political, religious, and
philosophical reaction. But their limitations were to be transcended,
and account taken of facts and aspects which their philosophy had
ignored or minimised. The value of the reactionary movement lay in
pressing these facts and aspects on the attention, in reopening chambers
of the human spirit which the age of Voltaire had locked and sealed.
The idea of Progress was particularly concerned in the general change of
attitude, intellectual and emotional, towards the Middle Ages. A fresh
interest in the great age of the Church was a natural part of the
religious revival, but extended far beyond the circle of ardent
Catholics. It was a characteristic feature, as every one knows, of
the Romantic movement. It did not affect only creative literature, it
occupied speculative thinkers and stimulated historians. For Guizot,
Michelet, and Auguste Comte, as well as for Chateaubriand and Victor
Hugo, the Middle Ages have a significance which Frenchmen of the
previous generation could hardly have comprehended.
We saw how that period had embarrassed the first pioneers who attempted
to trace the course of civilisation as a progressive movement, how
lightly they passed over it, how unconvincingly they explained it away.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century the medieval question was
posed in such a way that any one who undertook to develop the doctrine
of Progress would have to explore it more seriously. Madame de Stael saw
this when she wrote her book on Literature considered in its Relation
to Social Institutions (1801). She was then under the influence of
Condorcet and an ardent believer in perfectibility, and the work is
an attempt to extend this theory, which she testifies was falling into
discredit, to the realm of literature. She saw that, if man regressed
instead of progressing for ten centuries, the case for Progress was
gravely compromised, and she sought to show that the Middle Ages
contributed to the development of the intellectual faculties and to
the expansion of civilisation, and that the Christian religion was an
indispensable agent. This contention that Progress was uninterrupted is
an advance on Condorcet and an anticipation of Saint-Simon and Comte.
A more eloquent and persuasive voice was raised in the following year
from the ranks of reaction. Chateaubriand's Genie du Christianisme
appeared in 1802, "amidst the ruins of our temples," as the author
afterwards said, when France was issuing from the chaos of her
revolution. It was a declaration of war against the spirit of the
eighteenth century which had treated Christianity as a barbarous system
whose fall was demanded in the name of Progress. But it was much more
than polemic. Chateaubriand arrayed arguments in support of orthodox
dogmas, original sin, primitive degeneration, and the rest; but the
appeal of the book did not lie in its logic, it lay in the appreciation
of Christianity from a new point of view. He approached it in the spirit
of an artist, as an aesthete, not as a philosopher, and so far as he
proved anything he proved that Christianity is valuable because it
is beautiful, not because it is true. He aimed at showing that it can
"enchanter l'ame aussi divinement que les dieux de Virgile et d'Homere."
He might call to his help the Fathers of the Church, but it was on
Dante, Milton, Racine that his case was really based. The book is an
apologia, from the aesthetic standpoint of the Romantic school. "Dieu ne
defend pas les routes fleuries quand elles servent a revenir a lui."
It was a matter of course that the defender of original sin should
reject the doctrine of perfectibility. "When man attains the highest
point of civilisation," wrote Chateaubriand in the vein of Rousseau,
"he is on the lowest stair of morality; if he is free, he is rude; by
civilising his manners, he forges himself chains. His heart profits at
the expense of his head, his head at the expense of his heart." And,
apart from considerations of Christian doctrine, the question of
Progress had little interest for the Romantic school. Victor Hugo, in
the famous Preface to his Cromwell (1827), where he went more deeply
than Chateaubriand into the contrasts between ancient and modern art,
revived the old likeness of mankind to an individual man, and declared
that classical antiquity was the time of its virility and that we are
now spectators of its imposing old age.
From other points of view powerful intellects were reverting to the
Middle Ages and eager to blot out the whole development of modern
society since the Reformation, as the Encyclopaedic philosophers had
wished to blot out the Middle Ages. The ideal of Bonald, De Maistre,
and Lamennais was a sacerdotal government of the world, and the
English constitution was hardly less offensive to their minds than the
Revolution which De Maistre denounced as "satanic." Advocates as they
were of the dead system of theocracy, they contributed, however, to the
advance of thought, not only by forcing medieval institutions on the
notice of the world but also by their perception that society had
been treated in the eighteenth century in too mechanical a way, that
institutions grow, that the conception of individual men divested of
their life in society is a misleading abstraction. They put this in
extravagant and untenable forms, but there was a large measure of truth
in their criticism, which did its part in helping the nineteenth century
to revise and transcend the results of eighteenth century speculation.
In this reactionary literature we can see the struggle of the doctrine
of Providence, declining before the doctrine of Progress, to gain the
upper-hand again. Chateaubriand, Bonald, De Maistre, Lamennais firmly
held the dogma of an original golden age and the degradation of man,
and denounced the whole trend of progressive thought from Bacon to
Condorcet. These writers were unconsciously helping Condorcet's doctrine
to assume a new and less questionable shape. [Footnote: Bonald indeed in
his treatise De pouvoir adopted the idea of development and applied it
to religion (as Newman did afterwards) for the purpose of condemning the
Reformation as a retrograde movement.]
3.
Along with the discovery of the Middle Ages came the discovery of German
literature. In the intellectual commerce between the two countries in
the age of Frederick the Great, France had been exclusively the giver,
Germany the recipient. It was due, above all, to Madame de Stael
that the tide began to flow the other way. Among the writers of the
Napoleonic epoch, Madame de Stael is easily first in critical talent
and intellectual breadth. Her study of the Revolution showed a
more dispassionate appreciation of that convulsion than any of her
contemporaries were capable of forming. But her chef-d'oeuvre is her
study of Germany, De l'Allemagne, [Footnote: A.D. 1813.] which revealed
the existence of a world of art and thought, unsuspected by the French
public. Within the next twenty years Herder and Lessing, Kant and Hegel
were exerting their influence at Paris. She did in France what Coleridge
was doing in England for the knowledge of German thought.
Madame de Stael had raised anew the question which had been raised in
the seventeenth century and answered in the negative by Voltaire: is
there progress in aesthetic literature? Her early book on Literature had
clearly defined the issue. She did not propose the thesis that there is
any progress or improvement (as some of the Moderns had contended in the
famous Quarrel) in artistic form. Within the limits of their own thought
and emotional experience the ancients achieved perfection of expression,
and perfection cannot be surpassed. But as thought progresses, as the
sum of ideas increases and society changes, fresh material is supplied
to art, there is "a new development of sensibility" which enables
literary artists to compass new kinds of charm. The Genie du
Christianisme embodied a commentary on her contention, more arresting
than any she could herself have furnished. Here the reactionary joined
hands with the disciple of Condorcet, to prove that there is progress in
the domain of art. Madame de Stael's masterpiece, Germany, was a further
impressive illustration of the thesis that the literature of the modern
European nations represents an advance on classical literature, in the
sense that it sounds notes which the Greek and Roman masters had not
heard, reaches depths which they had not conjectured, unlocks chambers
which to them were closed,--as a result of the progressive experiences
of the human soul. [Footnote: German literature was indeed already
known, in some measure, to readers of the Decade philosophique, and Kant
had been studied in France long before 1813, the year of the publication
of De l'Allemagne. See Picavet, Les Ideologues, p. 99.] [Footnote: We
can see the effect of her doctrine in Guizot's remarks (Histoire de la
civilisation en Europe, 2e lecon) where he says of modern literatures
that "sous le point de vue du fond des sentiments et des idees elles
sont plus fortes et plus riches [than the ancient]. On voit que l'ame
humaine a ete remuee sur un plus grand nombre de points a une plus
grande profondeur"--and to this very fact he ascribes their comparative
imperfection in form.]
This view is based on the general propositions that all social phenomena
closely cohere and that literature is a social phenomenon; from which
it follows that if there is a progressive movement in society generally,
there is a progressive movement in literature. Her books were true to
the theory; they inaugurated the methods of modern criticism, which
studies literary works in relation to the social background of their
period.
4.
France, then, under the Bourbon Restoration began to seek new light from
the obscure profundities of German speculation which Madame de Stael
proclaimed. Herder's "Ideas" were translated by Edgar Quinet, Lessing's
Education by Eugene Rodrigues. Cousin sat at the feet of Hegel. At
the same time a new master, full of suggestiveness for those who were
interested in the philosophy of history, was discovered in Italy. The
"Scienza nuova" of Vico was translated by Michelet.
The book of Vico was now a hundred years old. I did not mention him in
his chronological place, because he exercised no immediate influence on
the world. His thought was an anachronism in the eighteenth century, it
appealed to the nineteenth. He did not announce or conceive any theory
of Progress, but his speculation, bewildering enough and confused in its
exposition, contained principles which seemed predestined to form
the basis of such a doctrine. His aim was that of Cabanis and the
ideologists, to set the study of society on the same basis of certitude
which had been secured for the study of nature through the work of
Descartes and Newton. [Footnote: Vico has sometimes been claimed as a
theorist of Progress, but incorrectly. See B. Croce, The Philosophy of
Giambattista Vico (Eng. tr., 1913), p. 132--an indispensable aid to the
study of Vico. The first edition of the Scienza nuova appeared in 1725;
the second, which was a new work, in 1730.
Vico influenced Ballanche, a writer who enjoyed a considerable repute
in his day. He taught the progressive development of man towards liberty
and equality within the four corners of the Christian religion, which he
regarded as final. His Palingenesie sociale appeared in 1823-30.]
His fundamental idea was that the explanation of the history of
societies is to be found in the human mind. The world at first is felt
rather than thought; this is the condition of savages in the state of
nature, who have no political organisation. The second mental state is
imaginative knowledge, "poetical wisdom"; to this corresponds the higher
barbarism of the heroic age. Finally, comes conceptual knowledge, and
with it the age of civilisation. These are the three stages through
which every society passes, and each of these types determines law,
institutions, language, literature, and the characters of men.
Vico's strenuous researches in the study of Homer and early Roman
history were undertaken in order to get at the point of view of the
heroic age. He insisted that it could not be understood unless we
transcended our own abstract ways of thinking and looked at the world
with primitive eyes, by a forced effort of imagination. He was convinced
that history had been vitiated by the habit of ignoring psychological
differences, by the failure to recapture the ancient point of view. Here
he was far in advance of his own times.
Concentrating his attention above all on Roman antiquity, he
adopted--not altogether advantageously for his system--the revolutions
of Roman history as the typical rule of social development. The
succession of aristocracy (for the early kingship of Rome and Homeric
royalty are merely forms of aristocracy in Vico's view), democracy, and
monarchy is the necessary sequence of political governments. Monarchy
(the Roman Empire) corresponds to the highest form of civilisation. What
happens when this is reached? Society declines into an anarchical state
of nature, from which it again passes into a higher barbarism or heroic
age, to be followed once more by civilisation. The dissolution of the
Roman Empire and the barbarian invasions are followed by the Middle
Ages, in which Dante plays the part of Homer; and the modern period with
its strong monarchies corresponds to the Roman Empire. This is Vico's
principle of reflux. If the theory were sound, it would mean that the
civilisation of his day must again relapse into barbarism and the
cycle begin again. He did not himself state this conclusion directly or
venture on any prediction. It is obvious how readily his doctrine could
be adapted to the conception of Progress as a spiral movement. Evidently
the corresponding periods in his cycles are not identical or really
homogeneous. Whatever points of likeness may be discovered between early
Greek or Roman and medieval societies, the points of unlikeness are
still more numerous and manifest. Modern civilisation differs in
fundamental and far-reaching ways from Greek and Roman. It is absurd to
pretend that the general movement brings man back again and again to
the point from which he started, and therefore, if there is any value
in Vico's reflux, it can only mean that the movement of society may be
regarded as a spiral ascent, so that each stage of an upward progress
corresponds, in certain general aspects, to a stage which has already
been traversed, this correspondence being due to the psychical nature of
man.
A conception of this kind could not be appreciated in Vico's day or by
the next generation. The "Scienza nuova" lay in Montesquieu's library,
and he made no use of it. But it was natural that it should arouse
interest in France at a time when the new idealistic philosophies
of Germany were attracting attention, and when Frenchmen, of the
ideological school, were seeking, like Vico himself, a synthetic
principle to explain social phenomena. Different though Vico was in
his point of departure as in his methods from the German idealists,
his speculations nevertheless had something in common with theirs.
Both alike explained history by the nature of mind which necessarily
determined the stages of the process; Vico as little as Fichte or Hegel
took eudaemonic considerations into account. The difference was that the
German thinkers sought their principle in logic and applied it a priori,
while Vico sought his in concrete psychology and engaged in laborious
research to establish it a posteriori by the actual data of history.
But both speculations suggested that the course of human development
corresponds to the fundamental character of mental processes and is not
diverted either by Providential intervention or by free acts of human
will.
5.
These foreign influences co-operated in determining the tendencies of
French speculation in the period of the restored monarchy, whereby the
idea of Progress was placed on new basements and became the headstone of
new "religions." Before we consider the founders of sects, we may glance
briefly at the views of some eminent savants who had gained the ear of
the public before the July Revolution--Jouffroy, Cousin, and Guizot.
Cousin, the chief luminary in the sphere of pure philosophy in France
in the first half of the nineteenth century, drew his inspiration from
Germany. He was professedly an eclectic, but in the main his philosophy
was Hegelian. He might endow God with consciousness and speak of
Providence, but he regarded the world-process as a necessary evolution
of thought, and he saw, not in religion but in philosophy, the highest
expression of civilisation. In 1828 he delivered a course of lectures on
the philosophy of history. He divided history into three periods, each
governed by a master idea: the first by the idea of the infinite (the
Orient); the second by that of the finite (classical antiquity); the
third by that of the relation of finite to infinite (the modern age). As
with Hegel, the future is ignored, progress is confined within a closed
system, the highest circle has already been reached. As an opponent of
the ideologists and the sensational philosophy on which they founded
their speculations, Cousin appealed to the orthodox and all those
to whom Voltairianism was an accursed thing, and for a generation
he exercised a considerable influence. But his work--and this is
the important point for us--helped to diffuse the idea, which the
ideologists were diffusing on very different lines--that human history
has been a progressive development.
Progressive development was also the theme of Jouffroy in his slight but
suggestive introduction to the philosophy of history (1825),
[Footnote: "Reflexions sur la philosophie de l'histoire," in Melanges
philosophiques, 2nd edition, 1838.] in which he posed the same problem
which, as we shall see, Saint-Simon and Comte were simultaneously
attempting to solve. He had not fallen under the glamour of German
idealism, and his results have more affinity with Vico's than with
Hegel's.
He begins with some simple considerations which conduct to the doubtful
conclusion that all the historical changes in man's condition are due to
the operation of his intelligence. The historian's business is to trace
the succession of the actual changes. The business of the philosopher of
history is to trace the succession of ideas and study the correspondence
between the two developments. This is the true philosophy of history:
"the glory of our age is to understand it."
Now it is admitted to-day, he says, that the human intelligence
obeys invariable laws, so that a further problem remains. The actual
succession of ideas has to be deduced from these necessary laws. When
that deduction is effected--a long time hence--history will disappear;
it will be merged in science.
