The Idea of Progress Part 10

"One consideration especially that we ought never to lose from sight,"

says Diderot, "is that, if we ever banish a man, or the thinking and contemplative being, from above the surface of the earth, this pathetic and sublime spectacle of nature becomes no more than a scene of melancholy and silence... It is the presence of man that gives its interest to the existence of other beings... Why should we not make him a common centre?... Man is the single term from which we ought to set out." [Footnote: The pa.s.sage from Diderot's article Encyclopedie is given as translated by Morley, Diderot, i, 145.] Hence psychology, morals, the structure of society, were the subjects which riveted attention instead of the larger supra-human problems which had occupied Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibnitz. It mattered little whether the universe was the best that could be constructed; what mattered was the relation of man's own little world to his will and capacities.

Physical science was important only in so far as it could help social science and minister to the needs of man. The closest a.n.a.logy to this development of thought is not offered by the Renaissance, to which the description HUMANISTIC has been conventionally appropriated, but rather by the age of illumination in Greece in the latter half of the fifth century B.C., represented by Protagoras, Socrates, and others who turned from the ultimate problems of the cosmos, hitherto the main study of philosophers, to man, his nature and his works.

In this revised form of "anthropo-centrism" we see how the general movement of thought has instinctively adapted itself to the astronomical revolution. On the Ptolemaic system it was not incongruous or absurd that man, lord of the central domain in the universe, should regard himself as the most important cosmic creature. This is the view, implicit in the Christian scheme, which had been constructed on the old erroneous cosmology. When the true place of the earth was shown and man found himself in a tiny planet attached to one of innumerable solar worlds, his cosmic importance could no longer be maintained. He was reduced to the condition of an insect creeping on a "tas de boue," which Voltaire so vividly ill.u.s.trated in Micromegas. But man is resourceful; [words in Greek]. Displaced, along with his home, from the centre of things, he discovers a new means of restoring his self-importance; he interprets his humiliation as a deliverance. Finding himself in an insignificant island floating in the immensity of s.p.a.ce, he decides that he is at last master of his own destinies; he can fling away the old equipment of final causes, original sin, and the rest; he can construct his own chart and, bound by no cosmic scheme, he need take the universe into account only in so far as he judges it to be to his own profit. Or, if he is a philosopher, he may say that, after all, the universe for him is built out of his own sensations, and that by virtue of this relativity "anthropo-centrism" is restored in a new and more effective form.

Built out of his own sensations: for the philosophy of Locke was now triumphant in France. I have used the term Cartesianism to designate, not the metaphysical doctrines of Descartes (innate ideas, two substances, and the rest), but the great principles which survived the pa.s.sing of his metaphysical system--the supremacy of reason, and the immutability of natural laws, not subject to providential interventions.

These principles still controlled thought, but the particular views of Descartes on mental phenomena were superseded in France by the psychology of Locke, whose influence was established by Voltaire and Condillac. The doctrine that all our ideas are derived from the senses lay at the root of the whole theory of man and society, in the light of which the revolutionary thinkers, Diderot, Helvetius, and their fellows, criticised the existing order and exposed the reigning prejudices. This sensationalism (which went beyond what Locke himself had really meant) involved the strict relativity of knowledge and led at once to the old pragmatic doctrine of Protagoras, that man is the measure of all things.

And the spirit of the French philosophers of the eighteenth century was distinctly pragmatic. The advantage of man was their principle, and the value of speculation was judged by its definite service to humanity.

"The value and rights of truth are founded on its utility," which is "the unique measure of man's judgements," one thinker a.s.serts; another declares that "the useful circ.u.mscribes everything," l'utile circonscrit tout; another lays down that "to be virtuous is to be useful; to be vicious is to be useless or harmful; that is the sum of morality."

