The Idea of Progress Part 16

Krause never attracted attention in England, but he exerted some influence in France and Spain, and especially in Belgium, notwithstanding the grotesque jargon in which he obscured his thoughts.

See Flint, Philosophy of History, pp. 474-5. Flint's account of his speculations is indulgent. The main ideas of his philosophy of history will be found in the Introduction a la philosophie (ed. 2, 1880) of G.

Tiberghien, a Belgian disciple.]

All these transcendent speculations had this in common that they pretended to discover the necessary course of human history on metaphysical principles, independent of experience. But it has been rightly doubted whether this alleged independence was genuine. We may question whether any of them would have produced the same sequence of periods of history, if the actual facts of history had been to them a sealed book. Indeed we may be sure that they were surrept.i.tiously and subconsciously using experience as a guide, while they imagined that abstract principles were entirely responsible for their conclusions. And this is equivalent to saying that their ideas of progressive movement were really derived from that idea of Progress which the French thinkers of the eighteenth century had attempted to base on experience.

The influence, direct and indirect, of these German philosophers reached far beyond the narrow circle of the bacchants or even the wandbearers of idealism. They did much to establish the notion of progressive development as a category of thought, almost as familiar and indispensable as that of cause and effect. They helped to diffuse the idea of "an increasing purpose" in history. Augustine or Bossuet might indeed have spoken of an increasing purpose, but the "purpose" of their speculations was subsidiary to a future life. The purpose of the German idealists could be fulfilled in earthly conditions and required no theory of personal immortality.

This atmosphere of thought affected even intelligent reactionaries who wrote in the interest of orthodox Christianity and the Catholic Church.

Progressive development is admitted in the lectures on the Philosophy of History of Friedrich von Schlegel. [Footnote: Translated into English in 2 vols., 1835.] He denounced Condorcet, and opposed to perfectibility the corruptible nature of man. But he a.s.serted that the philosophy of history is to be found in "the principles of social progress."

[Footnote: Op. cit. ii, p. 194, sqq.] These principles are three: the hidden ways of Providence emanc.i.p.ating the human race; the freewill of man; and the power which G.o.d permits to the agents of evil,--principles which Bossuet could endorse, but the novelty is that here they are arrayed as forces of Progress. In fact, the point of von Schlegel's pretentious, unilluminating book is to rehabilitate Christianity by making it the key to that new conception of life which had taken shape among the enemies of the Church.

7.

As biological development was one of the constant preoccupations of Goethe, whose doctrine of metamorphosis and "types" helped to prepare the way for the evolutionary hypothesis, we might have expected to find him interested in theories of social progress, in which theories of biological development find a logical extension. But the French speculations on Progress did not touch his imagination; they left him cool and sceptical. Towards the end of his life, in conversation with Eckermann, he made some remarks which indicate his att.i.tude. [Footnote: Gesprache mit Goethe, 23 Oktober 1828.] "'The world will not reach its goal so quickly as we think and wish. The r.e.t.a.r.ding demons are always there, intervening and resisting at every point, so that, though there is an advance on the whole, it is very slow. Live longer and you will find that I am right.'

"'The development of humanity,' said Eckermann, 'appears to be a matter of thousands of years.'

"'Who knows?' Goethe replied, 'perhaps of millions. But let humanity last as long as it will, there will always be hindrances in its way, and all kinds of distress, to make it develop its powers. Men will become more clever and discerning, but not better nor happier nor more energetic, at least except for limited periods. I see the time coming when G.o.d will take no more pleasure in the race, and must again proceed to a rejuvenated creation. I am sure that this will happen and that the time and hour in the distant future are already fixed for the beginning of this epoch of rejuvenation. But that time is certainly a long way off, and we can still for thousands and thousands of years enjoy ourselves on this dear old playing-ground, just as it is.'"

That is at once a plain rejection of perfectibility, and an opinion that intellectual development is no highroad to the gates of a golden city.

CHAPTER XIV. CURRENTS OF THOUGHT IN FRANCE AFTER THE REVOLUTION

1.

The failure of the Revolution to fulfil the visionary hopes which had dazzled France for a brief period--a failure intensified by the horrors that had attended the experiment--was followed by a reaction against the philosophical doctrines and tendencies which had inspired its leaders.

Forces, which the eighteenth century had underrated or endeavoured to suppress, emerged in a new shape, and it seemed for a while as if the new century might definitely turn its back on its predecessor. There was an intellectual rehabilitation of Catholicism, which will always be a.s.sociated with the names of four thinkers of exceptional talent, Chateaubriand, De Maistre, Bonald, and Lamennais.