Jouffroy then presented the world with what he calls the FATALITY OF
INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT, to take the place of Providence or Destiny.
It is a fatality, he is careful to explain, which, so far from
compromising, presupposes individual liberty. For it is not like the
fatality of sensual impulse which guides the brute creation. What it
implies is this: if a thousand men have the same idea of what is good,
this idea will govern their conduct in spite of their passions, because,
being reasonable and free, they are not blindly submissive to passion,
but can deliberate and choose.
This explanation of history as a necessary development of society
corresponding to a necessary succession of ideas differs in two
important points from the explanations of Hegel and Cousin. The
succession of ideas is not conceived as a transcendent logic, but is
determined by the laws of the HUMAN mind and belongs to the domain of
psychology. Here Jouffroy is on the same ground as Vico. In the second
place, it is not a closed system; room remains for an indefinite
development in the future.
6.
While Cousin was discoursing on philosophy at Paris in the days of the
last Bourbon king, Guizot was drawing crowded audiences to his lectures
on the history of European civilisation, [Footnote: Histoire de la
civilisation en Europe.] and the keynote of these lectures was Progress.
He approached it with a fresh mind, unencumbered with any of the
philosophical theories which had attended and helped its growth.
Civilisation, he said, is the supreme fact so far as man is concerned,
"the fact par excellence, the general and definite fact in which all
other facts merge." And "civilisation" means progress or development.
The word "awakens, when it is pronounced, the idea of a people which
is in motion, not to change its place but to change its state, a people
whose condition is expanding and improving. The idea of progress,
development, seems to me to be the fundamental idea contained in the
word CIVILISATION."
There we have the most important positive idea of eighteenth century
speculation, standing forth detached and independent, no longer bound
to a system. Fifty years before, no one would have dreamed of defining
civilisation like that and counting on the immediate acquiescence of his
audience. But progress has to be defined. It does not merely imply the
improvement of social relations and public well-being. France in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was behind Holland and England in
the sum and distribution of well-being among individuals, and yet she
can claim that she was the most "civilised" country in those ages.
The reason is that civilisation also implies the development of the
individual life, of men's private faculties, sentiments, and ideas. The
progress of man therefore includes both these developments. But they
are intimately connected. We may observe how moral reformers generally
recommend their proposals by promising social amelioration as a result,
and that progressive politicians maintain that the progress of society
necessarily induces moral improvement. The connection may not always
be apparent, and at different times one or other kind of progress
predominates. But one is followed by the other ultimately, though it may
be after a long interval, for "la Providence a ses aises dans le temps."
The rise of Christianity was one of the crises of civilisation, yet it
did not in its early stages aim at any improvement of social conditions;
it did not attack the great injustices which were wrought in the world.
It meant a great crisis because it changed the beliefs and sentiments of
individuals; social effects came afterwards.
The civilisation of modern Europe has grown through a period of fifteen
centuries and is still progressing. The rate of progress has been slower
than that of Greek civilisation, but on the other hand it has been
continuous, uninterrupted, and we can see "the vista of an immense
career."
The effects of Guizot's doctrine in propagating the idea of Progress
were all the greater for its divorce from philosophical theory. He did
not touch perplexing questions like fatality, or discuss the general
plan of the world; he did not attempt to rise above common-sense; and he
did not essay any premature scheme of the universal history of man. His
masterly survey of the social history of Europe exhibited progressive
movement as a fact, in a period in which to the thinkers of the
eighteenth century it had been almost invisible. This of course was far
from proving that Progress is the key to the history of the world and
human destinies. The equation of civilisation with progress remains an
assumption. For the question at once arises: Can civilisation reach a
state of equilibrium from which no further advance is possible; and
if it can, does it cease to be civilisation? Is Chinese civilisation
mis-called, or has there been here too a progressive movement all the
time, however slow? Such questions were not raised by Guizot. But his
view of history was effective in helping to establish the association
of the two ideas of civilisation and progress, which to-day is taken for
granted as evidently true.
7.
The views of these eminent thinkers Cousin, Jouffroy, and Guizot
show that--quite apart from the doctrines of ideologists and of
the "positivists," Saint-Simon and Comte, of whom I have still to
speak--there was a common trend in French thought in the Restoration
period towards the conception of history as a progressive movement.
Perhaps there is no better illustration of the infectiousness of this
conception than in the Historical Studies which Chateaubriand gave
to the world in 1831. He had learned much, from books as well as from
politics, since he wrote the GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY. He had gained some
acquaintance with German philosophy and with Vico. And in this work of
his advanced age he accepts the idea of Progress, so far as it could be
accepted by an orthodox son of the Church. He believes that the advance
of knowledge will lead to social progress, and that society, if it seems
sometimes to move backward, is always really moving forward. Bossuet,
for whom he had no word of criticism thirty years before, he now
convicts of "an imposing error." That great man, he writes, "has
confined historical events in a circle as rigorous as his genius. He has
imprisoned them in an inflexible Christianity--a terrible hoop in which
the human race would turn in a sort of eternity, without progress or
improvement." The admission from such a quarter shows eloquently how the
wind was setting.
The notions of development and continuity which were to control all
departments of historical study in the later nineteenth century were
at the same time being independently promoted by the young historical
school in Germany which is associated with the names of Eichhorn,
Savigny, and Niebuhr. Their view that laws and institutions are a
natural growth or the expression of a people's mind, represents another
departure from the ideas of the eighteenth century. It was a repudiation
of that "universal reason" which desired to reform the world and its
peoples indiscriminately without taking any account of their national
histories.
CHAPTER XV. THE SEARCH FOR A LAW OF PROGRESS:
I. SAINT-SIMON
Amid the intellectual movements in France described in the last chapter
the idea of Progress passed into a new phase of its growth. Hitherto it
had been a vague optimistic doctrine which encouraged the idealism of
reformers and revolutionaries, but could not guide them. It had waited
like a handmaid on the abstractions of Nature and Reason; it had hardly
realised an independent life. The time had come for systematic attempts
to probe its meaning and definitely to ascertain the direction in which
humanity is moving. Kant had said that a Kepler or a Newton was needed
to find the law of the movement of civilisation. Several Frenchmen
now undertook to solve the problem. They did not solve it; but the
new science of sociology was founded; and the idea of Progress, which
presided at its birth, has been its principal problem ever since.
1.
The three thinkers who claimed to have discovered the secret of social
development had also in view the practical object of remoulding society
on general scientific principles, and they became the founders of
sects, Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Comte. They all announced a new era
of development as a necessary sequel of the past, an inevitable and
desirable stage in the march of humanity, and delineated its features.
Comte was the successor of Saint-Simon, as Saint-Simon himself was the
successor of Condorcet. Fourier stands quite apart. He claimed that
he broke entirely new ground, and acknowledged no masters. He regarded
himself as a Newton for whom no Kepler or Galileo had prepared the
way. The most important and sanest part of his work was the scheme for
organising society on a new principle of industrial co-operation. His
general theory of the universe and man's destinies which lay behind
his practical plans is so fantastic that it sounds like the dream of a
lunatic. Yet many accepted it as the apocalypse of an evangelist.
Fourier was moved by the far-reaching effects of Newton's discovery
to seek a law which would coordinate facts in the moral world as the
principle of gravitation had co-ordinated facts in the physical world,
and in 1808 he claimed to have found the secret in what he called the
law of Passional Attraction. [Footnote: Theorie des quatre mouvements et
des destinees generales. General accounts of his theories will be
found in Charles Fourier, sa vie et sa theorie, by his disciple Dr. Ch.
Pellarin (2nd ed., 1843), and in Flint, Hist. of Philosophy of History
in France, etc., pp. 408 sqq.] The human passions have hitherto been
sources of misery; the problem for man is to make them sources of
happiness. If we know the law which governs them, we can make such
changes in our environment that none of the passions will need to be
curbed, and the free indulgence of one will not hinder or compromise the
satisfaction of the others.
His worthless law for harmonising the passions without restraining them
need not detain us. The structure of society, by which he proposed to
realise the benefits of his discovery, was based on co-operation, but
was not socialistic. The family as a social unit was to be replaced by
a larger unit (PHALANGE), economically self-sufficing, and consisting
of about 1800 persons, who were to live together in a vast building
(PHALANSTERE), surrounded by a domain sufficient to produce all they
required. Private property is not abolished; the community will include
both rich and poor; all the products of their work are distributed in
shares according to the labour, talents, and capital of each member, but
a fixed minimum is assured to every one. The scheme was actually tried
on a small scale near the forest of Rambouillet in 1832.
This transformation of society, which is to have the effect of
introducing harmony among the passions, will mark the beginning of a new
epoch. The duration of man's earthly career is 81,000 years, of which
5000 have elapsed. He will now enter upon a long period of increasing
harmony, which will be followed by an equal period of decline--like the
way up and the way down of Heraclitus. His brief past, the age of
his infancy, has been marked by a decline of happiness leading to the
present age of "civilisation" which is thoroughly bad--here we see the
influence of Rousseau--and from it Fourier's discovery is the clue to
lead humanity forth into the epoch in which harmony begins to emerge.
But men who have lived in the bad ages need not be pitied, and those
who live to-day need not be pessimistic. For Fourier believed in
metempsychosis, and could tell you, as if he were the private secretary
of the Deity calculating the arithmetical details of the cosmic plan,
how many very happy, tolerably happy, and unhappy lives fall to the lot
of each soul during the whole 81,000 years. Nor does the prospect end
with the life of the earth. The soul of the earth and the human souls
attached to it will live again in comets, planets, and suns, on a system
of which Fourier knew all the particulars. [Footnote: Details will be
found in the Theorie de l'unite universelle, originally published under
the title Association domestique-agricole in 1822.]
These silly speculations would not deserve even this slight indication
of their purport were it not that Fourier founded a sect and had a
considerable body of devoted followers. His "discovery" was acclaimed by
Beranger:
Fourier nous dit: Sors de la fange,
Peuple en proie aux deceptions,
Travaille, groupe par phalange,
Dans un cercle d'attractions;
La terre, apres tant de desastres,
Forme avec le ciel un hymen,
Et la loi qui regit les astres,
Donne la paix au genre humain.
Ten years after his death (1837) an English writer tells us that
"the social theory of Fourier is at the present moment engrossing the
attention and exciting the apprehensions of thinking men, not only in
France but in almost every country in Europe." [Footnote: R. Blakey,
History of the Philosophy of Mind, vol. iv. p. 293 (1848). Fourier,
born 1772, died in 1837. His principal disciple was Victor Considerant.]
Grotesque as was the theoretical background of his doctrines, he helped
to familiarise the world with the idea of indefinite Progress.
2.
"The imagination of poets has placed the golden age in the cradle of the
human race. It was the age of iron they should have banished there. The
golden age is not behind us, but in front of us. It is the perfection
of social order. Our fathers have not seen it; our children will arrive
there one day, and it is for us to clear the way for them."
The Comte de Saint-Simon, who wrote these words in 1814, was one of
the liberal nobles who had imbibed the ideas of the Voltairian age and
sympathised with the spirit of the Revolution. In his literary career
from 1803 to his death in 1825 he passed through several phases of
thought, [Footnote: They are traced in G. Weill's valuable monograph,
Saint-Simon et son oeuvre, 1894.] but his chief masters were always
Condorcet and the physiologists, from whom he derived his two guiding
ideas that ethics and politics depend ultimately on physics and that
history is progress.
Condorcet had interpreted history by the progressive movement of
knowledge. That, Saint-Simon said, is the true principle, but Condorcet
applied it narrowly, and committed two errors. He did not understand
the social import of religion, and he represented the Middle Ages as a
useless interruption of the forward movement. Here Saint-Simon learned
from the religious reaction. He saw that religion has a natural and
legitimate social role and cannot be eliminated as a mere perversity.
He expounded the doctrine that all social phenomena cohere. A religious
system, he said, always corresponds to the stage of science which the
society wherein it appears has reached; in fact, religion is merely
science clothed in a form suitable to the emotional needs which it
satisfies. And as a religious system is based on the contemporary
phase of scientific development, so the political system of an epoch
corresponds to the religious system. They all hang together. Medieval
Europe does not represent a temporary triumph of obscurantism, useless
and deplorable, but a valuable and necessary stage in human progress. It
was a period in which an important principle of social organisation was
realised, the right relation of the spiritual and temporal powers.
It is evident that these views transformed the theory of Condorcet into
a more acceptable shape. So long as the medieval tract of time appeared
to be an awkward episode, contributing nothing to the forward movement
but rather thwarting and retarding it, Progress was exposed to the
criticism that it was an arbitrary synthesis, only partly borne out by
historical facts and supplying no guarantees for the future. And so
long as rationalists of the Encyclopaedic school regarded religion as
a tiresome product of ignorance and deceit, the social philosophy
which lay behind the theory of Progress was condemned as unscientific;
because, in defiance of the close cohesion of social phenomena, it
refused to admit that religion, as one of the chief of those phenomena,
must itself participate and co-operate in Progress.
Condorcet had suggested that the value of history lies in affording
data for foreseeing the future. Saint-Simon raised this suggestion to a
dogma. But prevision was impossible on Condorcet's unscientific method.
In order to foretell, the law of the movement must be discovered, and
Condorcet had not found or even sought a law. The eighteenth
century thinkers had left Progress a mere hypothesis based on a very
insufficient induction; their successors sought to lift it to the rank
of a scientific hypothesis, by discovering a social law as valid as the
physical law of gravitation. This was the object both of Saint-Simon and
of Comte.
The "law" which Saint-Simon educed from history was that epochs of
organisation or construction, and epochs of criticism or revolution,
succeed each other alternately. The medieval period was a time of
organisation, and was followed by a critical, revolutionary period,
which has now come to an end and must be succeeded by another epoch of
organisation. Having discovered the clew to the process, Saint-Simon
is able to predict. As our knowledge of the universe has reached or
is reaching a stage which is no longer conjectural but POSITIVE in all
departments, society will be transformed accordingly; a new PHYSICIST
religion will supersede Christianity and Deism; men of science will play
the role of organisers which the clergy played in the Middle Ages.
As the goal of the development is social happiness, and as the working
classes form the majority, the first step towards the goal will be
the amelioration of the lot of the working classes. This will be
the principal problem of government in reorganising society, and
Saint-Simon's solution of the problem was socialism. He rejected the
watchwords of liberalism--democracy, liberty, and equality--with as much
disdain as De Maistre and the reactionaries.
The announcement of a future age of gold, which I quoted above, is taken
from a pamphlet which he issued, in conjunction with his secretary,
Augustin Thierry the historian, after the fall of Napoleon. [Footnote:
De la reorganisation de la societe europeenne, p. 111 (1814).] In it he
revived the idea of the Abbe de Saint-Pierre for the abolition of war,
and proposed a new organisation of Europe more ambitious and Utopian
than the Abbe's league of states. At this moment he saw in parliamentary
government, which the restored Bourbons were establishing in France,
a sovran remedy for political disorder, and he imagined that if this
political system were introduced in all the states of Europe a long step
would have been taken to the perpetuation of peace. If the old enemies
France and England formed a close alliance there would be little
difficulty in creating ultimately a European state like the American
Commonwealth, with a parliamentary government supreme over the state
governments. Here is the germ of the idea of a "parliament of man."
