The Idea of Progress Part 12

2.

Mercier has been remembered, or rather forgotten, as an inferior dramatist. He was a good deal more, and the researches of M. Beclard into his life and works enable us to appreciate him. If it is an overstatement to say that his soul reflected in miniature the very soul of his age, [Footnote: L. Beclard, Sebastien Mercier, sa vie, son oeuvre, son temps (1903), p. vii.] he was a.s.suredly one of its characteristic products. He reminds us in some ways of the Abbe de Saint-Pierre, who was one of his heroes. All his activities were urged by the dream of a humanity regenerated by reason, all his energy devoted to bringing about its accomplishment. Saint-Pierre's idea of perpetual peace inspired an early essay on the scourge of war.

The theories of Rousseau exercised at first an irresistible attraction, but modern civilisation had too strong a hold on him; he was too Parisian in temper to acquiesce for long in the doctrine of Arcadianism.

He composed a book on The Savage to ill.u.s.trate the text that the true standard of morality is the heart of primitive man, and to prove that the best thing we could do is to return to the forest; but in the process of writing it he seems to have come to the conclusion that the whole doctrine was fallacious. [Footnote: Mercier's early essay: Des malheurs de la guerre et des avantages de la paix (1766). On the savage: L'homme sauvage (1767). For the opposite thesis see the Songes philosophiques (1768). He describes a state of perfect happiness in a planet where beings live in perpetual contemplation of the infinite.

He appreciates the work of philosophers from Socrates to Leibnitz, and describes Rousseau as standing before the swelling stream, but cursing it. It may be suspected that the writings of Leibnitz had much to do with Mercier's conversion.] The transformation of his opinions was the work of a few months. He then came forward with the opposite thesis that all events have been ordered for man's felicity, and he began to work on an imaginary picture of the state to which man might find his way within seven hundred years.

L'an 2440 was published anonymously at Amsterdam in 1770. [Footnote: The author's name first appeared in the 3rd ed., 1799. A German translation, by C. F. Weisse, was published in London in 1772. The English version, by Dr. Hooper, appeared in the same year, and a new edition in 1802; the translator changed the t.i.tle to Memoirs of the year Two thousand five hundred.] Its circulation in France was rigorously forbidden, because it implied a merciless criticism of the administration. It was reprinted in London and Neuchatel, and translated into English and German.

3.

As the motto of his prophetic vision Mercier takes the saying of Leibnitz that "the present is pregnant of the future." Thus the phase of civilisation which he imagines is proposed as the outcome of the natural and inevitable march of history. The world of A.D. 2440 in which a man born in the eighteenth century who has slept an enchanted sleep awakes to find himself, is composed of nations who live in a family concord rarely interrupted by war. But of the world at large we hear little; the imagination of Mercier is concentrated on France, and particularly Paris. He is satisfied with knowing that slavery has been abolished; that the rivalry of France and England has been replaced by an indestructible alliance; that the Pope, whose authority is still august, has renounced his errors and returned to the customs of the primitive Church; that French plays are performed in China. The changes in Paris are a sufficient index of the general transformation.

The const.i.tution of France is still monarchical. Its population has increased by one half; that of the capital remains about the same. Paris has been rebuilt on a scientific plan; its sanitary arrangements have been brought to perfection; it is well lit; and every provision has been made for the public safety. Private hospitality is so large that inns have disappeared, but luxury at table is considered a revolting crime.

Tea, coffee, and tobacco are no longer imported. [Footnote: In the first edition of the book commerce was abolished.] There is no system of credit; everything is paid for in ready money, and this practice has led to a remarkable simplicity in dress. Marriages are contracted only through mutual inclination; dowries have been abolished. Education is governed by the ideas of Rousseau, and is directed, in a narrow spirit, to the promotion of morality. Italian, German, English, and Spanish are taught in schools, but the study of the cla.s.sical languages has disappeared; Latin does not help a man to virtue. History too is neglected and discouraged, for it is "the disgrace of humanity, every page being crowded with crimes and follies." Theatres are government inst.i.tutions, and have become the public schools of civic duties and morality. [Footnote: In 1769 Mercier began to carry out his programme of composing and adapting plays for instruction and edification. His theory of the true functions of the theatre he explained in a special treatise, Du theatre ou Nouvel Essai sur l'art dramatique (1773).]

The literary records of the past had been almost all deliberately destroyed by fire. It was found expedient to do away with useless and pernicious books which only obscured truth or contained perpetual repet.i.tions of the same thing. A small closet in the public library sufficed to hold the ancient books which were permitted to escape the conflagration, and the majority of these were English. The writings of the Abbe de Saint-Pierre were placed next those of Fenelon. "His pen was weak, but his heart was sublime. Seven ages have given to his great and beautiful ideas a just maturity. His contemporaries regarded him as a visionary; his dreams, however, have become realities."

