Progress and History Part 1

Progress and History.

by Various.

PREFACE

This volume is a sequel to _The Unity of Western Civilization_ published last year and arose in the same way, from a course of lectures given at the Woodbrooke Settlement, Birmingham.

The former book attempted to describe some of the permanent unifying factors which hold our Western civilization together in spite of such catastrophic divisions as the present war. This book attempts to show these forces in growth. The former aimed rather at a statical, the present at a dynamical view of the same problem. Both are historical in spirit.

It is hoped that these courses may serve as an introduction to a series of cognate studies, of which clearly both the supply and the scope are infinite, for under the general conception of 'Progress in Unity' all great human topics might be embraced. One subject has been suggested for early treatment which would have especial interest at the present time, viz. 'Recent Progress in European Thought'. We are by the war brought more closely than before into contact with other nations of Europe who are pursuing with inevitable differences the same main lines of evolution. To indicate these in general, with stress on the factor of betterment, is the aim of the present volume.

F.S.M.

I

THE IDEA OF PROGRESS

F. S. MARVIN

The editor of these essays was busy in the autumn of last year collating the opinions attached by different people to the word 'progress'. One Sunday afternoon he happened to be walking with two friends in Oxford, one a professor of philosophy, the other a lady. The professor of philosophy declared that to him human progress must always mean primarily the increase of knowledge; the editor urged the increase of power as its most characteristic feature, but the lady added at once that to her progress had always meant, and could only mean, increase in our appreciation of the humanity of others.

The first two thoughts, harmonized and directed by the third, may be taken to cover the whole field, and this volume to be merely a commentary upon them. What we have to consider is, when and how this idea of progress, as a general thing affecting mankind as a whole, first appeared in the world, how far it has been realized in history, and how far it gives us any guidance and hope for the future. In the midst of a catastrophe which appears at first sight to be a deadly blow to the ideal, such an inquiry has a special interest and may have some permanent value.

Words are the thought of ages crystallized, or rather embodied with a constantly growing soul. The word 'Progress', like the word 'Humanity', is one of the most significant. It is a Latin word, not used in its current abstract sense until after the Roman incorporation of the Mediterranean world. It contains Greek thought summed up and applied by Roman minds. Many of the earlier Greek thinkers, Xenophanes and Empedocles as well as Plato and Aristotle, had thought and spoken of a steady process in things, including man himself, from lower to higher forms; but the first writer who expounds the notion with sufficient breadth of view and sufficiently accurate and concrete observation to provide a preliminary sketch, was the great Roman poet who attributed all the best that was in him to the Greeks and yet has given us a highly original picture of the upward tendency of the world and of human society upon it. He, too, so far as one can discover, was the first to use the word 'progress' in the sense of our inquiry. The pa.s.sage in Lucretius at the end of his fifth book on the Nature of Things is so true and brilliant and antic.i.p.ates so many points in later thought that it is worth quoting at some length, and the poet's close relation with Cicero, the typical Greco-Roman thinker, gives his ideas the more weight as an historical doc.u.ment.

He begins by describing a struggle for existence in which the less well-adapted creatures died off, those who wanted either the power to protect themselves or the means of adapting themselves to the purposes of man. In this stage, however, man was a hardier creature than he afterwards became. He lived like the beasts of the field and was ignorant of tillage or fire or clothes or houses. He had no laws or government or marriage, and though he did not fear the dark, he feared the real danger of fiercer beasts. Men often died a miserable death, but not in mult.i.tudes on a single day as they do now by battle or shipwreck.

The next stage sees huts and skins and fire which softened their bodies, and marriage and the ties of family which softened their tempers. And tribes began to make treaties of alliance with other tribes.

Speech arose from the need which all creatures feel to exercise their natural powers, just as the calf will b.u.t.t before his horns protrude.

Men began to apply different sounds to denote different things, just as brute beasts will do to express different pa.s.sions, as any one must have noticed in the cases of dogs and horses and birds. No one man set out to invent speech.

Fire was first learnt from lightning and the friction of trees, and cooking from the softening and ripening of things by the sun.