Helvetius, antic.i.p.ating Bentham, works out the theory that utility is the only possible basis of ethics. Bacon, the utilitarian, was extolled like Locke. [Footnote: The pa.s.sages quoted on utility are from d'Holbach, Systems de la nature, i. c. 12, p. 224; c. 15, p. 312; Diderot, De I'interpretation de la nature in OEuvres, ii. p. 13; Raynal, Histoire des deux Indes, vii. p. 416. The effectiveness of the teaching may be ill.u.s.trated from the Essay on Man, by Antoine Rivarol, whom Burke called the Tacitus of the Revolution. "The virtues are only virtues because they are useful to the human race." OEuvres choisis (ed. de Lescure), i. p. 211.] As, a hundred years before, his influence had inspired the foundation of the Royal Society, so now his name was invoked by the founders of the Encyclopaedia. [Footnote: See d'Alembert's tribute to him in the Discours preliminaire.]

Beneath all philosophical speculation there is an undercurrent of emotion, and in the French philosophers of the eighteenth century this emotional force was strong and even violent. They aimed at practical results. Their work was a calculated campaign to transform the principles and the spirit of governments and to destroy sacerdotalism.

The problem for the human race being to reach a state of felicity by its own powers, these thinkers believed that it was soluble by the gradual triumph of reason over prejudice and knowledge over ignorance. Violent revolution was far from their thoughts; by the diffusion of knowledge they hoped to create a public opinion which would compel governments to change the tenor of their laws and administration and make the happiness of the people their guiding principle. The optimistic confidence that man is perfectible, which means capable of indefinite improvement, inspired the movement as a whole, however greatly particular thinkers might differ in their views.

Belief in Progress was their sustaining faith, although, occupied by the immediate problems of amelioration, they left it rather vague and ill-defined. The word itself is seldom p.r.o.nounced in their writings. The idea is treated as subordinate to the other ideas in the midst of which it had grown up: Reason, Nature, Humanity, Illumination (lumieres). It has not yet entered upon an independent life of its own and received a distinct label, though it is already a vital force.

In reviewing the influences which were forming a new public opinion during the forty years before the Revolution, it is convenient for the present purpose to group together the thinkers (including Voltaire) a.s.sociated with the Encyclopaedia, who represented a critical and consciously aggressive force against traditional theories and existing inst.i.tutions. The constructive thinker Rousseau was not less aggressive, but he stands apart and opposed, by his hostility to modern civilisation. Thirdly, we must distinguish the school of Economists, also reformers and optimists, but of more conservative temper than the typical Encyclopaedists.

2.

The Encyclopaedia (1751-1765) has rightly been p.r.o.nounced the central work of the rationalistic movement which made the France of 1789 so different from the France of 1715. [Footnote: The general views which governed the work may be gathered from d'Alembert's introductory discourse and from Diderot's article Encyclopedie. An interesting sketch of the princ.i.p.al contributors will be found in Morley's Diderot, i.

chap. v. Another modern study of the Encyclopaedic movement is the monograph of L. Ducros, Les Encyclopidistes (1900). Helvetius has recently been the subject of a study by Albert Keim (Helvetius, sa vie et son oeuvre, 1907). Among other works which help the study of the speculations of this age from various points of view may be mentioned: Marius Roustan, Les Philosophes et la societe francaise au xviii siecle(1906); Espinas, La Philosophie sociale du xviii siecle et la Revolution (1898); Lichtenberger, Le Socialisme au xviii siecle(1895).

I have not mentioned in the text Boullanger (1722-1758), who contributed to the Encyclopaedia the article on Political Economy (which has nothing to do with economics but treats of ancient theocracies); the emphasis laid on his views on progress by Buchez (op. cit. i. III sqq.) is quite excessive.] It was the organised section of a vast propaganda, speculative and practical, carried on by men of the most various views, most of whom were a.s.sociated directly with it. As has well been observed, it did for the rationalism of the eighteenth century in France much what the Fortnightly Review, under the editorship of Mr. Morley (from 1868 to 1882) did for that of the nineteenth in England, as an organ for the penetrating criticism of traditional beliefs. If Diderot, who directed the Encyclopaedia with the a.s.sistance of d'Alembert the mathematician, had lived a hundred years later he would probably have edited a journal.