The importance of men of letters as a social force was a favourite theme of Mercier, and in A.D. 2440 this will be duly recognised. But the State control which weighed upon them so heavily in 1770 is not to be entirely abolished. There is no preventive censorship to hinder publication, but there are censors. There are no fines or imprisonment, but there are admonitions. And if any one publishes a book defending principles which are considered dangerous, he is obliged to go about in a black mask.

There is a state religion, Deism. There is probably no one who does not believe in G.o.d. But if any atheist were discovered, he would be put through a course of experimental physics. If he remained obdurate in his rejection of a "palpable and salutary truth," the nation would go into mourning and banish him from its borders.

Every one has to work, but labour no longer resembles slavery. As there are no monks, nor numerous domestics, nor useless valets, nor work-men employed on the production of childish luxuries, a few daily hours of labour are sufficient for the public wants. Censors inquire into men's capacities, a.s.sign tasks to the unemployed, and if man be found fit for nothing but the consumption of food he is banished from the city.

These are some of the leading features of the ideal future to which Mercier's imagination reached. He did not put it forward as a final term. Later ages, he said, will go further, for "where can the perfectibility of man stop, armed with geometry and the mechanical arts and chemistry?" But in his scanty prophecies of what science might effect he showed curiously little resource. The truth is that this had not much interest for him, and he did not see that scientific discoveries might trans.m.u.te social conditions. The world of 2440, its intolerably docile and virtuous society, reflects two capital weaknesses in the speculation of the Encyclopaedist period: a failure to allow for the strength of human pa.s.sions and interests, and a deficient appreciation of the meaning of liberty. Much as the reformers acclaimed and fought for toleration, they did not generally comprehend the value of the principle. They did not see that in a society organised and governed by Reason and Justice themselves, the unreserved toleration of false opinions would be the only palladium of progress; or that a doctrinaire State, composed of perfectly virtuous and deferential people, would arrest development and stifle origiality, by its ungenial if mild tyranny. Mercier's is no exception to the rule that ideal societies are always repellent; and there are probably few who would not rather be set down in Athens in the days of the "vile" Aristophanes, whose works Mercier condemned to the flames, than in his Paris of 2440.

4.

That Bohemian man of letters, Restif de la Bretonne, whose unedifying novels the Parisians of 2440 would a.s.suredly have rejected from their libraries, published in 1790 a heroic comedy representing how marriages would be arranged in "the year 2000," by which epoch he conceived that all social equalities would have disappeared in a fraternal society and twenty nations be allied to France under the wise supremacy of "our well-beloved monarch Louis Francois XXII." It was the Revolution that converted Restif to the conception of Progress, for hitherto his master had been Rousseau; but it can hardly be doubted that the motif and t.i.tle of his play were suggested by the romance of Mercier. L'an 2440 and L'an 2000 are the first examples of the prophetic fiction which Mr. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward was to popularise a hundred years later.

The Count de Volney's Ruins was another popular presentation of the hopes which the theory of Progress had awakened in France. Although the work was not published till after the outbreak of the Revolution, [Footnote: Les Ruines des empires, 1789. An English translation ran to a second edition (1795).] the plan had been conceived some years before.

Volney was a traveller, deeply interested in oriental and cla.s.sical antiquities, and, like Louis Le Roy, he approached the problem of man's destinies from the point of view of a student of the revolutions of empires.

The book opens with melancholy reflections amid the ruins of Palmyra.

"Thus perish the works of men, and thus do nations and empires vanish away... Who can a.s.sure us that desolation like this will not one day be the lot of our own country?" Some traveller like himself will sit by the banks of the Seine, the Thames, or the Zuyder Zee, amid silent ruins, and weep for a people inurned and their greatness changed into an empty name. Has a mysterious Deity p.r.o.nounced a secret malediction against the earth?

In this disconsolate mood he is visited by an apparition, who unveils the causes of men's misfortunes and shows that they are due to themselves. Man is governed by natural invariable laws, and he has only to study them to know the springs of his destiny, the causes of his evils and their remedies. The laws of his nature are self-love, desire of happiness, and aversion to pain; these are the simple and prolific principles of everything that happens in the moral world. Man is the artificer of his own fate. He may lament his weakness and folly; but "he has perhaps still more reason to be confident in his energies when he recollects from what point he has set out and to what heights he has been capable of elevating himself."