Then men of genius invented improved methods of life, the building of cities and private property in lands and cattle. But gold gave power to the wealthy and destroyed the sense of contentment in simple happiness.

It must always be so whenever men allow themselves to become the slaves of things which should be their dependants and instruments.

They began to believe in and worship G.o.ds, because they saw in dreams shapes of preterhuman strength and beauty and deemed them immortal; and as they noted the changes of the seasons and all the wonders of the heavens, they placed their G.o.ds there and feared them when they spoke in the thunder.

Metals were discovered through the burning of the woods, which caused the ores to run. Copper and bra.s.s came first and were rated above gold and silver. And then the metals took the place of hands, nails, teeth, and clubs, which had been men's earliest arms and tools. Weaving followed the discovery of the use of iron.

Sowing, planting, and grafting were learnt from nature herself, and gradually the cultivation of the soil was carried farther and farther up the hills.

Men learnt to sing from the birds, and to blow on pipes from the whistling of the zephyr through the reeds: and those simple tunes gave as much rustic jollity as our more elaborate tunes do now.

Then, in a summary pa.s.sage at the end, Lucretius enumerates all the chief discoveries which men have made in the age-long process--ships, agriculture, walled cities, laws, roads, clothes, songs, pictures, statues, and all the pleasures of life--and adds, 'these things practice and the experience of the unresting mind have taught mankind gradually as they have progressed from point to point'.[1]

It is the first definition and use of the word in literature. If we accept it as a typical presentation of the Greco-Roman view, seen by a man of exceptional genius and insight at the climax of the period, there are two or three points which must arrest our attention. Lucretius is thinking mainly of progress in the arts, and especially of the arts as they affect man's happiness. There is no mention of increase in knowledge or in love. As in the famous parallel pa.s.sage in Sophocles'

_Antigone_, it is man's strength and skill which most impressed the poet, and his skill especially as exhibited in the arts. Compared with what we shall see as typical utterances of later times, it is an external view of the subject. The absence of love as an element of progress carries with it the absence of the idea of humanity. There is no conception here, nor anywhere in cla.s.sical thought before the Stoics, of a world-wide Being which has contributed to the advance and should share fully in its fruits. Still less do we find any hint of the possibilities of an infinite progress. The moral, on the contrary, is that we should limit our desires, banish disturbing thoughts, and settle down to a quiet and sensible enjoyment of the good things that advancing skill has provided for us. It is, of course, true that thoughts can be found in individual writers, especially in Plato and Aristotle, which would largely modify this view. Yet it can hardly be questioned that Lucretius here represents the prevalent tone of thoughtful men of his day. They had begun to realize the fact of human progress, but envisaged it, as was natural in a first view, mainly on the external side, and, above all, had no conception of its infinite possibilities.

When we turn to typical utterances of the next great age in history the contrast is striking. Catholic doctrine had absorbed much that was congenial to it from the Stoics, from Plato and Aristotle, but it added a thing that was new in the world, a pa.s.sionate love and an overpowering desire for personal moral improvement. This is so clear in the greatest figures of the Middle Ages, men such as St. Bernard and St. Francis, and it is so unlike anything that we know in the world before, that we are justified in treating it as characteristic of the age. To some of us, indeed, it will appear as the most important element in the general notion of progress which we are tracing. It so appeared to Comte.[2] Of numberless pa.s.sages that might be quoted from fathers and doctors of the Church, a few words from Nicholas of Cusa must suffice. He was a divine of the early fifteenth century, true to the faith, but anxious to improve the discipline of the Church. To him progress took an entirely spiritual form. 'To be able to understand more and more without end is the type of eternal wisdom.... Let a man desire to understand better what he does understand and to love more what he does love and the whole world will not satisfy him.'

Here is a point of view so different from the last that we find some difficulty in fitting it into the same scheme of things. Yet both are essential elements in Western civilization; both have been developed by the operations of similar forces in the world civilized and incorporated by Greece and Rome.