But the outstanding fame of these great reactionaries must not mislead us into exaggerating the reach of this reaction. The spirit and tendencies of the past century still persisted in the circles which were most permanently influential. Many eminent savants who had been imbued with the ideas of Condillac and Helvetius, and had taken part in the Revolution and survived it, were active under the Empire and the restored Monarchy, still true to the spirit of their masters, and commanding influence by the value of their scientific work. M. Picavet's laborious researches into the activities of this school of thinkers has helped us to understand the transition from the age of Condorcet to the age of Comte. The two central figures are Cabanis, the friend of Condorcet, [Footnote: He has already claimed our notice, above, p. 215.]

and Destutt de Tracy. M. Picavet has grouped around them, along with many obscurer names, the great scientific men of the time, like Laplace, b.i.+.c.hat, Lamarck, as all in the direct line of eighteenth century thought. "Ideologists" he calls them. [Footnote: Ideology is now sometimes used to convey a criticism; for instance, to contrast the methods of Lamarck with those of Darwin.] Ideology, the science of ideas, was the word invented by de Tracy to distinguish the investigation of thought in accordance with the methods of Locke and Condillac from old-fas.h.i.+oned metaphysics. The guiding principle of the ideologists was to apply reason to observed facts and eschew a priori deductions. Thinkers of this school had an influential organ, the Decade philosophique, of which J. B. Say the economist was one of the founders in 1794. The Inst.i.tut, which had been established by the Convention, was crowded with "ideologists," and may be said to have continued the work of the Encyclopaedia. [Footnote: Picavet, op. cit. p. 69. The members of the 2nd Cla.s.s of the Inst.i.tut, that of moral and political science, were so predominantly Ideological that the distrust of Napoleon was excited, and he abolished it in 1803, distributing its members among the other Cla.s.ses.] These men had a firm faith in the indefinite progress of knowledge, general enlightenment, and "social reason."

2.

Thus the ideas of the "sophists" of the age of Voltaire were alive in the speculative world, not withstanding political, religious, and philosophical reaction. But their limitations were to be transcended, and account taken of facts and aspects which their philosophy had ignored or minimised. The value of the reactionary movement lay in pressing these facts and aspects on the attention, in reopening chambers of the human spirit which the age of Voltaire had locked and sealed.

The idea of Progress was particularly concerned in the general change of att.i.tude, intellectual and emotional, towards the Middle Ages. A fresh interest in the great age of the Church was a natural part of the religious revival, but extended far beyond the circle of ardent Catholics. It was a characteristic feature, as every one knows, of the Romantic movement. It did not affect only creative literature, it occupied speculative thinkers and stimulated historians. For Guizot, Michelet, and Auguste Comte, as well as for Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo, the Middle Ages have a significance which Frenchmen of the previous generation could hardly have comprehended.

We saw how that period had embarra.s.sed the first pioneers who attempted to trace the course of civilisation as a progressive movement, how lightly they pa.s.sed over it, how unconvincingly they explained it away.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the medieval question was posed in such a way that any one who undertook to develop the doctrine of Progress would have to explore it more seriously. Madame de Stael saw this when she wrote her book on Literature considered in its Relation to Social Inst.i.tutions (1801). She was then under the influence of Condorcet and an ardent believer in perfectibility, and the work is an attempt to extend this theory, which she testifies was falling into discredit, to the realm of literature. She saw that, if man regressed instead of progressing for ten centuries, the case for Progress was gravely compromised, and she sought to show that the Middle Ages contributed to the development of the intellectual faculties and to the expansion of civilisation, and that the Christian religion was an indispensable agent. This contention that Progress was uninterrupted is an advance on Condorcet and an antic.i.p.ation of Saint-Simon and Comte.

A more eloquent and persuasive voice was raised in the following year from the ranks of reaction. Chateaubriand's Genie du Christianisme appeared in 1802, "amidst the ruins of our temples," as the author afterwards said, when France was issuing from the chaos of her revolution. It was a declaration of war against the spirit of the eighteenth century which had treated Christianity as a barbarous system whose fall was demanded in the name of Progress. But it was much more than polemic. Chateaubriand arrayed arguments in support of orthodox dogmas, original sin, primitive degeneration, and the rest; but the appeal of the book did not lie in its logic, it lay in the appreciation of Christianity from a new point of view. He approached it in the spirit of an artist, as an aesthete, not as a philosopher, and so far as he proved anything he proved that Christianity is valuable because it is beautiful, not because it is true. He aimed at showing that it can "enchanter l'ame aussi divinement que les dieux de Virgile et d'Homere."