We saw that the "solidarity" of the sciences was one of the conceptions a.s.sociated with the theory of intellectual progress, and that the popularisation of knowledge was another. Both these conceptions inspired the Encyclopaedia, which was to gather up and concentrate the illumination of the modern age. It was to establish the lines of communication among all departments, "to enclose in the unity of a system the infinitely various branches of knowledge." And it was to be a library of popular instruction. But it was also intended to be an organ of propaganda. In the history of the intellectual revolution it is in some ways the successor of the Dictionary of Bayle, which, two generations before, collected the material of war to demolish traditional doctrines. The Encyclopaedia carried on the campaign against authority and superst.i.tion by indirect methods, but it was the work of men who were not sceptics like Bayle, but had ideals, positive purposes, and social hopes. They were not only confident in reason and in science, but most of them had also a more or less definite belief in the possibility of an advance of humanity towards perfection.

As one of their own band afterwards remarked, they were less occupied in enlarging the bounds of knowledge than in spreading the light and making war on prejudice. [Footnote: Condorcet, Esquisse, p. 206 (ed. 1822).]

The views of the individual contributors differed greatly, and they cannot be called a school, but they agreed so far in common tendencies that they were able to form a co-operative alliance.

The propaganda of which the Encyclopaedia was the centre was reinforced by the independent publications of some of the leading men who collaborated or were closely connected with their circle, notably those of Diderot himself, Baron d'Holbach, and Helvetius.

3.

The optimism of the Encyclopaedists was really based on an intense consciousness of the enlightenment of their own age. The progressiveness of knowledge was taken as axiomatic, but was there any guarantee that the light, now confined to small circles, could ever enlighten the world and regenerate mankind? They found the guarantee they required, not in an induction from the past experience of the race, but in an a priori theory: the indefinite malleability of human nature by education and inst.i.tutions. This had been, as we saw, a.s.sumed by the Abbe de Saint-Pierre. It pervaded the speculation of the age, and was formally deduced from the sensational psychology of Locke and Condillac. It was developed, in an extreme form, in the work of Helvetius, De l'esprit (1758).

In this book, which was to exert a large influence in England, Helvetius sought, among other things, to show that the science of morals is equivalent to the science of legislation, and that in a well-organised society all men are capable of rising to the highest point of mental development. Intellectual and moral inequalities between man and man arise entirely from differences in education and social circ.u.mstances.

Genius itself is not a gift of nature; the man of genius is a product of circ.u.mstances--social, not physical, for Helvetius rejects the influence of climate. It follows that if you change education and social inst.i.tutions you can change the character of men.

The error of Helvetius in ignoring the irremovable physical differences between individuals, the varieties of cerebral organisation, was at once pointed out by Diderot. This error, however, was not essential to the general theory of the immeasurable power of social inst.i.tutions over human character, and other thinkers did not fall into it. All alike, indeed, were blind to the factor of heredity. But the theory in its collective application contains a truth which nineteenth century critics, bia.s.sed by their studies in heredity, have been p.r.o.ne to overlook. The social inheritance of ideas and emotions to which the individual is submitted from infancy is more important than the tendencies physically transmitted from parent to child. The power of education and government in moulding the members of a society has recently been ill.u.s.trated on a large scale in the psychological transformation of the German people in the life of a generation.

It followed from the theory expounded by Helvetius that there is no impa.s.sable barrier between the advanced and the stationary or retrograde races of the earth. [Footnote: The most informing discussion of the relations between the Advanced and Backward races is Bryce's Romanes Lecture (1902).] "True morality," Baron d'Holbach wrote, "should be the same for all the inhabitants of the globe. The savage man and the civilised; the white man, the red man, the black man; Indian and European, Chinaman and Frenchman, Negro and Lapp have the same nature.

The differences between them are only modifications of the common nature produced by climate, government, education, opinions, and the various causes which operate on them. Men differ only in the ideas they form of happiness and the means which they have imagined to obtain it." Here again the eighteenth century theorists held a view which can no longer be dismissed as absurd. Some are coming round to the opinion that enormous differences in capacity which seem fundamental are a result of the differences in social inheritance, and that these again are due to a long sequence of historical circ.u.mstances; and consequently that there is no people in the world doomed by nature to perpetual inferiority or irrevocably disqualified by race from playing a useful part in the future of civilisation.