The Catholic divine looks entirely inward for his idea of progress, and his conception contains elements of real and permanent validity, of which our present notions are full. His eyes are turned towards the future and there is no limit to his vision. And though the progress contemplated is within the soul of the individual believer, it rests on the two fundamental principles of knowledge and love which are both essentially social. The believer may isolate himself from the world to develop his higher nature, but the knowledge and the love which he carries with him into his solitude are themselves fruits of that intercourse with his fellows from which an exclusive religious ideal temporarily cuts him off.

Nor must we forget that Catholic doctrine and discipline, though aiming at this perfection of the individual rather than of the race, was embodied in an organization which carried farther than the Roman Empire the idea of a united civilization and furnished to many thinkers, Bossuet as well as Dante, a first sketch of the progress of mankind.

But it is clear that this construction was provisional only, either on the side of personal belief and practice, or of ecclesiastical organization; provisional, that is, if we are looking for real unity in the mind of mankind. For we need a doctrine, a scheme of knowledge, into which all that we discover about the world and our own nature may find its place; we need principles of action which will guide us in attaining a state of society more congruent with our knowledge of the possibilities of the world and human nature, more thoroughly inspired by human love, love of man for man as a being living his span of life here and now, under conditions which call for a concentration of skill and effort to realize the best. The breaking of the old Catholic synthesis, narrow but admirable within its limits, took place at what we call the Renascence and Reformation; the linking up of a new one is the task of our own and many later generations. Let it not be thought that such a change involves the destruction of any vital element in the idea of progress already achieved; if true and vital, every element must survive. But it does involve an acceptance of the fact that progress, or humanity, or the evolution of the divine within us--however we prefer to phrase it--is a larger thing than any one organization or any one set of carefully harmonized doctrines. The truth, and the organ in which we enshrine it, must grow with the human minds who are collectively producing it. The new unity is itself progress.

It must give us confidence in facing such a prospect to observe that at each remove from the first appearance of the idea of progress in the world man's use of the word has carried more meaning and, though sometimes quieter in tone, as in recent times, is better grounded in the facts of life and history. Such an advance in our conceptions took place after the Renascence. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the art and science of the ancient world had been recovered, the word and the idea of progress started on a fresh course of unexampled vigour.

The lines were closer to those of the pre-Christian than of the Catholic world, but it would be by no means true to call them pagan. When Bacon and Descartes begin to sound the modern note of progress, they think primarily of an advance in the arts and sciences, but there is a spiritual and human side to their ideal which could not be really paralleled in cla.s.sical thought. The Spirit of Man is now invoked, and this, not in the sense of an elite, the builders of the Greek State or the rulers of the Roman Empire, but of mankind as a whole. This is Christian, or perhaps we should say, Stoical-Christian. Thus Descartes tells us that he looks to science to furnish us ultimately with an art which will make us 'masters and possessors of nature ... and this not solely for the pleasure of enjoying with ease the good things of the world, but princ.i.p.ally for the preservation and improvement of human health which is both the foundation of all other goods and the means of strengthening the spirit itself' ('Discours de la Methode'). It is significant that the two words Progress and Humanity come into use in their modern sense side by side. The latter is the basis and the ideal of the former.

But the new thing which had come into the world at this point, and gives a fresh impulse and content to the idea of progress, is the development of science. The Greeks had founded it and, as we shall see in a later chapter, it was the recovery of the Greek thread which gave the moderns their clue. But no one before the sixteenth century, before the marvels revealed by Galileo's telescope and knit up by Newton's synthetic genius, could have conceived the visions of human regeneration by science which light up the pioneers of the seventeenth century and are the gospel of the eighteenth.

We turn to the eighteenth century, and primarily to the school of thinkers called 'philosophes' in France, for the fullest and most enthusiastic statement of progress as a gospel. It is, of course, European, as all the greatest advances of thought have been; and German thinkers, as well as English, stand with the French in the vanguard.

Kant and Herder, from different points of view, thought it out perhaps more thoroughly than any one else at that time; but the French believed in it as a nation and were willing to stake their lives and souls on the belief. Thus Turgot, before the Revolution, declared that 'the total ma.s.s of the human race marches continually though sometimes slowly towards an ever-increasing perfection'. And Condorcet, in the midst of the Revolution, while himself under its ban, painted a picture 'of the human race, freed from its chains, and marching with a firm tread on the road of truth and virtue and happiness'.