3.
Saint-Simon, however, did not construct a definite system for the
attainment of social perfection. He left it to disciples to develop
the doctrine which he sketched. In the year of his death (1825) Olinde
Rodrigues and Enfantin founded a journal, the Producteur, to present to
humanity the one thing which humanity, in the opinion of their master,
then most needed, a new general doctrine. [Footnote: The best study of
the Saint-Simonian school is that of G. Weill, L'Ecole saint-simonienne,
son histoire, son influence jusqu'a nos jours (1896), to which I am much
indebted.]
History shows that peoples have been moving from isolation to union,
from war to peace, from antagonism to association. The programme for the
future is association scientifically organised. The Catholic Church
in the Middle Ages offered the example of a great social organisation
resting on a general doctrine. The modern world must also be a
social organisation, but the general doctrine will be scientific,
not religious. The spiritual power must reside, not in priests but in
savants, who will direct the progress of science and public education.
Each member of the community will have his place and duties assigned to
him. Society consists of three classes of workers--industrial workers,
savants, and artists. A commission of eminent workers of each class will
determine the place of every individual according to his capacities.
Complete equality is absurd; inequality, based on merit, is reasonable
and necessary. It is a modern error to distrust state authority. A power
directing national forces is requisite, to propose great ideas and to
make the innovations necessary for Progress. Such an organisation will
promote progress in all domains: in science by co-operation, in industry
by credit, and in art too, for artists will learn to express the ideas
and sentiments of their own age. There are signs already of a tendency
towards something of this kind; its realisation must be procured, not by
revolution but by gradual change.
In the authoritarian character of the organisation to which these
apostles of Progress wished to entrust the destinies of man we may see
the influence of the great theocrat and antagonist of Progress, Joseph
de Maistre. He taught them the necessity of a strong central power and
the danger of liberty.
But the fullest exposition of the Saint-Simonian doctrine of development
was given by Bazard, one of the chief disciples, a few years later.
[Footnote: Exposition de la doctrine saint-simonienne, 2 vols., 1830-1.]
The human race is conceived as a collective being which unfolds its
nature in the course of generations, according to a law--the law
of Progress--which may be called the physiological law of the human
species, and was discovered by Saint-Simon. It consists in the
alternation of ORGANIC and CRITICAL epochs. [Footnote: In the Globe,
which became an organ of Saint-Simonism in 1831, Enfantin announced a
new principle (Weill, op. cit. 107). He defined the law of history as
"the harmony, ceaselessly progressive, of flesh and spirit, of industry
and science, of east and west, of woman and man." The role of woman
played a large part in the teaching of the sect.
Saint-Simon's law of organic and critical ages was definitely accepted
by H. de Ferron, a thinker who did not belong to the school, as late as
1867. See his Theorie du progres, vol. ii. p. 433.]
In an organic epoch men discern a destination and harmonise all their
energies to reach it. In a critical epoch they are not conscious of
a goal, and their efforts are dispersed and discordant. There was an
organic period in Greece before the age of Socrates. It was succeeded
by a critical epoch lasting to the barbarian invasions. Then came an
organic period in the homogeneous societies of Europe from Charlemagne
to the end of the fifteenth century, and a new critical period opened
with Luther and has lasted till to-day. Now it is time to prepare the
advent of the organic age which must necessarily follow.
The most salient fact observable in history is the continual extension
of the principle of association, in the series of family, city, nation,
supernational Church. The next term must be a still vaster association
comprehending the whole race.
In consequence of the incompleteness of association, the exploitation
of the weak by the strong has been a capital feature in human societies,
but its successive forms exhibit a gradual mitigation. Cannibalism is
followed by slavery, slavery by serfdom, and finally comes industrial
exploitation by the capitalist. This latest form of the oppression of
the weak depends on the right of property, and the remedy is to transfer
the right of inheriting the property of the individual from the family
to the state. The society of the future must be socialistic.
The new social doctrine must not only be diffused by education and
legislation, it must be sanctioned by a new religion. Christianity will
not serve, for Christianity is founded on a dualism between matter
and spirit, and has laid a curse on matter. The new religion must be
monistic, and its principles are, briefly: God is one, God is all that
is, all is God. He is universal love, revealing itself as mind and
matter. And to this triad correspond the three domains of religion,
science, and industry.
In combining their theory with a philosophical religion the
Saint-Simonian school was not only true to its master's teaching
but obeying an astute instinct. As a purely secular movement for the
transformation of society, their doctrine would not have reaped the same
success or inspired the same enthusiasm. They were probably influenced
too by the pamphlet of Lessing to which Madame de Stael had invited
attention, and which one of Saint-Simon's disciples translated.
The fortunes of the school, the life of the community at Menilmontant
under the direction of Enfantin, the persecution, the heresies,
the dispersion, the attempt to propagate the movement in Egypt, the
philosophical activity of Enfantin and Lemonnier under the Second
Empire, do not claim our attention; the curious story is told in
M. Weill's admirable monograph. [Footnote: It may be noticed that
Saint-Simonians came to the front in public careers after the revolution
of 1848; e.g. Carnot, Reynaud, Charton.] The sect is now extinct, but
its influence was wide in its day, and it propagated faith in Progress
as the key to history and the law of collective life.[Footnote: Two able
converts to the ideas of Saint-Simon seceded from the school at an early
stage in consequence of Enfantin's aberrations: Pierre Leroux, whom
we shall meet again, and P. J. B. Buchez, who in 1833 published a
thoughtful "Introduction a la science de l'histoire," where history is
defined as "a science whose end is to foresee the social future of the
human species in the order of its free activity" (vol. i. p. 60,. ed. 2,
1842).]
CHAPTER XVI. THE SEARCH FOR A LAW OF PROGRESS: II. COMTE
1.
Auguste Comte did more than any preceding thinker to establish the
idea of Progress as a luminary which could not escape men's vision.
The brilliant suggestions of Saint-Simon, the writings of Bazard and
Enfantin, the vagaries of Fourier, might be dismissed as curious rather
than serious propositions, but the massive system wrought out by Comte's
speculative genius--his organic scheme of human knowledge, his elaborate
analysis of history, his new science of sociology--was a great fact with
which European thought was forced to reckon. The soul of this system
was Progress, and the most important problem he set out to solve was the
determination of its laws.
His originality is not dimmed by the fact that he owed to Saint-Simon
more than he afterwards admitted or than his disciples have been willing
to allow. He collaborated with him for several years, and at this time
enthusiastically acknowledged the intellectual stimulus he received from
the elder savant. [Footnote: Comte collaborated with Saint-Simon
from 1818-1822. The final rupture came in 1824. The question of their
relations is cleared up by Weill (Saint-Simon, chap. xi.). On the
quarrel see also Ostwald, Auguste Comte (1914), 13 sqq.] But he derived
from Saint-Simon much more than the stimulation of his thoughts in a
certain direction. He was indebted to him for some of the characteristic
ideas of his own system. He was indebted to him for the principle which
lay at the very basis of his system, that the social phenomena of
a given period and the intellectual state of the society cohere and
correspond. The conception that the coming age was to be a period of
organisation like the Middle Ages, and the idea of the government of
savants, are pure Saint-Simonian doctrine. And the fundamental idea of
a POSITIVE philosophy had been apprehended by Saint-Simon long before he
was acquainted with his youthful associate.
But Comte had a more methodical and scientific mind, and he thought that
Saint-Simon was premature in drawing conclusions as to the reformation
of societies and industries before the positive philosophy had been
constructed. He published--he was then only twenty-two--in 1822 a
"Plan of the scientific operations necessary for the re-organisation
of society," which was published under another title two years later by
Saint-Simon, and it was over this that the friends quarrelled. This work
contains the principles of the positive philosophy which he was soon to
begin to work out; it announces already the "law of the Three Stages."
The first volume of the "Cours de philisophie positive" appeared in
1830; it took him twelve years more to complete the exposition of his
system. [Footnote: With vol. vi., 1842.]
2.
The "law of Three Stages" is familiar to many who have never read a line
of his writings. That men first attempted to explain natural phenomena
by the operation of imaginary deities, then sought to interpret them by
abstractions, and finally came to see that they could only be understood
by scientific methods, observation, and experiment--this was a
generalisation which had already been thrown out by Turgot. Comte
adopted it as a fundamental psychological law, which has governed
every domain of mental activity and explains the whole story of
human development. Each of our principal conceptions, every branch of
knowledge, passes successively through these three states which he names
the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive or scientific. In
the first, the mind invents; in the second, it abstracts; in the third,
it submits itself to positive facts; and the proof that any branch of
knowledge has reached the third stage is the recognition of invariable
natural laws.
But, granting that this may be the key to the history of the sciences,
of physics, say, or botany, how can it explain the history of man, the
sequence of actual historical events? Comte replies that history has
been governed by ideas; "the whole social mechanism is ultimately
based on opinions." Thus man's history is essentially a history of his
opinions; and these are subject to the fundamental psychological law.
It must, however, be observed that all branches of knowledge are not in
the same stage simultaneously. Some may have reached the metaphysical,
while others are still lagging behind in the theological; some may have
become scientific, while others have not passed from the metaphysical.
Thus the study of physical phenomena has already reached the positive
stage; but the study of social phenomena has not. The central aim of
Comte, and his great achievement in his own opinion, was to raise the
study of social phenomena from the second to the third stage.
When we proceed to apply the law of the three stages to the general
course of historical development, we are met at the outset by the
difficulty that the advance in all the domains of activity is not
simultaneous. If at a given period thought and opinions are partly
in the theological, partly in the metaphysical, and partly in the
scientific state, how is the law to be applied to general development?
One class of ideas, Comte says, must be selected as the criterion, and
this class must be that of social and moral ideas, for two reasons.
In the first place, social science occupies the highest rank in the
hierarchy of sciences, on which he laid great stress. [Footnote: Cours
de phil. pos. v. 267. Law of consensus: op. cit. iv. 347 sqq., 364, 505,
721, 735.] In the second, those ideas play the principal part for the
majority of men, and the most ordinary phenomena are the most important
to consider. When, in other classes of ideas, the advance is at any time
more rapid, this only means an indispensable preparation for the ensuing
period.
The movement of history is due to the deeply rooted though complex
instinct which pushes man to ameliorate his condition incessantly, to
develop in all ways the sum of his physical, moral, and intellectual
life. And all the phenomena of his social life are closely cohesive,
as Saint-Simon had pointed out. By virtue of this cohesion, political,
moral, and intellectual progress are inseparable from material progress,
and so we find that the phases of his material development correspond to
intellectual changes. The principle of consensus or "solidarity," which
secures harmony and order in the development, is as important as the
principle of the three stages which governs the onward movement. This
movement, however, is not in a right line, but displays a series of
oscillations, unequal and variable, round a mean motion which tends to
prevail. The three general causes of variation, according to Comte, are
race, climate, and deliberate political action (such as the retrograde
policies of Julian the Apostate or Napoleon). But while they cause
deflections and oscillation, their power is strictly limited; they may
accelerate or retard the movement, but they cannot invert its order;
they may affect the intensity of the tendencies in a given situation,
but cannot change their nature.
3.
In the demonstration of his laws by the actual course of civilisation,
Comte adopts what he calls "the happy artifice of Condorcet," and treats
the successive peoples who pass on the torch as if they were a single
people running the race. This is "a rational fiction," for a people's
true successors are those who pursue its efforts. And, like Bossuet
and Condorcet, he confined his review to European civilisation; he
considered only the ELITE or advance guard of humanity. He deprecated
the introduction of China or India, for instance, as a confusing
complication. He ignored the ROLES of Brahmanism, Buddhism,
Mohammedanism. His synthesis, therefore, cannot claim to be a synthesis
of universal history; it is only a synthesis of the movement of European
history. In accordance with the law of the three stages, the development
falls into three great periods. The first or Theological came to an
end about A.D. 1400, and the second or Metaphysical is now nearing
its close, to make way for the third or Positive, for which Comte was
preparing the way.
The Theological period has itself three stages, in which Fetishism,
Polytheism, and Monotheism successively prevail. The chief social
characteristics of the Polytheistic period are the institution of
slavery and the coincidence or "confusion" of the spiritual and temporal
powers. It has two stages: the theocratic, represented by Egypt, and the
military, represented by Rome, between which Greece stands in a rather
embarrassing and uneasy position.
The initiative for the passage to the Monotheistic period came from
Judaea, and Comte attempts to show that this could not have been
otherwise. His analysis of this period is the most interesting part of
his survey. The chief feature of the political system corresponding to
monotheism is the separation of the spiritual and temporal powers; the
function of the spiritual power being concerned with education, and
that of the temporal with action, in the wide senses of those terms. The
defects of this dual system were due to the irrational theology. But
the theory of papal infallibility was a great step in intellectual
and social progress, by providing a final jurisdiction, without which
society would have been troubled incessantly by contests arising from
the vague formulae of dogmas. Here Comte had learned from Joseph de
Maistre. But that thinker would not have been edified when Comte went
on to declare that in the passage from polytheism to monotheism the
religious spirit had really declined, and that one of the merits of
Catholicism was that it augmented the domain of human wisdom at the
expense of divine inspiration. [Footnote: Cours de philosophic positive,
vi. 354.] If it be said that the Catholic system promoted the empire of
the clergy rather than the interests of religion, this was all to the
good; for it placed the practical use of religion in "the provisional
elevation of a noble speculative corporation eminently able to direct
opinions and morals."
But Catholic monotheism could not escape dissolution. The metaphysical
spirit began to operate powerfully on the notions of moral philosophy,
as soon as the Catholic organisation was complete; and Catholicism,
because it could not assimilate this intellectual movement, lost its
progressive character and stagnated.
The decay began in the fourteenth century, where Comte dates the
beginning of the Metaphysical period--a period of revolution and
disorder. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the movement is
spontaneous and unconscious; from the sixteenth till to-day it has
proceeded under the direction of a philosophical spirit which is
negative and not constructive. This critical philosophy has only
accelerated a decomposition which began spontaneously. For as theology
progresses it becomes less consistent and less durable, and as its
conceptions become less irrational, the intensity of the emotions which
they excite decreases. Fetishism had deeper roots than polytheism
and lasted longer; and polytheism surpassed monotheism in vigour and
vitality.
Yet the critical philosophy was necessary to exhibit the growing need of
solid reorganisation and to prove that the decaying system was incapable
of directing the world any longer. Logically it was very imperfect, but
it was justified by its success. The destructive work was mainly done
in the seventeenth century by Hobbes, Spinoza, and Bayle, of whom
Hobbes was the most effective. In the eighteenth all prominent thinkers
participated in developing this negative movement, and Rousseau gave
it the practical stimulus which saved it from degenerating into an
unfruitful agitation. Of particular importance was the great fallacy,
which Helvetius propagated, that human intellects are equal. This error
was required for the full development of the critical doctrine. For
it supported the dogmas of popular sovranty and social equality, and
justified the principle of the right of private judgement.
