The Idea of Progress Part 20

Marcellin-Berthelot (published in Dialogues et fragments philosophiques, 1876): "Que sera Ie monde quand un million de fois se sera reproduit ce qui s'est pa.s.se depuis 1763 quand la chimie, au lieu de quatre-vingt ans de progres, en aura cent millions?" (p. 183). And again in the Dialogues written in 1871 (ib.), where it is laid down that the end of humanity is to produce great men: "le grand oeuvre s'accomplira par la science, non par la democratic. Rien sans grands hommes; le salut se fera par des grands hommes" (p. 103).]

In 1890 there was nothing left of the sentimental socialism which he had studied in 1848; it had been blown away by the cold wind of scientific socialism which Marx and Engels created. And Renan had come to think that in this new form socialism would triumph. [Footnote: He reckoned without the new forces, opposed to socialism as well as to parliamentary democracy, represented by Bakunin and men like Georges Sorel.] He had criticised Comte for believing that "man lives exclusively by science, or rather little verbal tags, like geometrical theorems, dry formulae."

Was he satisfied by the concrete doctrine of Marx that all the phenomena of civilisation at a given period are determined by the methods of production and distribution which then prevail? But the future of socialism is a minor issue, and the ultimate goal of humanity is quite uncertain. "Ce qu'il y a de consolant, c'est qu'on arrive necessairement quelque part." We may console ourselves with the certainty that we must get somewhere.

6.

Proudhon described the idea of Progress as the railway of liberty. It certainly supplied motive power to social ideals which were repugnant and alarming to the authorities of the Catholic Church. At the Vatican it was clearly seen that the idea was a powerful engine driven by an enemy; and in the famous SYLLABUS of errors which Pope Pius IX. flung in the face of the modern world at the end of 1864, Progress had the honour of being censured. The eightieth error, which closes the list, runs thus:

Roma.n.u.s Pontifex potest ac debet c.u.m progressu, c.u.m liberalismo et c.u.m recenti civilitate sese reconciliare et componere.

"The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, be reconciled and come to terms with progress, with liberalism, and with modern civilisation."

No wonder, seeing that Progress was invoked to justify every movement that offended the nostrils of the Vatican--liberalism, toleration, democracy, and socialism. And the Roman Church well understood the intimate connection of the idea with the advance of rationalism.

CHAPTER XVIII. MATERIAL PROGRESS: THE EXHIBITION OF 1851

1.

It is not easy for a new idea of the speculative order to penetrate and inform the general consciousness of a community until it has a.s.sumed some external and concrete embodiment or is recommended by some striking material evidence. In the case of Progress both these conditions were fulfilled in the period 1820 to 1850. In the Saint-Simonian Church, and in the attempts of Owen and Cabet to found ideal societies, people saw practical enterprises inspired by the idea. They might have no sympathy with these enterprises, but their attention was attracted. And at the same time they were witnessing a rapid transformation of the external conditions of life, a movement to the continuation of which there seemed no reason for setting any limit in the future. The spectacular results of the advance of science and mechanical technique brought home to the mind of the average man the conception of an indefinite increase of man's power over nature as his brain penetrated her secrets. This evident material progress which has continued incessantly ever since has been a mainstay of the general belief in Progress which is prevalent to-day.

England was the leader in this material progress, of which the particulars are familiar and need not be enumerated here. The discovery of the power of steam and the potentialities of coal revolutionised the conditions of life. Men who were born at the beginning of the century had seen, before they had pa.s.sed the age of thirty, the rapid development of steam navigation, the illumination of towns and houses by gas, the opening of the first railway.

It was just before this event, the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester railway, which showed how machinery would abbreviate s.p.a.ce as it had SIR THOMAS MORE, OR COLLOQUIES ON THE PROGRESS OF SOCIETY (1829).

There we see the effect of the new force on his imagination. "Steam," he says, "will govern the world next,... and shake it too before its empire is established." The biographer of Nelson devotes a whole conversation to the subject of "steam and war." But the theme of the book is the question of moral and social progress, on which the author inclines to the view that "the world will continue to improve, even as it has. .h.i.therto been continually improving; and that the progress of knowledge and the diffusion of Christianity will bring about at last, when men become Christian in reality as well as in name, something like that Utopian state of which philosophers have loved to dream." This admission of Progress, cautious though it was, circ.u.mscribed by reserves and compromised by hesitations, coming from such a conservative pillar of Church and State as Southey, is a notable sign of the times, when we remember that the idea was still a.s.sociated then with revolution and heresy.