4.

This doctrine of the possibility of indefinitely moulding the characters of men by laws and inst.i.tutions--whether combined or not with a belief in the natural equality of men's faculties--laid a foundation on which the theory of the perfectibility of humanity could be raised. It marked, therefore, an important stage in the development of the doctrine of Progress.

It gave, moreover, a new and larger content to that doctrine by its applicability, not only to the peoples which are at present in the van of civilisation, but also to those which have lagged far behind and may appear irreclaimably barbarous--thus potentially including all humanity in the prospect of the future. Turgot had already conceived "the total ma.s.s of the human race moving always slowly forward"; he had declared that the human mind everywhere contains the germs of progress and that the inequality of peoples is due to the infinite variety of their circ.u.mstances. This enlarging conception was calculated to add strength to the idea of Progress, by raising it to a synthesis comprehending not merely the western civilised nations but the whole human world.

Interest in the remote peoples of the earth, in the unfamiliar civilisations of the East, in the untutored races of America and Africa, was vivid in France in the eighteenth century. Everyone knows how Voltaire and Montesquieu used Hurons or Persians to hold up the gla.s.s to Western manners and morals, as Tacitus used the Germans to criticise the society of Rome. But very few ever look into the seven volumes of the Abbe Raynal's History of the Two Indies which appeared in 1772. It is however, one of the remarkable books of the century. Its immediate practical importance lay in the array of facts which it furnished to the friends of humanity in the movement against negro slavery. But it was also an effective attack on the Church and the sacerdotal system. The author's method was the same which his greater contemporary Gibbon employed on a larger scale. A history of facts was a more formidable indictment than any declamatory attack.

Raynal brought home to the conscience of Europeans the miseries which had befallen the natives of the New World through the Christian conquerors and their priests. He was not indeed an enthusiastic preacher of Progress. He is unable to decide between the comparative advantages of the savage state of nature and the most highly cultivated society.

But he observes that "the human race is what we wish to make it," that the felicity of man depends entirely on the improvement of legislation; and in the survey of the history of Europe to which the last Book of his work is devoted, his view is generally optimistic. [Footnote: cp. Raynal, Histoire, vii. 214, 256. This book was first published anonymously; the author's name appeared in the edition of 1780.]

5. Baron d'Holbach had a more powerful brain than Helvetius, but his writings had probably less influence, though he was the spiritual father of two prominent Revolutionaries, Hebert and Chaumette. His System of Nature (1770) develops a purely naturalistic theory of the universe, in which the prevalent Deism is rejected: there is no G.o.d; material Nature stands out alone, self-sufficing, dominis privata superbis. The book suggests how the Lucretian theory of development might have led to the idea of Progress. But it sent a chilly shock to the hearts of many and probably convinced few. The effective part was the outspoken and pa.s.sionate indictment of governments and religions as causes of most of the miseries of mankind.

It is in other works, especially in his Social System, that his views of Progress are to be sought. Man is simply a part of nature; he has no privileged position, and he is born neither good nor bad. Erras, as Seneca said, si existumas vitia n.o.bisc.u.m esse: supervenerunt, ingesta sunt. [Footnote: Seneca, Ep. 124.] We are made good or bad by education, public opinion, laws, government; and here the author points to the significance of the instinct of imitation as a social force, which a modern writer, M. Tarde, has worked into a system.

The evils, which are due to the errors of tyranny and superst.i.tion, the force of truth will gradually diminish if it cannot completely banish them; for our governments and laws may be perfected by the progress of useful knowledge. But the process will be a long one: centuries of continuous mental effort in unravelling the causes of social ill-being and repeated experiments to determine the remedies (des experiences reiterees de la societe). In any case we cannot look forward to the attainment of an unchangeable or unqualified felicity. That is a mere chimera "incompatible with the nature of a being whose feeble machine is subject to derangement and whose ardent imagination will not always submit to the guidance of reason. Sometimes to enjoy, sometimes to suffer, is the lot of man; to enjoy more often than to suffer is what const.i.tutes well-being."