The supernatural visitant paints a rather rosy picture of the ancient Egyptian and a.s.syrian kingdoms. But it would be a mistake to infer from their superficial splendour that the inhabitants generally were wise or happy. The tendency of man to ascribe perfection to past epochs is merely "the discoloration of his chagrin." The race is not degenerating; its misfortunes are due to ignorance and the mis-direction of self-love.

Two princ.i.p.al obstacles to improvement have been the difficulty of transmitting ideas from age to age, and that of communicating them rapidly from man to man. These have been removed by the invention of printing. The press is "a memorable gift of celestial genius." In time all men will come to understand the principles of individual happiness and public felicity. Then there will be established among the peoples of the earth an equilibrium of forces; there will be no more wars, disputes will be decided by arbitration, and "the whole species will become one great society, a single family governed by the same spirit and by common laws, enjoying all the felicity of which human nature is capable." The accomplishment of this will be a slow process, since the same leaven will have to a.s.similate an enormous ma.s.s of heterogeneous elements, but its operation will be effectual.

Here the genius interrupts his prophecy and exclaims, turning toward the west, "The cry of liberty uttered on the farther sh.o.r.es of the Atlantic has reached to the old continent." A prodigious movement is then visible to their eyes in a country at the extremity of the Mediterranean; tyrants are overthrown, legislators elected, a code of laws is drafted on the principles of equality, liberty, and justice. The liberated nation is attacked by neighbouring tyrants, but her legislators propose to the other peoples to hold a general a.s.sembly, representing the whole world, and weigh every religious system in the balance. The proceedings of this congress follow, and the book breaks off incomplete.

It is not an arresting book; to a reader of the present day it is positively tedious; but it suited contemporary taste, and, appearing when France was confident that her Revolution would renovate the earth, it appealed to the hopes and sentiments of the movement. It made no contribution to the doctrine of Progress, but it undoubtedly helped to popularise it.

CHAPTER XI. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: CONDORCET

I.

The authority which the advanced thinkers of France gained among the middle cla.s.ses during the third quarter of the eighteenth century was promoted by the influence of fashion. The new ideas of philosophers, rationalists, and men of science had interested the n.o.bles and higher cla.s.ses of society for two generations, and were a common subject of discussion in the most distinguished salons. Voltaire's intimacy with Frederick the Great, the relations of d'Alembert and Diderot with the Empress Catherine, conferred on these men of letters, and on the ideas for which they stood, a prestige which carried great weight with the bourgeoisie. Humbler people, too, were as amenable as the great to the seduction of theories which supplied simple keys to the universe [Footnote: Taine said of the Contrat Social that it reduces political science to the strict application of an elementary axiom which renders all study unnecessary (La Revolution, vol. i. c. iv. Sec. iii.).] and a.s.sumed that everybody was capable of judging for himself on the most difficult problems. As well as the Encyclopaedia, the works of nearly all the leading thinkers were written for the general public not merely for philosophers. The policy of the Government in suppressing these dangerous publications did not hinder their diffusion, and gave them the attraction of forbidden fruit. In 1770 the avocat general (Seguier) acknowledged the futility of the policy. "The philosophers," he said, "have with one hand sought to shake the throne, with the other to upset the altars. Their purpose was to change public opinion on civil and religious inst.i.tutions, and the revolution has, so to speak, been effected. History and poetry, romances and even dictionaries, have been infected with the poison of incredulity. Their writings are hardly published in the capital before they inundate the provinces like a torrent. The contagion has spread into workshops and cottages."

[Footnote: Rocquain, L'Esprit revolutionnaire avant la Revolution, p.

278.]

The contagion spread, but the official who wrote these words did not see that it was successful because it was opportune, and that the minds of men were prepared to receive the seed of revolutionary ideas by the unspeakable corruption of the Government and the Church. As Voltaire remarked about the same time, France was becoming Encyclopaedist, and Europe too.

2.

The influence of the subversive and rationalistic thinkers in bringing about the events of 1789 has been variously estimated by historians.

