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 l00 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