These three principles--popular sovranty, equality, and what he
calls the right of free examination--are in Comte's eyes vicious and
anarchical.[Footnote #1 Op. cit. iv. 36-38.] But it was necessary that
they should be promulgated, because the transition from one organised
social system to another cannot be direct; it requires an anarchical
interregnum. Popular sovranty is opposed to orderly institutions and
condemns all superior persons to dependence on the multitude of their
inferiors. Equality, obviously anarchical in its tendency, and obviously
untrue (for, as men are not equal or even equivalent to one another,
their rights cannot be identical), was similarly necessary to break down
the old institutions. The universal claim to the right of free judgement
merely consecrates the transitional state of unlimited liberty in the
interim between the decline of theology and the arrival of positive
philosophy. Comte further remarks that the fall of the spiritual power
had led to anarchy in international relations, and if the spirit of
nationality were to prevail too far, the result would be a state of
things inferior to that of the Middle Ages.
But Comte says for the metaphysical spirit in France that with all its
vices it was more disengaged from the prejudices of the old theological
regime, and nearer to a true rational positivism than either the German
mysticism or the English empiricism of the same period.
The Revolution was a necessity, to disclose the chronic decomposition
of society from which it resulted, and to liberate the modern social
elements from the grip of the ancient powers. Comte has praise for the
Convention, which he contrasts with the Constituent Assembly with its
political fictions and inconsistencies. He pointed out that the great
vice in the "metaphysics" of the crisis--that is, in the principles of
the revolutionaries--lay in conceiving society out of relation to the
past, in ignoring the Middle Ages, and borrowing from Greek and Roman
society retrograde and contradictory ideals.
Napoleon restored order, but he was more injurious to humanity than
any other historical person. His moral and intellectual nature was
incompatible with the true direction of Progress, which involves the
extinction of the theological and military regime of the past. Thus his
work, like Julian the Apostate's, exhibits an instance of deflection
from the line of Progress. Then came the parliamentary system of
the restored Bourbons which Comte designates as a political Utopia,
destitute of social principles, a foolish attempt to combine political
retrogression with a state of permanent peace.
4.
The critical doctrine has performed its historical function, and the
time has come for man to enter upon the Positive stage of his career. To
enable him to take this step forward, it is necessary that the study of
social phenomena should become a positive science. As social science is
the highest in the hierarchy of sciences, it could not develop until
the two branches of knowledge which come next in the scale, biology and
chemistry, assumed a scientific form. This has recently been achieved,
and it is now possible to found a scientific sociology.
This science, like mechanics and biology, has its statics and its
dynamics. The first studies the laws of co-existence, the second those
of succession; the first contains the theory of order, the second
that of progress. The law of consensus or cohesion is the fundamental
principle of social statics; the law of the three stages is that of
social dynamics. Comte's survey of history, of which I have briefly
indicated the general character, exhibits the application of these
sociological laws.
The capital feature of the third period, which we are now approaching,
will be the organisation of society by means of scientific sociology.
The world will be guided by a general theory, and this means that it
must be controlled by those who understand the theory and will know
how to apply it. Therefore society will revive the principle which
was realised in the great period of Monotheism, the distinction of a
spiritual and a temporal order. But the spiritual order will consist of
savants who will direct social life not by theological fictions but
by the positive truths of science. They will administer a system of
universal education and will draw up the final code of ethics. They will
be able, more effectively than the Church, to protect the interests of
the lower classes.
Comte's conviction that the world is prepared for a transformation
of this kind is based principally on signs of the decline of the
theological spirit and of the military spirit, which he regarded as the
two main obstacles to the reign of reason. Catholicism, he says, is now
no more than "an imposing historical ruin." As for militarism, the epoch
has arrived in which serious and lasting warfare among the ELITE nations
will totally cease. The last general cause of warfare has been the
competition for colonies. But the colonial policy is now in its
decadence (with the temporary exception of England), so that we need not
look for future trouble from this source. The very sophism, sometimes
put forward to justify war, that it is an instrument of civilisation, is
a homage to the pacific nature of modern society.
We need not follow further the details of Comte's forecast of the
Positive period, except to mention that he did not contemplate a
political federation. The great European nations will develop each
in its own way, with their separate "temporal" organisations. But he
contemplated the intervention of a common "spiritual" power, so that all
nationalities "under the direction of a homogeneous speculative class
will contribute to an identical work, in a spirit of active European
patriotism, not of sterile cosmopolitanism."
Comte claimed, like Saint-Simon, that the data of history,
scientifically interpreted, afford the means of prevision. It is
interesting to observe how he failed himself as a diviner; how utterly
he misapprehended the vitality of Catholicism, how completely his
prophecy as to the cessation of wars was belied by the event. He lived
to see the Crimean war. [Footnote: He died in 1857.] As a diviner he
failed as completely as Saint-Simon and Fourier, whose dream that the
nineteenth century would see the beginning of an epoch of harmony and
happiness was to be fulfilled by a deadly struggle between capitalism
and labour, the civil war in America, the war of 1870, the Commune,
Russian pogroms, Armenian massacres, and finally the universal
catastrophe of 1914.
5.
For the comprehension of history we have perhaps gained as little from
Comte's positive laws as from Hegel's metaphysical categories. Both
thinkers had studied the facts of history only slightly and partially,
a rather serious drawback which enabled them to impose their own
constructions with the greater ease. Hegel's method of a PRIORI
synthesis was enjoined by his philosophical theory; but in Comte we also
find a tendency to a PRIORI treatment. He expressly remarks that
the chief social features of the Monotheistic period might almost be
constructed a PRIORI.
The law of the Three Stages is discredited. It may be contended that
general Progress depends on intellectual progress, and that theology,
metaphysics, and science have common roots, and are ultimately
identical, being merely phases in the movement of the intelligence. But
the law of this movement, if it is to rank as a scientific hypothesis,
must be properly deduced from known causes, and must then be verified
by a comparison with historical facts. Comte thought that he fulfilled
these requirements, but in both respects his demonstration was
defective. [Footnote: Criticism of Comte's assumption that civilisation
begins with animism: Weber's criticisms from this point of view are
telling (Le Rythme du progres, 73-95). He observes that if Comte had
not left the practical and active side of intelligence in the shade and
considered only its speculative side, he could not have formulated
the law of the Three Stages. He would have seen that "the positive
explanation of phenomena has played in every period a preponderant role,
though latent, in the march of the human mind." Weber himself suggests
a scheme of two states (corresponding to the two-sidedness of the
intellect), technical and speculative, practical and theoretical,
through the alternation of which intellectual progress has been
effected. The first stage was probably practical (he calls it
proto-technic). It is to be remembered that when Comte was constructing
his system palaeontology was in its infancy.]
The gravest weakness perhaps in his historical sketch is the gratuitous
assumption that man in the earliest stage of his existence had animistic
beliefs and that the first phase of his progress was controlled by
fetishism. There is no valid evidence that fetishism is not a relatively
late development, or that in the myriads of years stretching back beyond
our earliest records, during which men decided the future of the human
species by their technical inventions and the discovery of fire, they
had any views which could be called religious or theological. The
psychology of modern savages is no clew to the minds of the people who
wrought tools of stone in the world of the mammoth and the RHINOCEROS
TICHIRHINUS. If the first stage of man's development, which was of such
critical importance for his destinies, was pre-animistic, Comte's law of
progress fails, for it does not cover the ground.
In another way, Comte's system may be criticised for failing to cover
the ground, if it is regarded as a philosophy of history. In accordance
with "the happy artifice of Condorcet," he assumes that the growth of
European civilisation is the only history that matters, and discards
entirely the civilisations, for instance, of India and China. This
assumption is much more than an artifice, and he has not scientifically
justified it. [Footnote: A propos of the view that only European
civilisation matters it has been well observed that "human history is
not unitary but pluralistic": F. J. Teggart, The Processes of History,
p. 24 (1918).]
The reader of the PHILOSOPHIE POSITIVE will also observe that Comte
has not grappled with a fundamental question which has to be faced in
unravelling the woof of history or seeking a law of events. I mean the
question of contingency. It must be remembered that contingency does not
in the least affect the doctrine of determinism; it is compatible with
the strictest interpretation of the principle of causation. A particular
example may be taken to show what it implies. [Footnote: On contingency
and the "chapter of accidents" see Cournot, Considerations sur la marche
des idees et des evenements dans les temps modernes (1872), i. 16 sqq.
I have discussed the subject and given some illustrations in a short
paper, entitled "Cleopatra's Nose," in the Annual of the Rationalist
Press Association for 1916.]
It may plausibly be argued that a military dictatorship was an
inevitable sequence of the French Revolution. This may not be true, but
let us assume it. Let us further assume that, given Napoleon, it was
inevitable that he should be the dictator. But Napoleon's existence was
due to an independent causal chain which had nothing whatever to do with
the course of political events. He might have died in his boyhood by
disease or by an accident, and the fact that he survived was due to
causes which were similarly independent of the causal chain which, as we
are assuming, led necessarily to an epoch of monarchical government. The
existence of a man of his genius and character at the given moment was
a contingency which profoundly affected the course of history. If he
had not been there another dictator would have grasped the helm, but
obviously would not have done what Napoleon did.
It is clear that the whole history of man has been modified at every
stage by such contingencies, which may be defined as the collisions
of two independent causal chains. Voltaire was perfectly right when he
emphasised the role of chance in history, though he did not realise what
it meant. This factor would explain the oscillations and deflections
which Comte admits in the movement of historical progression. But the
question arises whether it may not also have once and again definitely
altered the direction of the movement. Can the factor be regarded as
virtually negligible by those who, like Comte, are concerned with the
large perspective of human development and not with the details of an
episode? Or was Renouvier right in principle when he maintained "the
real possibility that the sequence of events from the Emperor Nerva to
the Emperor Charlemagne might have been radically different from what it
actually was"? [Footnote: He illustrated this proposition by a fanciful
reconstruction of European history from 100 to 800 A.D. in his UCHRONIE,
1876. He contended that there is no definite law of progress: "The true
law lies in the equal possibility of progress or regress for societies
as for individuals."]
6.
It does not concern us here to examine the defects of Comte's view of
the course of European history. But it interests us to observe that
his synthesis of human Progress is, like Hegel's, what I have called a
closed system. Just as his own absolute philosophy marked for Hegel the
highest and ultimate term of human development, so for Comte the coming
society whose organisation he adumbrated was the final state of humanity
beyond which there would be no further movement. It would take time
to perfect the organisation, and the period would witness a continuous
increase of knowledge, but the main characteristics were definitely
fixed. Comte did not conceive that the distant future, could he survive
to experience it, could contain any surprises for him. His theory of
Progress thus differed from the eighteenth century views which vaguely
contemplate an indefinite development and only profess to indicate some
general tendencies. He expressly repudiated this notion of INDEFINITE
progress; the data, he said, justify only the inference of CONTINUOUS
progress, which is a different thing.
A second point in which Comte in his view of Progress differed from
the French philosophers of the preceding age is this. Condorcet and his
predecessors regarded it exclusively from the eudaemonic point of view.
The goal of Progress for them was the attainment of human felicity. With
felicity Comte is hardly more concerned than Hegel. The establishment
of a fuller harmony between men and their environment in the third stage
will no doubt mean happiness. But this consideration lies outside the
theory, and to introduce it would only intrude an unscientific
element into the analysis. The course of development is determined
by intellectual ideas, and he treats these as independent of, and
indifferent to, eudaemonic motives.
A third point to be noted is the authoritarian character of the regime
of the future. Comte's ideal state would be as ill to live in for any
unfortunate being who values personal liberty as a theocracy or any
socialistic Utopia. He had as little sympathy with liberty as Plato
or as Bossuet, and less than the eighteenth century philosophers. This
feature, common to Comte and the Saint-Simonians, was partly due to the
reaction against the Revolution, but it also resulted from the logic of
the man of science. If sociological laws are positively established as
certainly as the law of gravitation, no room is left for opinion; right
social conduct is definitely fixed; the proper functions of every member
of society admit of no question; therefore the claim to liberty is
perverse and irrational. It is the same argument which some modern
exponents of Eugenics use to advocate a state tyranny in the matter of
human breeding.
When Comte was writing, the progressive movement in Europe was towards
increase of liberty in all its forms, national, civic, political, and
economical. On one hand there was the agitation for the release of
oppressed nationalities, on the other the growth of liberalism in
England and France. The aim of the liberalism of that period was to
restrict the functions of government; its spirit was distrust of the
state. As a political theory it was defective, as modern Liberals
acknowledge, but it was an important expression of the feeling that
the interests of society are best furthered by the free interplay of
individual actions and aims. It thus implicitly contained or pointed to
a theory of Progress sharply opposed to Comte's: that the realisation of
the fullest possible measure of individual liberty is the condition
of ensuring the maximum of energy and effectiveness in improving our
environment, and therefore the condition of attaining public felicity.
Right or wrong, this theory reckons with fundamental facts of human
nature which Comte ignored.
7.
Comte spent the later years of his life in composing another huge work,
on social reorganisation. It included a new religion, in which Humanity
was the object of worship, but made no other important addition to the
speculations of his earlier manhood, though he developed them further.
The Course of Positive Philosophy was not a book that took the public by
storm. We are told by a competent student of social theories in France
that the author's name was little known in his own country till about
1855, when his greatness began to win recognition, and his influence to
operate. [Footnote: Weill, Hist. du mouvement social, p. 21.] Even then
his work can hardly have been widely read. But through men like Littre
and Taine, whose conceptions of history were moulded by his teaching,
and men like Mill, whom he stimulated, as well as through the disciples
who adopted Positivism as a religion, his leading principles, detached
from his system, became current in the world of speculation.
[Footnote: The influence of Comte. The manner in which ideas filter
through, as it were, underground and emerge oblivious of their source
is illustrated by the German historian Lamprecht's theory of historical
development. He surveyed the history of a people as a series of what
he called typical periods, each of which is marked by a collective
psychical character expressing itself in every department of life. He
named this a diapason. Lamprecht had never read Comte, and he imagined
that this principle, on which he based his kulturhistorische Methode,
was original. But his psychical diapason is the psychical consensus of
Comte, whose system, as we have seen, depended on the proposition that
a given social organisation corresponds in a definite way to the
contemporary stage of mental development; and Comte had derived the
principle from Saint-Simon. Cf. his pamphlet Die kulturhistorische
Methode (1900). The succession of "typical period" was worked out for
Germany in his History of the German People.]
He laid the foundations of sociology, convincing many minds that the
history of civilisation is subject to general laws, or, in other words,
that a science of society is possible. In England this idea was still a
novelty when Mill's System of Logic appeared in 1843.
The publication of this work, which attempted to define the rules for
the investigation of truth in all fields of inquiry and to provide tests
for the hypotheses of science, was a considerable event, whether we
regard its value and range or its prolonged influence on education.