He might call to his help the Fathers of the Church, but it was on Dante, Milton, Racine that his case was really based. The book is an apologia, from the aesthetic standpoint of the Romantic school. "Dieu ne defend pas les routes fleuries quand elles servent a revenir a lui."

It was a matter of course that the defender of original sin should reject the doctrine of perfectibility. "When man attains the highest point of civilisation," wrote Chateaubriand in the vein of Rousseau, "he is on the lowest stair of morality; if he is free, he is rude; by civilising his manners, he forges himself chains. His heart profits at the expense of his head, his head at the expense of his heart." And, apart from considerations of Christian doctrine, the question of Progress had little interest for the Romantic school. Victor Hugo, in the famous Preface to his Cromwell (1827), where he went more deeply than Chateaubriand into the contrasts between ancient and modern art, revived the old likeness of mankind to an individual man, and declared that cla.s.sical antiquity was the time of its virility and that we are now spectators of its imposing old age.

From other points of view powerful intellects were reverting to the Middle Ages and eager to blot out the whole development of modern society since the Reformation, as the Encyclopaedic philosophers had wished to blot out the Middle Ages. The ideal of Bonald, De Maistre, and Lamennais was a sacerdotal government of the world, and the English const.i.tution was hardly less offensive to their minds than the Revolution which De Maistre denounced as "satanic." Advocates as they were of the dead system of theocracy, they contributed, however, to the advance of thought, not only by forcing medieval inst.i.tutions on the notice of the world but also by their perception that society had been treated in the eighteenth century in too mechanical a way, that inst.i.tutions grow, that the conception of individual men divested of their life in society is a misleading abstraction. They put this in extravagant and untenable forms, but there was a large measure of truth in their criticism, which did its part in helping the nineteenth century to revise and transcend the results of eighteenth century speculation.

In this reactionary literature we can see the struggle of the doctrine of Providence, declining before the doctrine of Progress, to gain the upper-hand again. Chateaubriand, Bonald, De Maistre, Lamennais firmly held the dogma of an original golden age and the degradation of man, and denounced the whole trend of progressive thought from Bacon to Condorcet. These writers were unconsciously helping Condorcet's doctrine to a.s.sume a new and less questionable shape. [Footnote: Bonald indeed in his treatise De pouvoir adopted the idea of development and applied it to religion (as Newman did afterwards) for the purpose of condemning the Reformation as a retrograde movement.]

3.

Along with the discovery of the Middle Ages came the discovery of German literature. In the intellectual commerce between the two countries in the age of Frederick the Great, France had been exclusively the giver, Germany the recipient. It was due, above all, to Madame de Stael that the tide began to flow the other way. Among the writers of the Napoleonic epoch, Madame de Stael is easily first in critical talent and intellectual breadth. Her study of the Revolution showed a more dispa.s.sionate appreciation of that convulsion than any of her contemporaries were capable of forming. But her chef-d'oeuvre is her study of Germany, De l'Allemagne, [Footnote: A.D. 1813.] which revealed the existence of a world of art and thought, unsuspected by the French public. Within the next twenty years Herder and Lessing, Kant and Hegel were exerting their influence at Paris. She did in France what Coleridge was doing in England for the knowledge of German thought.

Madame de Stael had raised anew the question which had been raised in the seventeenth century and answered in the negative by Voltaire: is there progress in aesthetic literature? Her early book on Literature had clearly defined the issue. She did not propose the thesis that there is any progress or improvement (as some of the Moderns had contended in the famous Quarrel) in artistic form. Within the limits of their own thought and emotional experience the ancients achieved perfection of expression, and perfection cannot be surpa.s.sed. But as thought progresses, as the sum of ideas increases and society changes, fresh material is supplied to art, there is "a new development of sensibility" which enables literary artists to compa.s.s new kinds of charm. The Genie du Christianisme embodied a commentary on her contention, more arresting than any she could herself have furnished. Here the reactionary joined hands with the disciple of Condorcet, to prove that there is progress in the domain of art. Madame de Stael's masterpiece, Germany, was a further impressive ill.u.s.tration of the thesis that the literature of the modern European nations represents an advance on cla.s.sical literature, in the sense that it sounds notes which the Greek and Roman masters had not heard, reaches depths which they had not conjectured, unlocks chambers which to them were closed,--as a result of the progressive experiences of the human soul. [Footnote: German literature was indeed already known, in some measure, to readers of the Decade philosophique, and Kant had been studied in France long before 1813, the year of the publication of De l'Allemagne. See Picavet, Les Ideologues, p. 99.] [Footnote: We can see the effect of her doctrine in Guizot's remarks (Histoire de la civilisation en Europe, 2e lecon) where he says of modern literatures that "sous le point de vue du fond des sentiments et des idees elles sont plus fortes et plus riches [than the ancient]. On voit que l'ame humaine a ete remuee sur un plus grand nombre de points a une plus grande profondeur"--and to this very fact he ascribes their comparative imperfection in form.]