The truth probably lies in the succinct statement of Acton that "the confluence of French theory with American example caused the Revolution to break out" when it did. The theorists aimed at reform, not at political revolution; and it was the stimulus of the Declaration of Rights of 1774 and the subsequent victory of the Colonies that precipitated the convulsion, at a time when the country had a better prospect of improvement than it ever had before 1774, when Louis XVI.

came to the throne. But the theories had prepared France for radical changes, and they guided the phases of the Revolution. The leaders had all the optimism of the Encyclopaedists; yet the most powerful single force was Rousseau, who, though he denied Progress and blasphemed civilisation, had promulgated the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, giving it an attractive appearance of mathematical precision; and to this doctrine the revolutionaries attached their optimistic hopes. [Footnote: It is interesting to observe how Robespierre, to whom the doctrines of Rousseau were oracles, could break out into admiration of the progress of civilised man, as he did in the opening pa.s.sage of his speech of 7th May 1794. proposing the decree for the worship of the Supreme Being (see the text in Stephen, Orators of the French Revolution, ii. 391-92).] The theory of equality seemed no longer merely speculative; for the American const.i.tution was founded on democratic equality, whereas the English const.i.tution, which before had seemed the nearest approximation to the ideal of freedom, was founded on inequality. The philosophical polemic of the masters was waged with weapons of violence by the disciples. Chaumette and Hebert, the followers of d'Holbach, were destroyed by the disciples of Rousseau. In the name of the creed of the Vicaire Savoyard the Jacobin Club shattered the bust of Helvetius. Mably and Morelly had their disciples in Babeuf and the socialists.

A naive confidence that the political upheaval meant regeneration and inaugurated a reign of justice and happiness pervaded France in the first period of the Revolution, and found a striking expression in the ceremonies of the universal "Federation" in the Champ-de-Mars on 14th July 1790. The festival was theatrical enough, decreed and arranged by the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly, but the enthusiasm and optimism of the people who gathered to swear loyalty to the new Const.i.tution were genuine and spontaneous. Consciously or subconsciously they were under the influence of the doctrine of Progress which leaders of opinion had for several decades been insinuating into the public mind. It did not occur to them that their oaths and fraternal embraces did not change their minds or hearts, and that, as Taine remarked, they remained what ages of political subjection and one age of political literature had made them.

The a.s.sumption that new social machinery could alter human nature and create a heaven upon earth was to be swiftly and terribly confuted.

Post uarios casus et tot discrimina rerum uenimus in Latium,

but Latium was to be the scene of sanguinary struggles.

Another allied and fundamental fallacy, into which all the philosophers and Rousseau had more or less fallen, was reflected and exposed by the Revolution. They had considered man in vacuo. They had not seen that the whole development of a society is an enormous force which cannot be talked or legislated away; they had ignored the power of social memory and historical traditions, and misvalued the strength of the links which bind generations together. So the Revolutionaries imagined that they could break abruptly with the past, and that a new method of government, constructed on mathematical lines, a const.i.tution (to use words of Burke) "ready made and ready armed, mature in its birth, a perfect G.o.ddess of wisdom and of war, hammered by our blacksmith midwives out of the brain of Jupiter himself," would create a condition of idyllic felicity in France, and that the arrival of the millennium depended only on the adoption of the same principles by other nations. The illusions created by the Declaration of the Rights of Man on the 4th of August died slowly under the shadow of the Terror; but though the hopes of those who believed in the speedy regeneration of the world were belied, some of the thoughtful did not lose heart. There was one at least who did not waver in his faith that the movement was a giant's step on the path of man towards ultimate felicity, however far he had still to travel. Condorcet, one of the younger Encyclopaedists, spent the last months of his life, under the menace of the guillotine, in projecting a history of human Progress.

3.

Condorcet was the friend and biographer of Turgot, and it was not unfitting that he should resume the design of a history of civilisation, in the light of the idea of Progress, for which Turgot had only left luminous suggestions. He did not execute the plan, but he completed an elaborate sketch in which the controlling ideas of the scheme are fully set forth. His principles are to be found almost entirely in Turgot. But they have a new significance for Condorcet. He has given them wings. He has emphasised, and made deductions. Turgot wrote in the calm spirit of an inquirer. Condorcet spoke with the verve of a prophet. He was prophesying under the shadow of death. It is amazing that the optimistic Sketch of a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind should have been composed when he was hiding from Robespierre in 1793.

[Footnote: Published in 1795.]

Condorcet was penetrated with the spirit of the Encyclopaedists, of whom he had been one, and his att.i.tude to Christianity was that of Voltaire and Diderot. Turgot had treated the received religion respectfully. He had acknowledged Providence, and, though the place which he a.s.signed to Providence was that of a sort of honorary President of the development of civilisation who might disappear without affecting the proceedings, there was a real difference between his views and those of his friend as to the role of Christianity and the civilisation of the Middle Ages.

A more important difference between the two thinkers is connected with the different circ.u.mstances in which they wrote. Turgot did not believe in the necessity of violent changes; he thought that steady reforms under the existing regime would do wonders for France. Before the Revolution Condorcet had agreed, but he was swept away by its enthusiasm. The victory of liberty in America and the increasing volume of the movement against slavery--one of the causes which most deeply stirred his heart--had heightened his natural optimism and confirmed his faith in the dogma of Progress. He felt the exhilaration of the belief that he was living through "one of the greatest revolutions of the human race," and he deliberately designed his book to be opportune to a crisis of mankind, at which "a picture of revolutions of the past will be the best guide."