It is significant too that at the same time an octogenarian mathematician of Aberdeen was composing a book on the same subject.

Hamilton's PROGRESS OF SOCIETY is now utterly forgotten, but it must have contributed in its day to propagating the same moderate view of Progress, consistent with orthodoxy, which Southey held. "The belief of the perfectibility of human nature and the attainment of a golden age in which vice and misery have no place, will only be entertained by an enthusiast; but an inquiry into the means of improving our nature and enlarging our happiness is consistent with sober reason, and is the most important subject, merely human, that can engage the mind of man." [Footnote: P. 13. The book was published posthumously by Murray in 1830, a year after the author's death.] [Footnote: "Progress of Society." The phrase was becoming common; e.g. Russell's History of Modern Europe (1822) has the sub-t.i.tle A view of the Progress of Society, etc. The didactic poem of Payne Knight, The Progress of Civil Society (1796), a very dull performance, was quite unaffected by the dreams of Priestley or G.o.dwin. It was towards the middle of the nineteenth century that Progress, without any qualifying phrase, came into use.]

2.

We have been told by Tennyson that when he went by the first train from Liverpool to Manchester (1830) he thought that the wheels ran in grooves.

"Then I made this line:

Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change."

[Footnote: See Tennyson, Memoir by his Son, vol. i. p. 195.]

LOCKSLEY HALL, which was published in 1842, ill.u.s.trates how the idea of Progress had begun to creep into the imagination of Englishmen. Though subsidiary to a love story, it is the true theme of the poem. The pulsation of eager interest in the terrestrial destinies of humanity, the large excitement of living in a "wondrous Mother-age," dreams of the future, quicken the pa.s.sion of the hero's youth. His disappointment in love disenchants him; he sees the reverse side of civilisation, but at last he finds an anodyne for his palsied heart in a more sober version of his earlier faith, a chastened belief in his Mother-age. He can at least discern an increasing purpose in history, and can be sure that "the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns." The novelty of the poem lay in finding a cathartic cure for a private sorrow, not in religion or in nature, but in the modern idea of Progress. It may be said to mark a stage in the career of the idea.

The view of civilisation which Tennyson took as his MOTIF had no revolutionary implications, suggested no impatience or anger with the past. The startling prospect unfolding itself before "the long result of time," and history is justified by the promise of to-day:

The centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed.

Very different was the spirit in which another great poet composed, nearly twenty years later, a wonderful hymn of Progress. Victor Hugo's PLEIN CEIL, in his epic LA LEGENDE DES SIECLES,[Footnote: A.D. 1859.]

announces a new era of the world in which man, the triumphant rebel, delivered from his past, will move freely forward on a glorious way. The poet is inspired not by faith in a continuous development throughout the ages, but by the old spirit of the Revolution, and he sees in the past only a heavy chain which the race at last flings off. The horrible past has gone, not to return: "ce monde est mort"; and the poem is at once a paean on man's victorious rebellion against it and a dithyramb on the prospect of his future.

Man is imagined as driving through the heavens an aerial car to which the four winds are harnessed, mounting above the clouds, and threatening to traverse the ether.

Superbe, il plane, avec un hymne en ses agres; Et l'on voit voir pa.s.ser la strophe du progres.

Il est la nef, il est le phare!

L'homme enfin prend son sceptre et jette son baton.

Et l'on voit s'envoler le calcul de Newton Monte sur l'ode de Pindare.

But if this vision foreshadows the conquest of the air, its significance is symbolic rather than literal, and, like Pindar checking the steeds of his song, Hugo returns to earth:

Pas si loin! pas si haut! redescendons.

Restons L'homme, restons Adam; mais non l'homme a tatons, Mais non l'Adam tombe! Tout autre reve altere L'espece d'ideal qui convient a la terre.

Contentons-nous du mot: meilleur! ecrit partout.