Here is the gospel in its purest and simplest form, and when we are inclined to think that the crimes and the partial failure of the Revolution discredit its principles, it is well to remember that the man who believed in them most systematically, expounded his belief with perfect calmness and confidence as he lay under sentence of death from a revolutionary tribunal.

If this enthusiasm is madness, we might all well wish to be possessed.

The true line of criticism is different. At the Revolution, as before at the Renascence, the leaders of the new movement could not see all their debt to the past. Like the Renascence, they idealized certain features in cla.s.sical antiquity, but they had not yet gained the notion of historical continuity; above all, they did not realize the value of the religious development of the Middle Ages. It was left for the nineteenth century and for us, its successors, to attempt the supreme task of seeing things steadily and seeing them whole.

For in spite of the capital contributions of the Renascence to progress and the idea of progress, especially by its scientific constructions, it is undeniable that a bias was then given to the course of Western civilization from which it has suffered ever since, and which it is now our urgent duty to correct. Two aspects of this may be specified. The old international unity which Rome had achieved, at least superficially, in the Mediterranean world, and which the Catholic Church had extended and deepened, was broken up in favour of a system of sovereign and independent states controlling religion and influencing education on lines calculated to strengthen the national forces and the national forces alone. They even believed that, at any rate in trade and commerce, the interests of these independent states were rather rival than co-operative. The Revolution struck the note of human a.s.sociation clearly enough, but we have not yet learnt to set all our other tunes in accord with it. Another, and perhaps even more fundamental, weakness of the Renascence tradition was the stress it laid on the material, mechanical, external side of progress. On the one hand, the spiritual side of life tended to be identified with that system of thought and discipline which had been so rudely disrupted. On the other hand, the new advance in science brought quickly after it a corresponding growth of wealth and mechanical inventions and material comforts. The spirit of man was for the time impeded and half suffocated by its own productions.

The present war seems to many of us the supreme struggle of our better nature to gain the mastery over these obstructions, and freedom for its proper growth.

Now if this a.n.a.lysis be anywhere near the truth, it is clear that our task for the future is one of synthesis on the lines of social progress.

Knowledge, power, wealth, increase of skill, increase of health, we have them all in growing measure, and Mr. Clutton Brock will tell us in his chapter in this volume that we may be able by an exercise of will to achieve even a new renascence in art. But we certainly do not yet possess these things fairly distributed or in harmony of mind.

The connexion therefore between progress as we now envisage it, and unity, both in ourselves and in society at large, becomes apparent. At each of the previous great moments in the history of the West development has been secured by emphasis on one side of our nature at the expense of the rest. Visions of mankind in common progress have flashed on individual thinkers, a Roman Emperor, a Catholic Schoolman, a Revolutionary prophet. But the thing achieved has been one-sided, and the needed correction has been given by another movement more one-sided still. The greatest hope of the present day lies in the fact that in all branches of life, in government as well as in philosophy, in science as in social reform, in religion and in international politics, men are now striving with determination to bind the threads together.

There is no necessary opposition between the rival forces which have so often led to conflict. In all our controversies harmony can be reached and has often been reached by the application of patience, knowledge, and goodwill. And goodwill implies here the readiness to submit the particular issue to the arbitration of the general good. The international question has been so fully canva.s.sed in these days that it would be superfluous to discuss it here. The moral is obvious, and abundant cases throughout the world ill.u.s.trate the truth that well-organized nationalities contain in themselves nothing contrary to the ideal of international peace.[3] Nor is the still more persistent and universal opposition of capital and labour really less amenable to reconciliation, because in this case also the two factors in the problem are equally necessary to social progress, and we shall not enter on the various practical solutions--co-operation, co-partnership, partial state-socialism, &c.--which have been proposed for a problem which no one believes to be insoluble. The conflict in our own souls between the things of matter and sense and the life of the spirit, is more closely germane to the present argument, because ultimately this has to be resolved, if not in every mind yet in the dominant mind of Europe, before the more practical questions can be generally settled. Harmony here is at the root of a sound idea of progress.