Feeling that he is personally doomed, he consoles himself with brooding on the time, however remote, when the sun will shine "on an earth of none but freemen, with no master save reason; for tyrants and slaves, priests and their stupid or hypocritical tools, will all have disappeared." He is not satisfied with affirming generally the certainty of an indefinite progress in enlightenment and social welfare. He sets himself to think out its nature, to forecast its direction, and determine its goal, and insists, as his predecessors had never done, on the prospects of the distant future.

4.

His ambitious design is, in his own words, to show "the successive changes in human society, the influence which each instant exerts on the succeeding instant, and thus, in its successive modifications, the advance of the human species towards truth or happiness." Taken literally, this is an impossible design, and to put it forward as a practical proposition is as if a man were to declare his intention of writing a minute diary of the life of Julius Caesar from his birth to his death. By stating his purpose in such terms, Condorcet reveals that he had no notion of the limitations which confine our knowledge of the past, and that even if he had conceived a more modest and practicable programme he would have been incapable of executing it. His formula, however, is worth remembering. For the unattainable ideal which it expresses reminds us how many periods and pa.s.sages of human experience must always remain books with seven seals.

Condorcet distinguished ten periods of civilisation, of which the tenth lies in the future, but he has not justified his divisions and his epochs are not co-ordinate in importance. Yet his arrangement of the map of history is remarkable as an attempt to mark its sections not by great political changes but by important steps in knowledge. The first three periods--the formation of primitive societies, followed by the pastoral age, and the agricultural age--conclude with the invention of alphabetic writing in Greece. The fourth is the history of Greek thought, to the definite division of the sciences in the time of Aristotle. In the fifth knowledge progresses and suffers obscuration under Roman rule, and the sixth is the dark age which continues to the time of the Crusades. The significance of the seventh period is to prepare the human mind for the revolution which would be achieved by the invention of printing, with which the eighth period opens. Some of the best pages of the book develop the vast consequences of this invention. The scientific revolution effected by Descartes begins a new period, which is now closed by the creation of the French Republic.

The idea of the progress of knowledge had created the idea of social Progress and remained its foundation. It was therefore logical and inevitable that Condorcet should take advance in knowledge as the clew to the march of the human race. The history of civilisation is the history of enlightenment. Turgot had justified this axiom by formulating the cohesion of all modes of social activity. Condorcet insists on "the indissoluble union" between intellectual progress and that of liberty, virtue, and the respect for natural rights, and on the effect of science in the destruction of prejudice. All errors in politics and ethics have sprung, he a.s.serts, from false ideas which are closely connected with errors in physics and ignorance of the laws of nature. And in the new doctrine of Progress he sees an instrument of enlightenment which is to give "the last blow to the tottering edifice of prejudices."

It would not be useful to a.n.a.lyse Condorcet's sketch or dwell on his obsolete errors and the defects of his historical knowledge. His slight picture of the Middle Ages reflects the familiar view of all the eighteenth century philosophers. The only contribution to social amelioration which he can discover in a period of nearly a millennium is the abolition of domestic slavery. And so this period appears as an interruption of the onward march. His inability to appreciate the historical role of the Roman Empire exhibits more surprising ignorance and prejudice. But these particular defects are largely due to a fundamental error which runs through his whole book and was inherent in the social speculations of the Encyclopaedists. Condorcet, like all his circle, ignored the preponderant part which inst.i.tutions have played in social development. So far as he considered them at all, he saw in them obstacles to the free play of human reason; not the spontaneous expression of a society corresponding to its needs or embodying its ideals, but rather machinery deliberately contrived for oppressing the ma.s.ses and keeping them in chains. He did not see that if the Progress in which he believed is a reality, its possibility depends on the inst.i.tutions and traditions which give to societies their stability. In the following generation, it would be pointed out that he fell into a manifest contradiction when he praised the relative perfection reached in some European countries in the eighteenth century, and at the same time condemned as eminently retrograde all the doctrines and inst.i.tutions which had been previously in control. [Footnote: Comte.

Cours de philosophie positive, iv. 228.] This error is closely connected with the other error, previously noticed, of conceiving man abstracted from his social environment and exercising his reason in vacuo.

5.

The study of the history of civilisation has, in Condorcet's eyes, two uses. It enables us to establish the fact of Progress, and it should enable us to determine its direction in the future, and thereby to accelerate the rate of progression.