D'Holbach was a strict determinist; he left no room for freewill in the rigorous succession of cause and effect, and the pages in which he drives home the theory of causal necessity are still worth reading. From his naturalistic principles he inferred that the distinction between nature and art is not fundamental; civilisation is as rational as the savage state. Here he was at one with Aristotle.

All the successive inventions of the human mind to change or perfect man's mode of existence and render it happier were only the necessary consequence of his essence and that of the existences which act upon him. All we do or think, all we are or shall be, is only an effect of what universal nature has made us. Art is only nature acting by the aid of the instruments which she has fashioned. [Footnote: The pa.s.sages of d'Holbach specially referred to are: Systeme social, i. 1, p. 13; Syst.

de la nature, i. 6, p. 88; Syst. soc. i. 15, p. 271; Syst. de la n. i.

1, p. 3.]

Progress, therefore, is natural and necessary, and to criticise or condemn it by appealing to nature is only to divide the house of nature against itself.

If d'Holbach had pressed his logic further, he would have taken a more indulgent and calmer view of the past history of mankind. He would have acknowledged that inst.i.tutions and opinions to which modern reason may give short shrift were natural and useful in their day, and would have recognised that at any stage of history the heritage of the past is no less necessary to progress than the solvent power of new ideas. Most thinkers of his time were inclined to judge the past career of humanity anachronistically. All the things that had been done or thought which could not be justified in the new age of enlightenment, were regarded as gratuitous and inexcusable errors. The traditions, superst.i.tions, and customs, the whole "code of fraud and woe" transmitted from the past, weighed then too heavily in France to allow the school of reform to do impartial justice to their origins. They felt a sort of resentment against history. D'Alembert said that it would be well if history could be destroyed; and the general tendency was to ignore the social memory and the common heritage of past experiences which mould a human society and make it something very different from a mere collection of individuals.

Belief in Progress, however, took no extravagant form. It did not beguile d'Holbach or any other of the leading thinkers of the Encyclopaedia epoch into optimistic dreams of the future which might await mankind. They had a much clearer conception of obstacles than the good Abbe de Saint-Pierre. Helvetius agrees with d'Holbach that progress will be slow, and Diderot is wavering and sceptical of the question of indefinite social improvement. [Footnote: De l'esprit, Disc. ii. cc. 24, 25.]

6.

The reformers of the Encyclopaedia group were not alone in disseminating the idea of Progress. Another group of thinkers, who widely differed in their principles, though some of them had contributed articles to the Encyclopaedia, [Footnote: Quesnay and Turgot, who, though not professedly a Physiocrat, held the same views as the sect.] also did much to make it a power. The rise of the special study of Economics was one of the most significant facts in the general trend of thought towards the a.n.a.lysis of civilisation. Economical students found that in seeking to discover a true theory of the production, distribution, and employment of wealth, they could not avoid the consideration of the const.i.tution and purpose of society. The problems of production and distribution could not be divorced from political theory: production raises the question of the functions of government and the limits of its intervention in trade and industry; distribution involve questions of property, justice, and equality. The employment of riches leads into the domain of morals.

The French Economists or "Physiocrats," as they were afterwards called, who formed a definite school before 1760--Quesnay the master, Mirabeau, Mercier de la Riviere, and the rest--envisaged their special subject from a wide philosophical point of view; their general economic theory was equivalent to a theory of human society. They laid down the doctrine of a Natural Order in political communities, and from it they deduced their economic teaching.

They a.s.sumed, like the Encyclopaedists, that the end of society is the attainment of terrestrial happiness by its members, and that this is the sole purpose of government. The object of a treatise by Mercier de la Riviere [Footnote: L'ordre naturel et essentiel des societes politiqes, 1767.] (a convenient exposition of the views of the sect) is, in his own words, to discover the natural order for the government of men living in organised communities, which will a.s.sure to them temporal felicity: an order in which everything is well, necessarily well, and in which the interests of all are so perfectly and intimately consolidated that all are happy, from the ruler to the least of his subjects.