This view is based on the general propositions that all social phenomena closely cohere and that literature is a social phenomenon; from which it follows that if there is a progressive movement in society generally, there is a progressive movement in literature. Her books were true to the theory; they inaugurated the methods of modern criticism, which studies literary works in relation to the social background of their period.

4.

France, then, under the Bourbon Restoration began to seek new light from the obscure profundities of German speculation which Madame de Stael proclaimed. Herder's "Ideas" were translated by Edgar Quinet, Lessing's Education by Eugene Rodrigues. Cousin sat at the feet of Hegel. At the same time a new master, full of suggestiveness for those who were interested in the philosophy of history, was discovered in Italy. The "Scienza nuova" of Vico was translated by Michelet.

The book of Vico was now a hundred years old. I did not mention him in his chronological place, because he exercised no immediate influence on the world. His thought was an anachronism in the eighteenth century, it appealed to the nineteenth. He did not announce or conceive any theory of Progress, but his speculation, bewildering enough and confused in its exposition, contained principles which seemed predestined to form the basis of such a doctrine. His aim was that of Cabanis and the ideologists, to set the study of society on the same basis of cert.i.tude which had been secured for the study of nature through the work of Descartes and Newton. [Footnote: Vico has sometimes been claimed as a theorist of Progress, but incorrectly. See B. Croce, The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (Eng. tr., 1913), p. 132--an indispensable aid to the study of Vico. The first edition of the Scienza nuova appeared in 1725; the second, which was a new work, in 1730.

Vico influenced Ballanche, a writer who enjoyed a considerable repute in his day. He taught the progressive development of man towards liberty and equality within the four corners of the Christian religion, which he regarded as final. His Palingenesie sociale appeared in 1823-30.]

His fundamental idea was that the explanation of the history of societies is to be found in the human mind. The world at first is felt rather than thought; this is the condition of savages in the state of nature, who have no political organisation. The second mental state is imaginative knowledge, "poetical wisdom"; to this corresponds the higher barbarism of the heroic age. Finally, comes conceptual knowledge, and with it the age of civilisation. These are the three stages through which every society pa.s.ses, and each of these types determines law, inst.i.tutions, language, literature, and the characters of men.

Vico's strenuous researches in the study of Homer and early Roman history were undertaken in order to get at the point of view of the heroic age. He insisted that it could not be understood unless we transcended our own abstract ways of thinking and looked at the world with primitive eyes, by a forced effort of imagination. He was convinced that history had been vitiated by the habit of ignoring psychological differences, by the failure to recapture the ancient point of view. Here he was far in advance of his own times.

Concentrating his attention above all on Roman antiquity, he adopted--not altogether advantageously for his system--the revolutions of Roman history as the typical rule of social development. The succession of aristocracy (for the early kings.h.i.+p of Rome and Homeric royalty are merely forms of aristocracy in Vico's view), democracy, and monarchy is the necessary sequence of political governments. Monarchy (the Roman Empire) corresponds to the highest form of civilisation. What happens when this is reached? Society declines into an anarchical state of nature, from which it again pa.s.ses into a higher barbarism or heroic age, to be followed once more by civilisation. The dissolution of the Roman Empire and the barbarian invasions are followed by the Middle Ages, in which Dante plays the part of Homer; and the modern period with its strong monarchies corresponds to the Roman Empire. This is Vico's principle of reflux. If the theory were sound, it would mean that the civilisation of his day must again relapse into barbarism and the cycle begin again. He did not himself state this conclusion directly or venture on any prediction. It is obvious how readily his doctrine could be adapted to the conception of Progress as a spiral movement. Evidently the corresponding periods in his cycles are not identical or really h.o.m.ogeneous. Whatever points of likeness may be discovered between early Greek or Roman and medieval societies, the points of unlikeness are still more numerous and manifest. Modern civilisation differs in fundamental and far-reaching ways from Greek and Roman. It is absurd to pretend that the general movement brings man back again and again to the point from which he started, and therefore, if there is any value in Vico's reflux, it can only mean that the movement of society may be regarded as a spiral ascent, so that each stage of an upward progress corresponds, in certain general aspects, to a stage which has already been traversed, this correspondence being due to the psychical nature of man.