Dawn has appeared, after six thousand years in the fatal way, and man, freed by "the invisible hand" from the weight of his chains, has embarked for new sh.o.r.es:

Ou va-t-il ce navire? II va, de jour vetu, A l'avenir divin et pur, a la vertu, A la science qu'on voit luire, A la mort des fleaux, a l'oubli genereux, A l'abondance, au caime, au rire, a l'homme heureux, Il va, ce glorieux navire.

Oh! ce navire fait le voyage sacre!

C'est l'ascension bleue a son premier degre; Hors de l'antique et vil decombre, Hors de la pesanteur, c'est l'avenir fonde; C'est le destin de l'homme a la fin evade, Qui leve l'ancre et sort de l'ombre!

The union of humanity in a universal commonwealth, which Tennyson had expressed as "the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World,"

the goal of many theorists of Progress, becomes in Hugo's imagination something more sublime. The magic s.h.i.+p of man's destiny is to compa.s.s the cosmopolis of the Stoics, a terrestrial order in harmony with the whole universe.

Nef magique et supreme! elle a, rien qu'eri marchant, Change le cri terrestre en pur et joyeux chant, Rajeuni les races fletries, Etabli l'ordre vrai, montre le chemin sur, Dieu juste! et fait entrer dans l'homme tant d'azur Qu'elle a supprime les patries!

Faisant a l'homme avec le ciel une cite, Une pensee avec toute l'immensite, Elle abolit les vieilles regles; Elle abaisse les monts, elle annule les tours; Splendide, elle introduit les peuples, marcheurs lourds, Dans la communion des aigles.

3.

Between 1830 and 1850 railway transport spread throughout Great Britain and was introduced on the Continent, and electricity was subdued to man's use by the invention of telegraphy. The great Exhibition of London in 1851 was, in one of its aspects, a public recognition of the material progress of the age and the growing power of man over the physical world. Its aim, said a contemporary, was "to seize the living scroll of human progress, inscribed with every successive conquest of man's intellect."[Footnote: Edinburgh Review (October 1851), p. 562, in a review of the Official Catalogue of the Exhibition.] The Prince Consort, who originated the Exhibition, explained its significance in a public speech:

"n.o.body who has paid any attention to the peculiar features of our present era will doubt for a moment that we are living at a period of most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end to which indeed all history points--THE REALISATION OF THE UNITY OF MANKIND.... The distances which separated the different nations and parts of the globe are rapidly vanis.h.i.+ng before the achievements of modern invention, and we can traverse them with incredible ease; the languages of all nations are known, and their acquirements placed within the reach of everybody; thought is communicated with the rapidity, and even by the power, of lightning. On the other hand, the GREAT PRINCIPLE OF DIVISION OF LABOUR, which may be called the moving power of civilisation, is being extended to all branches of science, industry, and art... Gentlemen, the Exhibition of 1851 is to give us a true test and a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived in this great task, and a new starting-point from which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions."

[Footnote: Martin, Life of the Prince Consort (ed. 3), iii. p. 247.

The speech was delivered at a banquet at the Mansion House on March 21, 1850.]

The point emphasised here is the "solidarity" of the world. The Exhibition is to bring home to men's consciousness the community of all the inhabitants of the earth. The a.s.sembled peoples, wrote Thackeray, in his "May-day Ode," [Footnote: Published in the Times, April 30, 1851.

The Exhibition was opened on May I.] See the sumptuous banquet set, The brotherhood of nations met Around the feast.

And this was the note struck in the leading article of the Times on the opening day: "The first morning since the creation that all peoples have a.s.sembled from all parts of the world and done a common act." It was claimed that the Exhibition signified a new, intelligent, and moral movement which "marks a great crisis in the history of the world," and foreshadows universal peace.

England, said another writer, produced Bacon and Newton, the two philosophers "who first lent direction and force to the stream of industrial science; we have been the first also to give the widest possible base to the watch-tower of international progress, which seeks the formation of the physical well-being of man and the extinction of the meaner jealousies of commerce."[Footnote: Edinburgh Review, loc.

cit.]

These quotations show that the great Exhibition was at the time optimistically regarded, not merely as a record of material achievements, but as a demonstration that humanity was at last well on its way to a better and happier state, through the falling of barriers and the resulting insight that the interests of all are closely interlocked. A vista was suggested, at the end of which far-sighted people might think they discerned Tennyson's "Federation of the World."