Mill, who had followed recent French thought attentively and was
particularly impressed by the system of Comte, recognised that a new
method of investigating social phenomena had been inaugurated by the
thinkers who set out to discover the "law" of human progression. He
proclaimed and welcomed it as superior to previous methods, and at the
same time pointed out its limitations.
Till about fifty years ago, he said, generalisations on man and society
have erred by implicitly assuming that human nature and society will for
ever revolve in the same orbit and exhibit virtually the same phenomena.
This is still the view of the ostentatiously practical votaries of
common sense in Great Britain; whereas the more reflective minds of the
present age, analysing historical records more minutely, have adopted
the opinion that the human race is in a state of necessary progression.
The reciprocal action between circumstances and human nature, from which
social phenomena result, must produce either a cycle or a trajectory.
While Vico maintained the conception of periodic cycles, his successors
have universally adopted the idea of a trajectory or progress, and are
endeavouring to discover its law. [Footnote: Philosophical writers in
England in the middle of the century paid more attention to Cousin than
to Comte or Saint-Simon. J. D. Morell, in his forgotten History and
Critical View of Speculative Philosophy (1846), says that eclecticism is
the philosophy of human progress (vol. ii. 635, 2nd ed.). He conceived
the movement of humanity as that of a spiral, ever tending to a higher
perfection (638).]
But they have fallen into a misconception in imagining that if they can
find a law of uniformity in the succession of events they can infer the
future from the past terms of the series. For such a law would only be
an "empirical law"; it would not be a causal law or an ultimate law.
However rigidly uniform, there is no guarantee that it would apply to
phenomena outside those from which it was derived. It must itself depend
on laws of mind and character (psychology and ethology). When those
laws are known and the nature of the dependence is explained, when the
determining causes of all the changes constituting the progress are
understood, then the empirical law will be elevated to a scientific law,
then only will it be possible to predict.
Thus Mill asserted that if the advanced thinkers who are engaged on
the subject succeed in discovering an empirical law from the data of
history, it may be converted into a scientific law by deducing it a
priori from the principles of human nature. In the meantime, he argued
that what is already known of those principles justifies the important
conclusion that the order of general human progression will mainly
depend on the order of progression in the intellectual convictions of
mankind.
Throughout his exposition Mill uses "progress" in a neutral sense,
without implying that the progression necessarily means improvement.
Social science has still to demonstrate that the changes determined by
human nature do mean improvement. But in warning the reader of this
he declares himself to be personally an optimist, believing that the
general tendency, saving temporary exceptions, is in the direction of a
better and happier state.
8.
Twenty years later [Footnote: In later editions of the Logic.] Mill was
able to say that the conception of history as subject to general
laws had "passed into the domain of newspaper and ordinary political
discussion." Buckle's HISTORY OF CIVILISATION IN ENGLAND [Footnote: 2
Vol. i. appeared in 1857, vol. ii. in 1861.] which enjoyed an immediate
success, did a great deal to popularise the idea. In this stimulating
work Buckle took the fact of Progress for granted; his purpose was to
investigate its causes. Considering the two general conditions on which
all events depend, human nature and external nature, he arrived at two
conclusions: (1) In the early stage of history the influence of man's
external environment is the more decisive factor; but as time goes on
the roles are gradually inverted, and now it is his own nature that is
principally responsible for his development. (2) Progress is determined,
not by the emotional and moral faculties, but by the intellect;
[Footnote: This was the view of Jouffroy, Comte, and Mill; Buckle
popularised it.] the emotional and moral faculties are stationary, and
therefore religion is not a decisive influence in the onward movement
of humanity. "I pledge myself to show that the progress Europe has
made from barbarism to civilisation is entirely due to its intellectual
activity.... In what may be called the innate and original morals of
mankind there is, so far as we are aware, no progress." [Footnote:
Buckle has been very unjustly treated by some critics, but has found an
able defender in Mr. J.M. Robertson (Buckle and his Critics (1895)). The
remarks of Benn (History of Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century, ii.
182 sqq.) are worth reading.]
Buckle was convinced that social phenomena exhibit the same undeviating
regularity as natural phenomena. In this belief he was chiefly
influenced by the investigations of the Belgian statistician Quetelet
(1835). "Statistics," he said, "has already thrown more light on the
study of human nature than all the sciences put together." From the
regularity with which the same crimes recur in the same state of
society, and many other constant averages, he inferred that all actions
of individuals result directly from the state of society in which they
live, and that laws are operating which, if we take large enough numbers
into account, scarcely undergo any sensible perturbation. [Footnote:
Kant had already appealed to statistics in a similar sense; see above,
p. 243.] Thus the evidence of statistics points to the conclusion that
progress is not determined by the acts of individual men, but depends
on general laws of the intellect which govern the successive stages of
public opinion. The totality of human actions at any given time depends
on the totality of knowledge and the extent of its diffusion.
There we have the theory that history is subject to general laws in its
most unqualified form, based on a fallacious view of the significance
of statistical facts. Buckle's attempt to show the operation of general
laws in the actual history of man was disappointing. When he went on to
review the concrete facts of the historical process, his own political
principles came into play, and he was more concerned with denouncing
the tendencies of which he did not approve than with extricating general
laws from the sequence of events. His comments on religious persecution
and the obscurantism of governments and churches were instructive
and timely, but they did not do much to exhibit a set of rigid laws
governing and explaining the course of human development.
The doctrine that history is under the irresistible control of law
was also popularised by an American physiologist, J. W. Draper, whose
HISTORY OF THE INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT OF EUROPE appeared in 1864 and
was widely read. His starting-point was a superficial analogy between
a society and an individual. "Social advancement is as completely under
the control of natural law as a bodily growth. The life of an individual
is a miniature of the life of a nation," and "particles" in the
individual organism answer to persons in the political organism. Both
have the same epochs--infancy, childhood, youth, manhood, old age--and
therefore European progress exhibits five phases, designated as
Credulity, Inquiry, Faith, Reason, Decrepitude. Draper's conclusion was
that Europe, now in the fourth period, is hastening to a long period
of decrepitude. The prospect did not dismay him; decrepitude is
the culmination of Progress, and means the organisation of national
intellect. That has already been achieved in China, and she owes to it
her well-being and longevity. "Europe is inevitably hastening to become
what China is. In her we may see what we shall be like when we are old."
Judged by any standard, Draper's work is much inferior to Buckle's, but
both these books, utterly different though they were in both conception
and treatment, performed a similar function. Each in its own way
diffused the view which had originated in France, that civilisation is
progression and, like nature, subject to general laws.
CHAPTER XVII. "PROGRESS" IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT (1830-1851)
1.
In 1850 there appeared at Paris a small book by M. A. Javary, with the
title DE L'IDEE DU PROGRES. Its interest lies in the express recognition
that Progress was the characteristic idea of the age, ardently received
by some, hotly denounced by others. [Footnote: Lamartine denounced in
his monthly journal Le Conseiller du peuple, vol. i. (1849), all the
progressive gospels of the day, socialist, communist, Saint-Simonian,
Fourierist, Icarian--in fact every school of social reform since the
First Republic--as purely materialistic, sprung from the "cold seed of
the century of Helvetius" (pp. 224, 287).]
"If there is any idea," he says, "that belongs properly to one century,
at least by the importance accorded to it, and that, whether accepted or
not, is familiar to all minds, it is the idea of Progress conceived as
the general law of history and the future of humanity."
He observes that some, intoxicated by the spectacle of the material
improvements of modern civilisation and the results of science, set no
limits to man's power or his hopes; while others, unable to deny the
facts, say that this progress serves only the lower part of human
nature, and refuse to look with complacency on a movement which means,
they assert, a continuous decadence of the nobler part. To which it is
replied that, If moral decadence is a fact, it is only transient; it
is a necessary phase of a development which means moral progress in
the end, for it is due to the process by which the beliefs, ideas,
and institutions of the past disappear and make way for new and better
principles.
And Javary notes a prevailing tendency in France to interpret every
contemporary movement as progressive, while all the social doctrinaires
justify their particular reforms by invoking the law of Progress. It was
quite true that during the July monarchy nearly all serious speculations
on society and history were related to that idea. It was common to
Michelet and Quinet, who saw in the march of civilisation the gradual
triumph of liberty; to Leroux and Cabet, who preached humanitarian
communism; to Louis Blanc and to Proudhon; to the bourgeois, who were
satisfied with the regime of Louis Philippe and grew rich, following
the precept of Guizot, as well as to the workers who overthrew it. It is
significant that the journal of Louis Blanc, in which he published his
book on the ORGANISATION OF WORK (1839), was entitled REVUS DES PROGRES.
The political question as to the due limits between government and
individual freedom was discussed in terms of Progress: is personal
liberty or state authority the efficient means of progressing? The
metaphysical question of necessity and freewill acquired a new interest:
is Progress a fatality, independent of human purposes, determined
by general, ineluctable, historical laws? Quinet and Michelet argued
vigorously against the optimism of Cousin, who with Hegel held that
history is just what it ought to be and could not be improved.
2.
Among the competing theories of the time, and sharply opposed to the
views of Comte, was the idea, derived from the Revolution, that the
world is moving towards universal equality and the obliteration of class
distinctions, that this is the true direction of Progress. This view,
represented by leaders of the popular movement against the bourgeois
ascendency, derived powerful reinforcement from one of the most
enlightened political thinkers of the day. The appearance of de
Tocqueville's renowned study of American democracy was the event of
1834. He was convinced that he had discovered on the other side of the
Atlantic the answer to the question whither the world is tending. In
American society he found that equality of conditions is the generating
fact on which every other fact depends. He concluded that equality is
the goal of humanity, providentially designed.
"The gradual development of equality of conditions has the principal
characteristics of a providential fact. It is universal, it is
permanent, it eludes human power; all events and all men serve this
development.... This whole book has been written under the impression of
a sort of religious terror produced in the author's soul by the view
of this irresistible revolution which for so many centuries has been
marching across all obstacles, and which is to-day seen still advancing
in the midst of the ruins it has made.... If the men of our time were
brought to see that the gradual and progressive development of equality
is at once the past and the future of their history, this single
discovery would give that development the sacred character of the will
of the sovran master."
Here we have a view of the direction of Progress and the meaning of
history, pretending to be based upon the study of facts and announced
with the most intense conviction. And behind it is the fatalistic
doctrine that the movement cannot be arrested or diverted; that it is
useless to struggle against it; that men, whatever they may do, cannot
deflect the clock-like motion regulated by a power which de Tocqueville
calls Providence but to which his readers might give some other name.
3.
It has been conjectured, [Footnote: Georges Sorel, Les Illusions
du progres, pp. 247-8 (1908).] and seems probable enough, that de
Tocqueville's book was one of the influences which wrought upon the
mind of Proudhon. The speculations of this remarkable man, who, like
Saint-Simon and Comte, sought to found a new science of society,
attracted general attention in the middle of the century. [Footnote:
Compare the appreciation by Weill in Histoire du mouvement social
en France 1852-1910 (1911, ed. 2), p. 41: "Le grande ecrivain
revolutionnaire et anarchiste n'etait au fond ni un revolutionnaire
ni un anarchiste, mais un reformateur pratique et modere qui a
fait illusion par le ton vibrant de ses pamphlets centre la societe
capitaliste."]His hostility to religion, his notorious dictum that
"property is theft," his gospel of "anarchy," and the defiant,
precipitous phrases in which he clothed his ideas, created an impression
that he was a dangerous anti-social revolutionary. But when his ideas
are studied in their context and translated into sober language, they
are not so unreasonable. Notwithstanding his communistic theory of
property and his ideal of equality, he was a strong individualist.
He held that the future of civilisation depends on the energy of
individuals, that liberty is a condition of its advance, and that the
end to be kept in view is the establishment of justice, which means
equality. He saw the difficulty of reconciling liberty with complete
equality, but hoped that the incompatibility would be overcome by a
gradual reduction of the natural differences in men's capacities. He
said, "I am an anarchist," but his anarchy only meant that the time
would come when government would be superfluous, when every human
being could be trusted to act wisely and morally without a restraining
authority or external sanctions. Nor was he a Utopian. He comprehended
that such a transformation of society would be a long, slow process, and
he condemned the schools of Saint-Simon and Fourier for imagining that a
millennium might be realised immediately by a change of organisation.
He tells us that all his speculations and controversial activities are
penetrated with the idea of Progress, which he described as "the railway
of liberty"; and his radical criticism on current social theories,
whether conservative or democratic, was that they did not take Progress
seriously though they invoked it.
"What dominates in all my studies, what forms their beginning and end,
their summit and their base, their reason, what makes my originality
as a thinker (if I have any), is that I affirm Progress resolutely,
irrevocably, and everywhere, and deny the Absolute. All that I have
ever written, all I have denied or affirmed, I have written, denied or
affirmed in the name of one unique idea, Progress. My adversaries, on
the other hand, are all partisans of the Absolute, IN OMNI GENERE, CASU,
ET NUMERO, to use the phrase of Sganarelle." [Footnote: Philosophie du
progres, Premiere lettre (1851).]
4.
A vague confidence in Progress had lain behind and encouraged the
revolution of 1789, but in the revolution of 1848 the idea was
definitely enthroned as the regnant principle. It presided over the
session of the Committee which drew up the Constitution of the second
Republic. Armand Marrast, the most important of the men who framed that
document, based the measure of universal suffrage upon "the invisible
law which rules societies," the law of progress which has been so long
denied but which is rooted in the nature of man. His argument was
this: Revolutions are due to the repression of progress, and are the
expression and triumph of a progress which has been achieved. But such
convulsions are an undesirable method of progressing; how can they be
avoided? Only by organising elastic institutions in which new ideas
of amelioration can easily be incorporated, and laws which can be
accommodated without struggle or friction to the rise of new opinions.
What is needed is a flexible government open to the penetration of
ideas, and the key to such a government is universal suffrage.
[Footnote: Marrast, "the invisible law"; "Oui," he continues, "toute
societe est progressive, parce que tout individu est educable,
perfectible; on peut mesurer, limiter, peut-etre les facultes d'un
individu; on ne saurait limiter, mesurer ce que peuvent, dans l'ordre
des idees, les intelligences dont les produits ne s'ajoutent pas
seulement mais se fecondent et se multiplient dans une progression
indefinie." No. 393 Republique francoise. Assemblee nationale. Projet de
Constitution... precede par un rapport fait au nom de la Commission par
le citoyen Armand Marrast. Seance du 30 aout, 1848.]
Universal suffrage was practical politics, but the success of the
revolution fluttered agreeably all the mansions of Utopia, and social
reformers of every type sought to improve the occasion. In the history
of the political struggles of 1848 the names are written of Proudhon,
of Victor Considerant the disciple of Fourier, of Pierre Leroux the
humanitarian communist, and his devoted pupil George Sand. The chief
title of Leroux to be remembered is just his influence over the soul
of the great novelist. Her later romances are pervaded by ideas derived
from his teaching. His communism was vague and ineffectual, but he was
one of the minor forces in the thought of the period, and there are some
features in his theory which deserve to be pointed out.