A conception of this kind could not be appreciated in Vico's day or by the next generation. The "Scienza nuova" lay in Montesquieu's library, and he made no use of it. But it was natural that it should arouse interest in France at a time when the new idealistic philosophies of Germany were attracting attention, and when Frenchmen, of the ideological school, were seeking, like Vico himself, a synthetic principle to explain social phenomena. Different though Vico was in his point of departure as in his methods from the German idealists, his speculations nevertheless had something in common with theirs.

Both alike explained history by the nature of mind which necessarily determined the stages of the process; Vico as little as Fichte or Hegel took eudaemonic considerations into account. The difference was that the German thinkers sought their principle in logic and applied it a priori, while Vico sought his in concrete psychology and engaged in laborious research to establish it a posteriori by the actual data of history.

But both speculations suggested that the course of human development corresponds to the fundamental character of mental processes and is not diverted either by Providential intervention or by free acts of human will.

5.

These foreign influences co-operated in determining the tendencies of French speculation in the period of the restored monarchy, whereby the idea of Progress was placed on new bas.e.m.e.nts and became the headstone of new "religions." Before we consider the founders of sects, we may glance briefly at the views of some eminent savants who had gained the ear of the public before the July Revolution--Jouffroy, Cousin, and Guizot.

Cousin, the chief luminary in the sphere of pure philosophy in France in the first half of the nineteenth century, drew his inspiration from Germany. He was professedly an eclectic, but in the main his philosophy was Hegelian. He might endow G.o.d with consciousness and speak of Providence, but he regarded the world-process as a necessary evolution of thought, and he saw, not in religion but in philosophy, the highest expression of civilisation. In 1828 he delivered a course of lectures on the philosophy of history. He divided history into three periods, each governed by a master idea: the first by the idea of the infinite (the Orient); the second by that of the finite (cla.s.sical antiquity); the third by that of the relation of finite to infinite (the modern age). As with Hegel, the future is ignored, progress is confined within a closed system, the highest circle has already been reached. As an opponent of the ideologists and the sensational philosophy on which they founded their speculations, Cousin appealed to the orthodox and all those to whom Voltairianism was an accursed thing, and for a generation he exercised a considerable influence. But his work--and this is the important point for us--helped to diffuse the idea, which the ideologists were diffusing on very different lines--that human history has been a progressive development.

Progressive development was also the theme of Jouffroy in his slight but suggestive introduction to the philosophy of history (1825), [Footnote: "Reflexions sur la philosophie de l'histoire," in Melanges philosophiques, 2nd edition, 1838.] in which he posed the same problem which, as we shall see, Saint-Simon and Comte were simultaneously attempting to solve. He had not fallen under the glamour of German idealism, and his results have more affinity with Vico's than with Hegel's.

He begins with some simple considerations which conduct to the doubtful conclusion that all the historical changes in man's condition are due to the operation of his intelligence. The historian's business is to trace the succession of the actual changes. The business of the philosopher of history is to trace the succession of ideas and study the correspondence between the two developments. This is the true philosophy of history: "the glory of our age is to understand it."

Now it is admitted to-day, he says, that the human intelligence obeys invariable laws, so that a further problem remains. The actual succession of ideas has to be deduced from these necessary laws. When that deduction is effected--a long time hence--history will disappear; it will be merged in science.

Jouffroy then presented the world with what he calls the FATALITY OF INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT, to take the place of Providence or Destiny.

It is a fatality, he is careful to explain, which, so far from compromising, presupposes individual liberty. For it is not like the fatality of sensual impulse which guides the brute creation. What it implies is this: if a thousand men have the same idea of what is good, this idea will govern their conduct in spite of their pa.s.sions, because, being reasonable and free, they are not blindly submissive to pa.s.sion, but can deliberate and choose.

This explanation of history as a necessary development of society corresponding to a necessary succession of ideas differs in two important points from the explanations of Hegel and Cousin. The succession of ideas is not conceived as a transcendent logic, but is determined by the laws of the HUMAN mind and belongs to the domain of psychology. Here Jouffroy is on the same ground as Vico. In the second place, it is not a closed system; room remains for an indefinite development in the future.

6.

While Cousin was discoursing on philosophy at Paris in the days of the last Bourbon king, Guizot was drawing crowded audiences to his lectures on the history of European civilisation, [Footnote: Histoire de la civilisation en Europe.] and the keynote of these lectures was Progress.

He approached it with a fresh mind, unenc.u.mbered with any of the philosophical theories which had attended and helped its growth.