But in what does this happiness consist? His answer is that "humanly speaking, the greatest happiness possible for us consists in the greatest possible abundance of objects suitable to our enjoyment and in the greatest liberty to profit by them." And liberty is necessary not only to enjoy them but also to produce them in the greatest abundance, since liberty stimulates human efforts. Another condition of abundance is the multiplication of the race; in fact, the happiness of men and their numbers are closely bound up together in the system of nature.

From these axioms may be deduced the Natural Order of a human society, the reciprocal duties and rights whose enforcement is required for the greatest possible multiplication of products, in order to procure to the race the greatest sum of happiness with the maximum population.

Now, individual property is the indispensable condition for full enjoyment of the products of human labour; "property is the measure of liberty, and liberty is the measure of property." Hence, to realise general happiness it is only necessary to maintain property and consequently liberty in all their natural extent. The fatal error which has made history what it is has been the failure to recognise this simple fact; for aggression and conquest, the causes of human miseries, violate the law of property which is the foundation of happiness.

The practical inference was that the chief function of government was to protect property and that complete freedom should be left to private enterprise to exploit the resources of the earth. All would be well if trade and industry were allowed to follow their natural tendencies. This is what was meant by Physiocracy, the supremacy of the Natural Order. If rulers observed the limits of their true functions, Mercier thought that the moral effect would be immense. "The public system of government is the true education of moral man. Regis ad exemplum totus componitur orbis." [Footnote: The particulars of the Physiocratic doctrine as to the relative values of agriculture and commerce which Adam Smith was soon to criticise do not concern us; nor is it necessary to repeat the obvious criticisms on a theory which virtually reduced the science of society to a science of production and distribution.]

While they advocated a thorough reform of the principles which ruled the fiscal policy of governments, the Economists were not idealists, like the Encyclopaedic philosophers; they sowed no seeds of revolution. Their starting-point was that which is, not that which ought to be. And, apart from their narrower point of view, they differed from the philosophers in two very important points. They did not believe that society was of human inst.i.tution, and therefore they did not believe that there could be any deductive science of society based simply on man's nature.

Moreover, they held that inequality of condition was one of its immutable features, immutable because it is a consequence of the inequality of physical powers.

But they believed in the future progress of society towards a state of happiness through the increase of opulence which would itself depend on the growth of justice and "liberty"; and they insisted on the importance of the increase and diffusion of knowledge. Their influence in promoting a belief in Progress is vouched for by Condorcet, the friend and biographer of Turgot. As Turgot stands apart from the Physiocrats (with whom indeed he did not identify himself) by his wider views on civilisation, it might be suspected that it is of him that Condorcet was chiefly thinking. Yet we need not limit the scope of his statement when we remember that as a sect the Economists a.s.sumed as their first principle the eudaemonic value of civilisation, declared that temporal happiness is attainable, and threw all their weight into the scales against the doctrine of Regress which had found a powerful advocate in Rousseau.

7.

By liberty the Economists meant economic liberty. Neither they nor the philosophers nor Rousseau, the father of modern democracy, had any just conception of what political liberty means. They contributed much to its realisation, but their own ideas of it were narrow and imperfect. They never challenged the principle of a despotic government, they only contended that the despotism must be enlightened. The paternal rule of a Joseph or a Catherine, acting under the advice of philosophers, seemed to them the ideal solution of the problem of government; and when the progressive and disinterested Turgot, whom they might regard as one of themselves, was appointed financial minister on the accession of Louis XVI., it seemed that their ideal was about to be realised. His speedy fall dispelled their hopes, but did not teach them the secret of liberty. They had no quarrel with the principle of the censorship, though they writhed under its tyranny; they did not want to abolish it.

They only complained that it was used against reason and light, that is against their own writings; and, if the Conseil d'Etat or the Parlement had suppressed the works of their obscurantist opponents, they would have congratulated themselves that the world was marching quickly towards perfection. [Footnote: The principle that intolerance on the part of the wise and strong towards the ignorant and weak is a good thing is not alien to the spirit of the French philosophers, though I do not think any of them expressly a.s.serted it. In the following century it was formulated by Colins, a Belgian (author of two works on social science, 1857-60), who believed that an autocratic government suppressing liberty of conscience is the most effective instrument of Progress. It is possible that democracy may yet try the experiment.]