Leroux had begun as a member of the Saint-Simonian school, but he
diverged into a path of his own. He reinstated the ideal of equality
which Saint-Simon rejected, and made the approach to that ideal the
measure of Progress. The most significant process in history, he held,
is the gradual breaking down of caste and class: the process is now
approaching its completion; "today MAN is synonymous with EQUAL."
In order to advance to the city of the future we must have a force and
a lever. Man is the force, and the lever is the idea of Progress. It is
supplied by the study of history which displays the improvement of our
faculties, the increase of our power over nature, the possibility of
organising society more efficaciously. But the force and the lever are
not enough. A fulcrum is also required, and this is to be found in the
"solidarity" of the human race. But this conception meant for Leroux
something different from what is ordinarily meant by the phrase, a
deeper and even mystical bond. Human "solidarity" was a corollary from
the pantheistic religion of the Saint-Simonians, but with Leroux,
as with Fourier, it was derived from the more difficult doctrine of
palingenesis. We of this generation, he believed, are not merely the
sons and descendants of past generations, we are the past generations
themselves, which have come to birth again in us.
Through many pages of the two volumes [Footnote: De l'humanite, 1840
(dedicated to Beranger).] in which he set forth his thesis, Leroux
expended much useless learning in endeavouring to establish this
doctrine, which, were it true, might be the central principle in a
new religion of humanity, a transformed Pythagoreanism. It is easy to
understand the attractiveness of palingenesis to a believer in Progress:
for it would provide a solution of the anomaly that generations after
generations are sacrificed for the sake of posterity, and so appear to
have no value in themselves. Believers in Progress, who are sensitive to
the sufferings of mankind, past and present, need a stoical resolution
to face this fact. We saw how Herder refused to accept it. A pantheistic
faith, like that of the Saint-Simonian Church, may help some, it cannot
do more, to a stoical acquiescence. The palingenesis of Leroux or
Fourier removes the radical injustice. The men of each generation are
sacrificed and suffer for the sake of their descendants, but as their
descendants are themselves come to life again, they are really suffering
in their own interests. They will themselves reach the desirable state
to which the slow, painful process of history is tending.
But palingenesis, notwithstanding all the ancient opinions and
traditions that the researches of Leroux might muster, could carry
little conviction to those who were ceasing to believe in the familiar
doctrine of a future life detached from earth, and Madame Dudevant was
his only distinguished convert.
5.
The ascendency of the idea of Progress among thoughtful people in France
in the middle of the last century is illustrated by the work which
Ernest Renan composed under the immediate impression of the events
of 1848. He desired to understand the significance of the current
revolutionary doctrines, and was at once involved in speculation on
the future of humanity. This is the purport of L'AVENIR DE LA SCIENCE.
[Footnote: L'Avenir de la science--Pensees de (1848). Published in
1890.]
[Footnote: The ascendency of the idea of Progress at this epoch may be
further illustrated by E. Pelletan's Profession de foi du dix-neuvieme
siecle, 1852 (4th ed., 1857), where Progress is described as the general
law of the universe; and by Jean Reynaud's Philosophie religieuse:
Terre et ciel (3rd ed., 1858), a religious but not orthodox book, which
acclaims the "sovran principle of perfectibility" (cp. p. 138). I may
refer also to the rhetorical pages of E. Vacherot on the Doctrine du
progres, printed (as part of an essay on the Philosophy of History) in
his Essais de philosophie critique (1864).]
The author was then convinced that history has a goal, and that mankind
tends perpetually, though in an oscillating line, towards a more perfect
state, through the growing dominion of reason over instinct and caprice.
He takes the French Revolution as the critical moment in which humanity
first came to know itself. That revolution was the first attempt of man
to take the reins into his own hands. All that went before we may call,
with Owen, the irrational period of human existence.
We have now come to a point at which we must choose between two faiths.
If we despair of reason, we may find a refuge from utter scepticism in
a belief in the external authority of the Roman Church. If we trust
reason, we must accept the march of the human mind and justify the
modern spirit. And it can be justified only by proving that it is a
necessary step towards perfection. Renan affirmed his belief in
the second alternative, and felt confident that science--including
philology, on the human bearings of which he enlarged,--philosophy, and
art would ultimately enable men to realise an ideal civilisation,
in which all would be equal. The state, he said, is the machine of
Progress, and the Socialists are right in formulating the problem which
man has to solve, though their solution is a bad one. For individual
liberty, which socialism would seriously limit, is a definite conquest,
and ought to be preserved inviolate.
Renan wrote this work in 1848 and 1849, but did not publish it at the
time. He gave it to the world forty years later. Those forty years
had robbed him of his early optimism. He continues to believe that the
unfortunate conditions of our race might be ameliorated by science, but
he denounces the view that men can ever be equal. Inequality is written
in nature; it is not only a necessary consequence of liberty, but
a necessary postulate of Progress. There will always be a superior
minority. He criticises himself too for having fallen into the error of
Hegel, and assigned to man an unduly important place in the universe.
[Footnote: Renan, speaking of the Socialists, paid a high tribute
to Bazard (L'Avenir de la science, p. 104). On the other hand, he
criticised Comte severely (p. 149).
Renan returned to speculation on the future in 1863, in a letter to M.
Marcellin-Berthelot (published in Dialogues et fragments philosophiques,
1876): "Que sera Ie monde quand un million de fois se sera reproduit ce
qui s'est passe depuis 1763 quand la chimie, au lieu de quatre-vingt ans
de progres, en aura cent millions?" (p. 183). And again in the Dialogues
written in 1871 (ib.), where it is laid down that the end of humanity is
to produce great men: "le grand oeuvre s'accomplira par la science, non
par la democratic. Rien sans grands hommes; le salut se fera par des
grands hommes" (p. 103).]
In 1890 there was nothing left of the sentimental socialism which he had
studied in 1848; it had been blown away by the cold wind of scientific
socialism which Marx and Engels created. And Renan had come to think
that in this new form socialism would triumph. [Footnote: He reckoned
without the new forces, opposed to socialism as well as to parliamentary
democracy, represented by Bakunin and men like Georges Sorel.] He had
criticised Comte for believing that "man lives exclusively by science,
or rather little verbal tags, like geometrical theorems, dry formulae."
Was he satisfied by the concrete doctrine of Marx that all the phenomena
of civilisation at a given period are determined by the methods of
production and distribution which then prevail? But the future of
socialism is a minor issue, and the ultimate goal of humanity is quite
uncertain. "Ce qu'il y a de consolant, c'est qu'on arrive necessairement
quelque part." We may console ourselves with the certainty that we must
get somewhere.
6.
Proudhon described the idea of Progress as the railway of liberty. It
certainly supplied motive power to social ideals which were repugnant
and alarming to the authorities of the Catholic Church. At the Vatican
it was clearly seen that the idea was a powerful engine driven by an
enemy; and in the famous SYLLABUS of errors which Pope Pius IX. flung in
the face of the modern world at the end of 1864, Progress had the honour
of being censured. The eightieth error, which closes the list, runs
thus:
Romanus Pontifex potest ac debet cum progressu, cum liberalismo et cum
recenti civilitate sese reconciliare et componere.
"The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, be reconciled and come to terms
with progress, with liberalism, and with modern civilisation."
No wonder, seeing that Progress was invoked to justify every movement
that offended the nostrils of the Vatican--liberalism, toleration,
democracy, and socialism. And the Roman Church well understood the
intimate connection of the idea with the advance of rationalism.
CHAPTER XVIII. MATERIAL PROGRESS: THE EXHIBITION OF 1851
1.
It is not easy for a new idea of the speculative order to penetrate and
inform the general consciousness of a community until it has assumed
some external and concrete embodiment or is recommended by some striking
material evidence. In the case of Progress both these conditions were
fulfilled in the period 1820 to 1850. In the Saint-Simonian Church, and
in the attempts of Owen and Cabet to found ideal societies, people saw
practical enterprises inspired by the idea. They might have no sympathy
with these enterprises, but their attention was attracted. And at the
same time they were witnessing a rapid transformation of the external
conditions of life, a movement to the continuation of which there seemed
no reason for setting any limit in the future. The spectacular results
of the advance of science and mechanical technique brought home to the
mind of the average man the conception of an indefinite increase of
man's power over nature as his brain penetrated her secrets. This
evident material progress which has continued incessantly ever since
has been a mainstay of the general belief in Progress which is prevalent
to-day.
England was the leader in this material progress, of which the
particulars are familiar and need not be enumerated here. The discovery
of the power of steam and the potentialities of coal revolutionised the
conditions of life. Men who were born at the beginning of the
century had seen, before they had passed the age of thirty, the rapid
development of steam navigation, the illumination of towns and houses by
gas, the opening of the first railway.
It was just before this event, the opening of the Liverpool and
Manchester railway, which showed how machinery would abbreviate space as
it had SIR THOMAS MORE, OR COLLOQUIES ON THE PROGRESS OF SOCIETY (1829).
There we see the effect of the new force on his imagination. "Steam," he
says, "will govern the world next,... and shake it too before its empire
is established." The biographer of Nelson devotes a whole conversation
to the subject of "steam and war." But the theme of the book is the
question of moral and social progress, on which the author inclines
to the view that "the world will continue to improve, even as it has
hitherto been continually improving; and that the progress of knowledge
and the diffusion of Christianity will bring about at last, when men
become Christian in reality as well as in name, something like that
Utopian state of which philosophers have loved to dream." This admission
of Progress, cautious though it was, circumscribed by reserves and
compromised by hesitations, coming from such a conservative pillar of
Church and State as Southey, is a notable sign of the times, when we
remember that the idea was still associated then with revolution and
heresy.
It is significant too that at the same time an octogenarian
mathematician of Aberdeen was composing a book on the same subject.
Hamilton's PROGRESS OF SOCIETY is now utterly forgotten, but it must
have contributed in its day to propagating the same moderate view of
Progress, consistent with orthodoxy, which Southey held. "The belief of
the perfectibility of human nature and the attainment of a golden age
in which vice and misery have no place, will only be entertained by an
enthusiast; but an inquiry into the means of improving our nature and
enlarging our happiness is consistent with sober reason, and is the
most important subject, merely human, that can engage the mind of
man." [Footnote: P. 13. The book was published posthumously by Murray
in 1830, a year after the author's death.] [Footnote: "Progress of
Society." The phrase was becoming common; e.g. Russell's History
of Modern Europe (1822) has the sub-title A view of the Progress of
Society, etc. The didactic poem of Payne Knight, The Progress of Civil
Society (1796), a very dull performance, was quite unaffected by
the dreams of Priestley or Godwin. It was towards the middle of the
nineteenth century that Progress, without any qualifying phrase, came
into use.]
2.
We have been told by Tennyson that when he went by the first train
from Liverpool to Manchester (1830) he thought that the wheels ran in
grooves.
"Then I made this line:
Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change."
[Footnote: See Tennyson, Memoir by his Son, vol. i. p. 195.]
LOCKSLEY HALL, which was published in 1842, illustrates how the idea of
Progress had begun to creep into the imagination of Englishmen. Though
subsidiary to a love story, it is the true theme of the poem. The
pulsation of eager interest in the terrestrial destinies of humanity,
the large excitement of living in a "wondrous Mother-age," dreams of the
future, quicken the passion of the hero's youth. His disappointment in
love disenchants him; he sees the reverse side of civilisation, but at
last he finds an anodyne for his palsied heart in a more sober version
of his earlier faith, a chastened belief in his Mother-age. He can at
least discern an increasing purpose in history, and can be sure that
"the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns." The
novelty of the poem lay in finding a cathartic cure for a private
sorrow, not in religion or in nature, but in the modern idea of
Progress. It may be said to mark a stage in the career of the idea.
The view of civilisation which Tennyson took as his MOTIF had no
revolutionary implications, suggested no impatience or anger with the
past. The startling prospect unfolding itself before "the long result of
time," and history is justified by the promise of to-day:
The centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed.
Very different was the spirit in which another great poet composed,
nearly twenty years later, a wonderful hymn of Progress. Victor Hugo's
PLEIN CEIL, in his epic LA LEGENDE DES SIECLES,[Footnote: A.D. 1859.]
announces a new era of the world in which man, the triumphant rebel,
delivered from his past, will move freely forward on a glorious way. The
poet is inspired not by faith in a continuous development throughout the
ages, but by the old spirit of the Revolution, and he sees in the past
only a heavy chain which the race at last flings off. The horrible past
has gone, not to return: "ce monde est mort"; and the poem is at once
a paean on man's victorious rebellion against it and a dithyramb on the
prospect of his future.
Man is imagined as driving through the heavens an aerial car to which
the four winds are harnessed, mounting above the clouds, and threatening
to traverse the ether.
Superbe, il plane, avec un hymne en ses agres;
Et l'on voit voir passer la strophe du progres.
Il est la nef, il est le phare!
L'homme enfin prend son sceptre et jette son baton.
Et l'on voit s'envoler le calcul de Newton
Monte sur l'ode de Pindare.
But if this vision foreshadows the conquest of the air, its significance
is symbolic rather than literal, and, like Pindar checking the steeds of
his song, Hugo returns to earth:
Pas si loin! pas si haut! redescendons.
Restons L'homme, restons Adam; mais non l'homme a tatons,
Mais non l'Adam tombe! Tout autre reve altere
L'espece d'ideal qui convient a la terre.
Contentons-nous du mot: meilleur! ecrit partout.
Dawn has appeared, after six thousand years in the fatal way, and
man, freed by "the invisible hand" from the weight of his chains, has
embarked for new shores:
Ou va-t-il ce navire? II va, de jour vetu,
A l'avenir divin et pur, a la vertu,
A la science qu'on voit luire,
A la mort des fleaux, a l'oubli genereux,
A l'abondance, au caime, au rire, a l'homme heureux,
Il va, ce glorieux navire.
Oh! ce navire fait le voyage sacre!
C'est l'ascension bleue a son premier degre;
Hors de l'antique et vil decombre,
Hors de la pesanteur, c'est l'avenir fonde;
C'est le destin de l'homme a la fin evade,
Qui leve l'ancre et sort de l'ombre!
The union of humanity in a universal commonwealth, which Tennyson had
expressed as "the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World,"
the goal of many theorists of Progress, becomes in Hugo's imagination
something more sublime. The magic ship of man's destiny is to compass
the cosmopolis of the Stoics, a terrestrial order in harmony with the
whole universe.
Nef magique et supreme! elle a, rien qu'eri marchant,
Change le cri terrestre en pur et joyeux chant,
Rajeuni les races fletries,
Etabli l'ordre vrai, montre le chemin sur,
Dieu juste! et fait entrer dans l'homme tant d'azur
Qu'elle a supprime les patries!
Faisant a l'homme avec le ciel une cite,
Une pensee avec toute l'immensite,
Elle abolit les vieilles regles;
Elle abaisse les monts, elle annule les tours;
Splendide, elle introduit les peuples, marcheurs lourds,
Dans la communion des aigles.
3.