When the concluding chapters of this volume are reached it will be seen how fully the recent developments both in science and philosophy corroborate the line which is here suggested for the reconciliation of conflicts and the establishment of a stronger and more coherent notion of what we may rightly pursue as progress. For both in science and still more in philosophy attention is being more and more closely concentrated on the meaning of life itself, which science approaches by way of its physical concomitants, and philosophy from the point of view of consciousness. And while science has been a.n.a.lysing the characteristics of a living organism, philosophy finds in our consciousness just that element of community with others which an organic conception of progress demands. The only progress of which we can be certain, the philosopher tells us, is progress in our own consciousness, which becomes constantly fuller, more knowing, and more social, as time unfolds. This, he tells us, must endure, though the storms of pa.s.sion and nature may fall upon us.

On such a firm basis we would all gladly build our faith. No unity can be perfect except that which we achieve in our own souls, and no progress can be relied on except that which we can know within, and can develop from, our own consciousness and our own powers. But we cannot rest in this. We are bound to look outside our own consciousness for some objective correspondence to that progress which our own nature craves; and history supplies this evidence. It is from history that we derive the first idea and the acc.u.mulating proofs of the reality of progress. Lucretius's first sketch is really his summary of social history up to that point. The Catholic thinker had a wider scope. He was able to see that the whole course of Greco-Roman civilization was, from his point of view, a preparation for the Church which had the care of the spiritual life of man while on earth. And in the next stage, that in which we now live, we see all the interests of life taken back again into the completeness of human progress, and can trace that complete being, labouring slowly but unmistakably to a higher state, outside us in the world, as well as within our own consciousness, which is ready to expand if we will give it range.

On such lines we may sketch the historical aspect of progress on which the personal is based; and it is of the utmost importance to keep the two aspects before us concurrently, because reliance on the growing fullness of the individual life to the neglect of the social evolution is likely to empty that life itself of its true content, to leave the self-centred visionary absorbed in the contemplation of some ideal perfection within himself, while the world outside him from which he ultimately derives his notions, is toiling and suffering from the want of those very elements which he is best able to supply.

The succeeding chapters of this book will, it is hoped, supply some evidence of the concrete reality of progress, as well as of the tendency to greater coherence and purity in the ideal itself. It would have been easy to acc.u.mulate evidence; some sides of life are hardly touched on at all. The collective and the intellectual sides are fully dealt with both in this and in the volume on _The Unity of Western Civilization_. But if we make our survey over a sufficient s.p.a.ce, coming down especially to our own days, our conclusion as to the advance made in the physical and moral well-being of mankind, will be hardly less emphatic. Our average lives are longer and continue to lengthen, and they are unquestionably spent with far less physical suffering than was generally the case at any previous period. We are bound to give full weight to this, however much we rightly deplore the deadening effect of monotonous and mechanical toil on so large a part of the population. And even for these the opportunities for a free and improving life are amazingly enlarged.

We groan and chafe at what remains to be done because of the unexampled size of the modern industrial populations with which we have to deal.

But we know in some points very definitely what we want, and we are now all persuaded with John Stuart Mill that the remedy is in our own hands, 'that all the great sources of human suffering are in a great degree, many of them entirely, conquerable by human care and effort.' This conviction is perhaps the greatest step of all that we have gained. In morality some pertinent and necessary questions are raised in Chap. VI, but the general progress would be doubted by very few who have had the opportunity of comparing the evidence as to any previous state of morals, say in the Middle Ages or in the Elizabethan age--the crown of the Renascence in England--with that of the present day. The capital advance in morality, which by itself would be sufficient to justify our thesis, is the increase in the consciousness and the obligation of the 'common weal', that conception of which Government, increasingly better organized, is the most striking practical realization. It has its drawback in the spread of what we feel as a debasing 'vulgarity', but the general balance is overwhelmingly on the side of good. And in all such discussions we are apt to allow far too little weight to the change which the New World, and especially the United States, has brought about. In matters of personal prosperity and a high general standard of intellectual and moral competence, what has been achieved there would outweigh a good deal of our Old World defects when we come to drawing up a world's balance-sheet.