The Idea of Progress Part 17

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 p.r.o.nounced, 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 a.s.sumption. 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 a.s.sociation 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 a.s.sociated with the names of Eichhorn, Savigny, and Niebuhr. Their view that laws and inst.i.tutions 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 pa.s.sed 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 princ.i.p.al 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 Pa.s.sional 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 pa.s.sions 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 pa.s.sions 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 pa.s.sions 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 a.s.sured 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 pa.s.sions, 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 Herac.l.i.tus. 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 t.i.tle a.s.sociation 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 princ.i.p.al 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 n.o.bles 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 pa.s.sed 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 r.e.t.a.r.ding 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 partic.i.p.ate 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 cla.s.ses form the majority, the first step towards the goal will be the amelioration of the lot of the working cla.s.ses. This will be the princ.i.p.al 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 a.s.sociation. The programme for the future is a.s.sociation 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 a.s.signed to him. Society consists of three cla.s.ses of workers--industrial workers, savants, and artists. A commission of eminent workers of each cla.s.s 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 h.o.m.ogeneous 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 a.s.sociation, in the series of family, city, nation, supernational Church. The next term must be a still vaster a.s.sociation comprehending the whole race.

In consequence of the incompleteness of a.s.sociation, 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: G.o.d is one, G.o.d is all that is, all is G.o.d. 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).]