Between 1830 and 1850 railway transport spread throughout Great Britain
and was introduced on the Continent, and electricity was subdued to
man's use by the invention of telegraphy. The great Exhibition of London
in 1851 was, in one of its aspects, a public recognition of the material
progress of the age and the growing power of man over the physical
world. Its aim, said a contemporary, was "to seize the living scroll
of human progress, inscribed with every successive conquest of man's
intellect."[Footnote: Edinburgh Review (October 1851), p. 562, in a
review of the Official Catalogue of the Exhibition.] The Prince Consort,
who originated the Exhibition, explained its significance in a public
speech:
"Nobody who has paid any attention to the peculiar features of our
present era will doubt for a moment that we are living at a period of
most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to accomplish that great
end to which indeed all history points--THE REALISATION OF THE UNITY
OF MANKIND.... The distances which separated the different nations and
parts of the globe are rapidly vanishing before the achievements of
modern invention, and we can traverse them with incredible ease; the
languages of all nations are known, and their acquirements placed within
the reach of everybody; thought is communicated with the rapidity, and
even by the power, of lightning. On the other hand, the GREAT PRINCIPLE
OF DIVISION OF LABOUR, which may be called the moving power of
civilisation, is being extended to all branches of science, industry,
and art... Gentlemen, the Exhibition of 1851 is to give us a true test
and a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of
mankind has arrived in this great task, and a new starting-point from
which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions."
[Footnote: Martin, Life of the Prince Consort (ed. 3), iii. p. 247.
The speech was delivered at a banquet at the Mansion House on March 21,
1850.]
The point emphasised here is the "solidarity" of the world. The
Exhibition is to bring home to men's consciousness the community of all
the inhabitants of the earth. The assembled peoples, wrote Thackeray,
in his "May-day Ode," [Footnote: Published in the Times, April 30, 1851.
The Exhibition was opened on May I.] See the sumptuous banquet set, The
brotherhood of nations met Around the feast.
And this was the note struck in the leading article of the Times on the
opening day: "The first morning since the creation that all peoples have
assembled from all parts of the world and done a common act." It was
claimed that the Exhibition signified a new, intelligent, and moral
movement which "marks a great crisis in the history of the world," and
foreshadows universal peace.
England, said another writer, produced Bacon and Newton, the two
philosophers "who first lent direction and force to the stream of
industrial science; we have been the first also to give the widest
possible base to the watch-tower of international progress, which seeks
the formation of the physical well-being of man and the extinction of
the meaner jealousies of commerce."[Footnote: Edinburgh Review, loc.
cit.]
These quotations show that the great Exhibition was at the time
optimistically regarded, not merely as a record of material
achievements, but as a demonstration that humanity was at last well on
its way to a better and happier state, through the falling of barriers
and the resulting insight that the interests of all are closely
interlocked. A vista was suggested, at the end of which far-sighted
people might think they discerned Tennyson's "Federation of the World."
4.
Since the Exhibition, western civilisation has advanced steadily, and
in some respects more rapidly than any sober mind could have
predicted--civilisation, at least, in the conventional sense, which
has been not badly defined as "the development of material ease, of
education, of equality, and of aspirations to rise and succeed in life."
[Footnote: B. Kidd, Social Evolution, p. 368.] The most striking advance
has been in the technical conveniences of life--that is, in the
control over natural forces. It would be superfluous to enumerate
the discoveries and inventions since 1850 which have abridged space,
economised time, eased bodily suffering, and reduced in some ways
the friction of life, though they have increased it in others. This
uninterrupted series of technical inventions, proceeding concurrently
with immense enlargements of all branches of knowledge, has gradually
accustomed the least speculative mind to the conception that
civilisation is naturally progressive, and that continuous improvement
is part of the order of things.
So far the hopes of 1851 have been fulfilled. But against all this
technical progress, with the enormous expansion of industry and
commerce, dazzling to the man in the market-place when he pauses to
reflect, have to be set the exploitation and sufferings of industrial
workers, the distress of intense economic competition, the heavier
burdens of preparation for modern war. The very increase of "material
ease" seemed unavoidably to involve conditions inconsistent with
universal happiness; and the communications which linked the peoples of
the world together modified the methods of warfare instead of bringing
peace. "Toutes nos merveilleuses inventions sont aussi puissantes pour
le mal que pour le bien." [Footnote: H. de Ferron, Theorie du progres
(1867), ii. 439.] One fact indeed might be taken as an index that
humanity was morally advancing--the abolition of slavery in America
at the price of a long and sanguinary war. Yet some triumphs of
philanthropy hardly seemed to endanger the conclusion that, while
knowledge is indefinitely progressive, there is no good reason for
sanguine hopes that man is "perfectible" or that universal happiness is
attainable. A thoughtful writer observed, discussing Progress in 1864,
that the innumerable individual steps in the growth of knowledge and
business organisation have not been combined, so far, to produce a
general advance in the happiness of life; each step brings increase of
pressure. [Footnote: Lotze, Microcosmus (Eng. tr.), vol. ii. p. 396.]
Yet in spite of all adverse facts and many eminent dissenters the belief
in social Progress has on the whole prevailed. This triumph of optimism
was promoted by the victory of a revolutionary hypothesis in another
field of inquiry, which suddenly electrified the world. [Footnote:
Against Lotze we might set many opinions which do not seem to have been
influenced by the doctrine of evolution. For instance, the optimism of
M. Marcellin-Berthelot in a letter to Renan in 1863. He says (Renan,
Dialogues, p. 233) that one of the general results of historical study
is "the fact of the incessant progress of human societies in science, in
material conditions, and in morality, three correlatives.... Societies
become more and more civilised, and I will venture to say more and more
virtuous. The sum of good is always increasing, and the sum of evil
diminishing, in the same measure as the sum of truth increases and the
sum of ignorance diminishes."
In 1867 Emerson delivered an address at Harvard on the "Progress
of Culture" (printed in his Letters and Social Aims), in which he
enumerates optimistically the indications of social advance: "the new
scope of social science; the abolition of capital punishment and of
imprisonment for debt: the improvement of prisons; the efforts for the
suppression of intemperance, vice, etc.," and asks: "Who would live in
the stone age, or the bronze, or the iron, or the lacustrine? Who does
not prefer the age of steel, of gold, of coal, petroleum, cotton, steam,
electricity, and the spectroscope?"
The discursive Thoughts on the Future of the Human Race, published in
1866, by W. Ellis (1800-81), a disciple of J. S. Mill, would have been
remarkable if it had appeared half a century earlier. He is untouched
by the theory of evolution, and argues on common-sense grounds that
Progress is inevitable.]
CHAPTER XIX. PROGRESS IN THE LIGHT OF EVOLUTION
1.
In the sixties of the nineteenth century the idea of Progress entered
upon the third period of its history. During the FIRST period, up to the
French Revolution, it had been treated rather casually; it was taken for
granted and received no searching examination either from philosophers
or from historians. In the SECOND period its immense significance was
apprehended, and a search began for a general law which would define and
establish it. The study of sociology was founded, and at the same time
the impressive results of science, applied to the conveniences of life,
advertised the idea. It harmonised with the notion of "development"
which had become current both in natural science and in metaphysics.
Socialists and other political reformers appealed to it as a gospel.
By 1850 it was a familiar idea in Europe, but was not yet universally
accepted as obviously true. The notion of social Progress had been
growing in the atmosphere of the notion of biological development,
but this development still seemed a highly precarious speculation.
The fixity of species and the creation of man, defended by powerful
interests and prejudices, were attacked but were not shaken. The
hypothesis of organic evolution was much in the same position as the
Copernican hypothesis in the sixteenth century. Then in 1859 Darwin
intervened, like Galileo. The appearance of the ORIGIN OF SPECIES
changed the situation by disproving definitely the dogma of fixity of
species and assigning real causes for "transformism." What might be
set aside before as a brilliant guess was elevated to the rank of a
scientific hypothesis, and the following twenty years were enlivened by
the struggle around the evolution of life, against prejudices chiefly
theological, resulting in the victory of the theory.
The ORIGIN OF SPECIES led to the THIRD stage of the fortunes of the idea
of Progress. We saw how the heliocentric astronomy, by dethroning man
from his privileged position in the universe of space and throwing him
back on his own efforts, had helped that idea to compete with the
idea of a busy Providence. He now suffers a new degradation within the
compass of his own planet. Evolution, shearing him of his glory as a
rational being specially created to be the lord of the earth, traces a
humble pedigree for him. And this second degradation was the decisive
fact which has established the reign of the idea of Progress.
2.
Evolution itself, it must be remembered, does not necessarily mean,
applied to society, the movement of man to a desirable goal. It is a
neutral, scientific conception, compatible either with optimism or with
pessimism. According to different estimates it may appear to be a cruel
sentence or a guarantee of steady amelioration. And it has been actually
interpreted in both ways.
In order to base Progress on Evolution two distinct arguments are
required. If it could be shown that social life obeys the same general
laws of evolution as nature, and also that the process involves an
increase of happiness, then Progress would be as valid a hypothesis as
the evolution of living forms. Darwin had concluded his treatise with
these words:
As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those
which lived long before the Silurian epoch, we may feel certain that the
ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that
no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence we may look with some
confidence to a secure future of equally inappreciable length. And as
natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being,
all corporeal and mental environments will tend to progress towards
perfection.
Here the evolutionist struck the note of optimism. And he suggested that
laws of Progress would be found in other quarters than those where they
had hitherto been sought.
The ablest and most influential development of the argument from
evolution to Progress was the work of Spencer. He extended the principle
of evolution to sociology and ethics, and was the most conspicuous
interpreter of it in an optimistic sense. He had been an evolutionist
long before Darwin's decisive intervention, and in 1851 he had published
his Social Statics, which, although he had not yet worked out the
evolutionary laws which he began to formulate soon afterwards and was
still a theist, exhibits the general trend of his optimistic philosophy.
Progress here appears as the basis of a theory of ethics. The title
indicates the influence of Comte, but the argument is sharply opposed to
the spirit of Comte's teaching, and sociology is treated in a new
way. [Footnote: Social Statics, or the Conditions Essential to Human
Happiness specified, and the first of them developed, is the full
title.]
Spencer begins by arguing that the constancy of human nature, so
frequently alleged, is a fallacy. For change is the law of all things,
of every single object as well as of the universe. "Nature in its
infinite complexity is ever growing to a new development." It would be
strange if, in this universal mutation, man alone were unchangeable,
and it is not true. "He also obeys the law of indefinite variation."
Contrast the houseless savages with Newtons and Shakespeares; between
these extremes there are countless degrees of difference. If then
humanity is indefinitely variable, perfectibility is possible.
In the second place, evil is not a permanent necessity. For all evil
results from the non-adaptation of the organism to its conditions;
this is true of everything that lives. And it is equally true that evil
perpetually tends to disappear. In virtue of an essential principle of
life, this non-adaptation of organisms to their conditions is ever being
rectified, and one or both continue to be modified until the adaptation
is perfect. And this applies to the mental as well as to the physical
sphere.
In the present state of the world men suffer many evils, and this shows
that their characters are not yet adjusted to the social state. Now the
qualification requisite for the social state is that each individual
shall have such desires only as may fully be satisfied without trenching
upon the ability of others to obtain similar satisfaction. This
qualification is not yet fulfilled, because civilised man retains some
of the characteristics which were suitable for the conditions of
his earlier predatory life. He needed one moral constitution for his
primitive state, he needs quite another for his present state. The
resultant is a process of adaptation which has been going on for a long
time, and will go on for a long time to come.
Civilisation represents the adaptations which have already been
accomplished. Progress means the successive steps of the process. That
by this process man will eventually become suited to his mode of life,
Spencer has no doubts. All excess and deficiency of suitable faculties
must disappear; in other words, all imperfection. "The ultimate
development of the ideal man is logically certain--as certain as any
conclusion in which we place the most implicit faith; for instance, that
all men will die." Here is the theory of perfectibility asserted, on new
grounds, with a confidence not less assured than that of Condorcet or
Godwin.
Progress then is not an accident, but a necessity. Civilisation is a
part of nature, being a development of man's latent capabilities under
the action of favourable circumstances which were certain at some time
or other to occur. Here Spencer's argument assumes a final cause. The
ultimate purpose of creation, he asserts, is to produce the greatest
amount of happiness, and to fulfil this aim it is necessary that each
member of the race should possess faculties enabling him to experience
the highest enjoyment of life, yet in such a way as not to diminish the
power of others to receive like satisfaction. Beings thus constituted
cannot multiply in a world tenanted by inferior creatures; these,
therefore, must be dispossessed to make room; and to dispossess them
aboriginal man must have an inferior constitution to begin with; he
must be predatory, he must have the desire to kill. In general, given
an unsubdued earth, and the human being "appointed" to overspread and
occupy it, then, the laws of life being what they are, no other series
of changes than that which has actually occurred could have occurred.
The argument might be put in a form free from the assumption of a final
cause, and without introducing the conception of a divine Providence
which in this work Spencer adopted, though in his later philosophy it
was superseded by the conception of the Unknowable existing behind all
phenomena. But the ROLE of the Divine ruler is simply to set in motion
immutable forces to realise his design. "In the moral as in the material
world accumulated evidence is gradually generating the conviction that
events are not at bottom fortuitous, but that they are wrought out in a
certain inevitable way by unchanging forces."
The optimism of Spencer's view could not be surpassed. "After patient
study," he writes, "this chaos of phenomena into the midst of which
he [man] was born has begun to generalise itself to him"; instead of
confusion he begins to discern "the dim outlines of a gigantic plan. No
accidents, no chance, but everywhere order and completeness One by one
exceptions vanish, and all becomes systematic."
Always towards perfection is the mighty movement--towards a complete
development and a more unmixed good; subordinating in its universality
all petty irregularities and fallings back, as the curvature of the
earth subordinates mountains and valleys. Even in evils the student
learns to recognise only a struggling beneficence. But above all he is
struck with the inherent sufficingness of things.
But the movement towards harmony, the elimination of evil, will not be
effected by idealists imposing their constructions upon the world or
by authoritarian governments. It means gradual adaptation, gradual
psychological change, and its life is individual liberty. It proceeds by
the give and take of opposed opinions. Guizot had said, "Progress, and
at the same time resistance." And Spencer conceives that resistance is
beneficial, so long as it comes from those who honestly think that
the institutions they defend are really the best and the proposed
innovations absolutely wrong.
It will be observed that Spencer's doctrine of perfectibility rests on
an entirely different basis from the doctrine of the eighteenth century.
It is one thing to deduce it from an abstract psychology which
holds that human nature is unresistingly plastic in the hands of the
legislator and the instructor. It is another to argue that human nature
is subject to the general law of change, and that the process by which
it slowly but continuously tends to adapt itself more and more to the
conditions of social life--children inheriting the acquired aptitudes
of their parents--points to an ultimate harmony. Here profitable
legislation and education are auxiliary to the process of unconscious
adaptation, and respond to the psychological changes in the community,
changes which reveal themselves in public opinion.
3.
During the following ten years Spencer was investigating the general
laws of evolution and planning his Synthetic Philosophy which was to
explain the development of the universe. [Footnote: In an article on
"Progress: its Law and Cause," in the Westminster Review, April 1857,
Spencer explained that social progress, rightly understood, is not the
increase of material conveniences or widening freedom of action,
but changes of structure in the social organism which entail such
consequences, and proceeded to show that the growth of the individual
organism and the growth of civilisation obey the same law of advance
from homogeneity to heterogeneity of structure. Here he used progress
in a neutral sense; but recognising that a word is required which has no
teleological implications (Autobiography, i. 500), he adopted evolution
six months later in an article on "Transcendental Physiology" (National
Review, Oct. 1857). In his study of organic laws Spencer was indirectly
influenced by the ideas of Schelling through von Baer.] He aimed at
showing that laws of change are discoverable which control all phenomena
alike, inorganic, biological, psychical, and social. In the light of
this hypothesis the actual progression of humanity is established as a
necessary fact, a sequel of the general cosmic movement and governed
by the same principles; and, if that progression is shown to involve
increasing happiness, the theory of Progress is established. The first
section of the work, FIRST PRINCIPLES, appeared in 1862. The BIOLOGY,
the PSYCHOLOGY, and finally the SOCIOLOGY, followed during the next
twenty years; and the synthesis of the world-process which these volumes
lucidly and persuasively developed, probably did more than any other
work, at least in England, both to drive home the significance of the
doctrine of evolution and to raise the doctrine of Progress to the
rank of a commonplace truth in popular estimation, an axiom to which
political rhetoric might effectively appeal.
Many of those who were allured by Spencer's gigantic synthesis hardly
realised that his theory of social evolution, of the gradual psychical
improvement of the race, depends upon the validity of the assumption
that parents transmit to their children faculties and aptitudes which
they have themselves acquired. On this question experts notoriously
differ. Some day it will probably be definitely decided, and perhaps in
Spencer's favour. But the theory of continuous psychical improvement
by a process of nature encounters an obvious difficulty, which did not
escape some critics of Spencer, in the prominent fact of history that
every great civilisation of the past progressed to a point at which
instead of advancing further it stood still and declined, to become
the prey of younger societies, or, if it survived, to stagnate. Arrest,
decadence, stagnation has been the rule. It is not easy to reconcile
this phenomenon with the theory of mental improvement.
The receptive attitude of the public towards such a philosophy as
Spencer's had been made possible by Darwin's discoveries, which were
reinforced by the growing science of palaeontology and the accumulating
material evidence of the great antiquity of man. By the simultaneous
advances of geology and biology man's perspective in time was
revolutionised, just as the Copernican astronomy had revolutionised his
perspective in space. Many thoughtful and many thoughtless people were
ready to discern--as Huxley suggested--in man's "long progress through
the past, a reasonable ground of faith in his attainment of a nobler
future." and Winwood Reade, a young African traveller, exhibited it in
a vivid book as a long-drawn-out martyrdom. But he was a disciple of
Spencer, and his hopes for the future were as bright as his picture
of the past was dark. THE MARTYRDOM OF MAN, published in 1872, was so
widely read that it reached an eighth edition twelve years later,
and may be counted as one of the agencies which popularised Spencer's
optimism.
That optimism was not endorsed by all the contemporary leaders of
thought. Lotze had asserted emphatically in 1864 that "human nature will
not change," and afterwards he saw no reason to alter his conviction.
Never one fold and one shepherd, never one uniform culture for all
mankind, never universal nobleness. Our virtue and happiness can only
flourish amid an active conflict with wrong. If every stumbling-block
were smoothed away, men would no longer be like men, but like a flock
of innocent brutes, feeding on good things provided by nature as at the
very beginning of their course. [Footnote: Microcosmus, Bk. vii. 5
ad fin. (Eng. trans. p. 300). The first German edition (three vols.)
appeared in 1856-64, the third, from which the English translation
was made, in 1876. Lotze was optimistic as to the durability of modern
civilisation: "No one will profess to foreknow the future, but as far
as men may judge it seems that in our days there arc greater safeguards
than there were in antiquity against unjustifiable excesses and against
the external forces which might endanger the continued existence of
civilisation."]
But even if we reject with Spencer the old dictum, endorsed by Lotze as
by Fontenelle, that human nature is immutable, the dictum of ultimate
harmony encounters the following objection. "If the social environment
were stable," it is easy to argue, "it could be admitted that man's
nature, variable EX HYPOTHESI, could gradually adapt itself to it,
and that finally a definite equilibrium would be established. But the
environment is continually changing as the consequence of man's very
efforts to adapt himself; every step he takes to harmonise his needs
and his conditions produces a new discord and confronts him with a
new problem. In other words, there is no reason to believe that the
reciprocal process which goes on in the growth of society between men's
natures and the environment they are continually modifying will ever
reach an equilibrium, or even that, as the character of the discords
changes, the suffering which they cause diminishes."
In fact, upon the neutral fact of evolution a theory of pessimism may
be built up as speciously as a theory of optimism. And such a theory was
built up with great power and ability by the German philosopher E. von
Hartmann, whose PHILOSOPHY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS appeared in 1869. Leaving
aside his metaphysics and his grotesque theory of the destiny of the
universe, we see here and in his subsequent works how plausibly
a convinced evolutionist could revive the view of Rousseau that
civilisation and happiness are mutually antagonistic, and that Progress
means an increase of misery.
Huxley himself, [Footnote: See Agnosticism in Nineteenth Century (Feb.
1889); Government: Anarchy or Regimentation, ib. (May 1890); Essays on
Evolution and Ethics (1894).] one of the most eminent interpreters
of the doctrine of evolution, did not, in his late years at least,
entertain very sanguine views of mankind. "I know of no study which is
so saddening as that of the evolution of humanity as it is set forth
in the annals of history.... Man is a brute, only more intelligent than
other brutes"; and "even the best of modern civilisations appears to
me to exhibit a condition of mankind which neither embodies any worthy
ideal nor even possesses the merit of stability." There may be some hope
of a large improvement, but otherwise he would "welcome a kindly comet
to sweep the whole affair away." And he came to the final conclusion
that such an improvement could only set in by deliberately resisting,
instead of co-operating with, the processes of nature. "Social
progress means the checking of the cosmic process at every step and the
substitution for it of another which may be called the ethical process."
[Footnote: Huxley considers progress exclusively from an ethical, not
from an eudaemonic point of view.] How in a few centuries can man hope
to gain the mastery over the cosmic process which has been at work for
millions of years? "The theory of evolution encourages no millennial
anticipations."
I have quoted these views to illustrate that evolution lends itself to
a pessimistic as well as to an optimistic interpretation. The question
whether it leads in a desirable direction or not is answered according
to the temperament of the inquirer. In an age of prosperity and
self-complacency the affirmative answer was readily received, and the
term evolution attracted to itself in common speech the implications of
value which belong to Progress.
It may be noticed that the self-complacency of the age was promoted by
the popularisation of scientific knowledge. A rapidly growing demand
(especially in England) for books and lectures, making the results of
science accessible and interesting to the lay public, is a remarkable
feature of the second half of the nineteenth century; and to supply this
demand was a remunerative enterprise. This popular literature explaining
the wonders of the physical world was at the same time subtly flushing
the imaginations of men with the consciousness that they were living in
an era which, in itself vastly superior to any age of the past, need
be burdened by no fear of decline or catastrophe, but trusting in the
boundless resources of science might securely defy fate.
4.
[It was said in 1881 by an American writer (who strongly dissented from
Spencer's theory) that the current view was "fatalistic." See Henry
George, Progress and Poverty. But it may be doubted whether those of the
general public who optimistically accepted evolution without going very
deeply into the question really believed that the future of man is taken
entirely out of his hands and is determined exclusively by the nature
of the cosmic process. Bagehot was a writer who had a good deal of
influence in his day; and in Physics and Politics (1872), where he
discusses Progress, there is no suggestion of fatalism. In France, the
chief philosophical writers who accepted Progress as a fact protested
against a fatalistic interpretation (Renouvier, Cournot, Caro; and cf. L.
Carrau's article on Progress in the Revue des deux Mondes (Oct. 1875)).
Progress was discussed by Fiske in his Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy
(1874), vol. ii. 192 sqq. For him (p. 201) "the fundamental
characteristic of social progress is the continuous weakening of
selfishness and the continuous strengthening of sympathy."]
Thus in the seventies and eighties of the last century the idea of
Progress was becoming a general article of faith. Some might hold it
in the fatalistic form that humanity moves in a desirable direction,
whatever men do or may leave undone; others might believe that the
future will depend largely on our own conscious efforts, but that there
is nothing in the nature of things to disappoint the prospect of steady
and indefinite advance. The majority did not inquire too curiously
into such points of doctrine, but received it in a vague sense as a
comfortable addition to their convictions. But it became a part of the
general mental outlook of educated people.
When Mr. Frederic Harrison delivered in 1889 at Manchester an eloquent
discourse on the "New Era," in which the dominant note is "the faith in
human progress in lieu of celestial rewards of the separate soul,"
his general argument could appeal to immensely wider circles than the
Positivists whom he was specially addressing.
The dogma--for a dogma it remains, in spite of the confidence of Comte
or of Spencer that he had made it a scientific hypothesis--has produced
an important ethical principle. Consideration for posterity has
throughout history operated as a motive of conduct, but feebly,
occasionally, and in a very limited sense. With the doctrine of Progress
it assumes, logically, a preponderating importance; for the centre of
interest is transferred to the life of future generations who are to
enjoy conditions of happiness denied to us, but which our labours and
sufferings are to help to bring about. If the doctrine is held in an
extreme fatalistic form, then our duty is to resign ourselves cheerfully
to sacrifices for the sake of unknown descendants, just as ordinary
altruism enjoins the cheerful acceptance of sacrifices for the sake of
living fellow-creatures. Winwood Reade indicated this when he wrote,
"Our own prosperity is founded on the agonies of the past. Is it
therefore unjust that we also should suffer for the benefit of those
who are to come?" But if it is held that each generation can by its own
deliberate acts determine for good or evil the destinies of the race,
then our duties towards others reach out through time as well as through
space, and our contemporaries are only a negligible fraction of the
"neighbours" to whom we owe obligations. The ethical end may still be
formulated, with the Utilitarians, as the greatest happiness of the
greatest number; only the greatest number includes, as Kidd observed,
"the members of generations yet unborn or unthought of." This extension
of the moral code, if it is not yet conspicuous in treatises on Ethics,
has in late years been obtaining recognition in practice.
5.
Within the last forty years nearly every civilised country has produced
a large literature on social science, in which indefinite Progress is
generally assumed as an axiom. But the "law" whose investigation Kant
designated as the task for a Newton, which Saint-Simon and Comte did
not find, and to which Spencer's evolutionary formula would stand in
the same relation as it stands to the law of gravitation, remains
still undiscovered. To examine or even glance at this literature, or
to speculate how theories of Progress may be modified by recent
philosophical speculation, lies beyond the scope of this volume, which
is only concerned with tracing the origin of the idea and its growth up
to the time when it became a current creed.
Looking back on the course of the inquiry, we note how the history of
the idea has been connected with the growth of modern science, with the
growth of rationalism, and with the struggle for political and religious
liberty. The precursors (Bodin and Bacon) lived at a time when the world
was consciously emancipating itself from the authority of tradition and
it was being discovered that liberty is a difficult theoretical problem.
The idea took definite shape in France when the old scheme of the
universe had been shattered by the victory of the new astronomy and the
prestige of Providence, CUNCTA SUPERCILIO MOUENTIS, was paling before
the majesty of the immutable laws of nature. There began a slow but
steady reinstatement of the kingdom of this world. The otherworldly
dreams of theologians,
ceux qui reniaient la terre pour patrie,
which had ruled so long lost their power, and men's earthly home again
insinuated itself into their affections, but with the new hope of its
becoming a place fit for reasonable beings to live in. We have seen how
the belief that our race is travelling towards earthly happiness was
propagated by some eminent thinkers, as well as by some "not very
fortunate persons who had a good deal of time on their hands." And
all these high-priests and incense-bearers to whom the creed owes its
success were rationalists, from the author of the Histoire des oracles
to the philosopher of the Unknowable.
EPILOGUE
In achieving its ascendency and unfolding its meaning, the Idea of
Progress had to overcome a psychological obstacle which may be described
as THE ILLUSION OF FINALITY.
It is quite easy to fancy a state of society, vastly different from
ours, existing in some unknown place like heaven; it is much more
difficult to realise as a fact that the order of things with which we
are familiar has so little stability that our actual descendants may
be born into a world as different from ours as ours is from that of our
ancestors of the pleistocene age.
The illusion of finality is strong. The men of the Middle Ages would
have found it hard to imagine that a time was not far off in which the
Last Judgement would have ceased to arouse any emotional interest.
In the sphere of speculation Hegel, and even Comte, illustrate this
psychological limitation: they did not recognise that their own
systems could not be final any more than the system of Aristotle or
of Descartes. It is science, perhaps, more than anything else--the
wonderful history of science in the last hundred years--that has helped
us to transcend this illusion.
But if we accept the reasonings on which the dogma of Progress is based,
must we not carry them to their full conclusion? In escaping from the
illusion of finality, is it legitimate to exempt that dogma itself?
Must not it, too, submit to its own negation of finality? Will not that
process of change, for which Progress is the optimistic name, compel
"Progress" too to fall from the commanding position in which it is now,
with apparent security, enthroned? [words in Greek]... A day will come,
in the revolution of centuries, when a new idea will usurp its place
as the directing idea of humanity. Another star, unnoticed now or
invisible, will climb up the intellectual heaven, and human emotions
will react to its influence, human plans respond to its guidance. It
will be the criterion by which Progress and all other ideas will be
judged. And it too will have its successor.
In other words, does not Progress itself suggest that its value as a
doctrine is only relative, corresponding to a certain not very advanced
stage of civilisation; just as Providence, in its day, was an idea of
relative value, corresponding to a stage somewhat less advanced? Or
will it be said that this argument is merely a disconcerting trick of
dialectic played under cover of the darkness in which the issue of the
future is safely hidden by Horace's prudent god?
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Idea of Progress, by J. B. Bury
*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE IDEA OF PROGRESS ***
***** This file should be named 4557.txt or 4557.zip *****
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
http://www.gutenberg.org/4/5/5/4557/
Produced by Steve Harris, Charles Franks and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team
Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
will be renamed.
Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules,
set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project
Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you
do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is
subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
redistribution.
*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
http://gutenberg.org/license).
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the
collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an
individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in
a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check
the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning
the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked
to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg-tm License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or
distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
that
- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is
owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments
must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License. You must require such a user to return or
destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
Project Gutenberg-tm works.
- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
of receipt of the work.
- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the
Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with
the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy
is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any
provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists
because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need, are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
http://pglaf.org/fundraising. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
throughout numerous locations. Its business office is located at
809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
[email protected]. Email contact links and up to date contact
information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
page at http://pglaf.org
For additional contact information:
Dr. Gregory B. Newby
Chief Executive and Director
[email protected]
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To
SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
particular state visit http://pglaf.org
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works.
Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
with anyone. For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily
keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
http://www.gutenberg.org
This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
