The Idea of Progress Part 7

But this does not apply to poetry or eloquence, round which the controversy has most violently raged. For poetry and eloquence do not depend on correct reasoning. They depend princ.i.p.ally on vivacity of imagination, and "vivacity of imagination does not require a long course of experiments, or a great mult.i.tude of rules, to attain all the perfection of which it is capable." Such perfection might be attained in a few centuries. If the ancients did achieve perfection in imaginative literature, it follows that they cannot be surpa.s.sed; but we have no right to say, as their admirers are fond of pretending, that they cannot be equalled.

5.

Besides the mere nature of time, we have to take into account external circ.u.mstances in considering this question.

If the forces of nature are permanent, how are we to explain the fact that in the barbarous centuries after the decline of Rome--the term Middle Ages has not yet come into currency--ignorance was so dense and deep? This breach of continuity is one of the plausible arguments of the advocates of the Ancients. Those ages, they say, were ignorant and barbarous because the Greek and Latin writers had ceased to be read; as soon as the study of the cla.s.sical models revived there was a renaissance of reason and good taste. That is true, but it proves nothing. Nature never forgot how to mould the head of Cicero or Livy.

She produces in every age men who might be great men; but the age does not always allow them to exert their talents. Inundations of barbarians, universal wars, governments which discourage or do not favour science and art, prejudices which a.s.sume all variety of shapes--like the Chinese prejudice against dissecting corpses--may impose long periods of ignorance or bad taste.

But observe that, though the return to the study of the ancients revived, as at one stroke, the aesthetic ideals which they had created and the learning which they had acc.u.mulated, yet even if their works had not been preserved we should, though it would have cost us many long years of labour, have discovered for ourselves "ideas of the true and the beautiful." Where should we have found them? Where the ancients themselves found them, after much groping.

6.

The comparison of the life of collective humanity to the life of a single man, which had been drawn by Bacon and Pascal, Saint Sorlin and Perrault, contains or ill.u.s.trates an important truth which bears on the whole question. Fontenelle puts it thus. An educated mind is, as it were, composed of all the minds of preceding ages; we might say that a single mind was being educated throughout all history. Thus this secular man, who has lived since the beginning of the world, has had his infancy in which he was absorbed by the most urgent needs of life; his youth in which he succeeded pretty well in things of imagination like poetry and eloquence, and even began to reason, but with more courage than solidity. He is now in the age of manhood, is more enlightened, and reasons better; but he would have advanced further if the pa.s.sion for war had not distracted him and given him a distaste for the sciences to which he has at last returned.

Figures, if they are pressed, are dangerous; they suggest unwarrantable conclusions. It may be illuminative to liken the development of humanity to the growth of an individual; but to infer that the human race is now in its old age, merely on the strength of the comparison, is obviously unjustifiable. That is what Bacon and the others had done. The fallacy was pointed out by Fontenelle.

From his point of view, an "old age" of humanity, which if it meant anything meant decay as well as the wisdom of experience, was contrary to the principle of the permanence of natural forces. Man, he a.s.serts, will have no old age. He will be always equally capable, of achieving the successes of his youth; and he will become more and more expert in the things which become the age of virility. Or "to drop metaphor, men will never degenerate." In ages to come we may be regarded--say in America--with the same excess of admiration with which we regard the ancients. We might push the prediction further. In still later ages the interval of time which divides us from the Greeks and Romans will appear so relatively small to posterity that they will cla.s.sify us and the ancients as virtually contemporary; just in the same way as we group together the Greeks and Romans, though the Romans in their own day were moderns in relation to the Greeks. In that remote period men will be able to judge without prejudice the comparative merits of Sophocles and Corneille.

Unreasonable admiration for the ancients is one of the chief obstacles to progress (le progres des choses). Philosophy not only did not advance, but even fell into an abyss of unintelligible ideas, because, through devotion to the authority of Aristotle, men sought truth in his enigmatic writings instead of seeking it in nature. If the authority of Descartes were ever to have the same fortune, the results would be no less disastrous.

7.

This memorable brochure exhibits, without pedantry, perspicuous arrangement and the "geometrical" precision on which Fontenelle remarked as one of the notes of the new epoch introduced by Descartes. It displays too the author's open-mindedness, and his readiness to follow where the argument leads. He is able already to look beyond Cartesianism; he knows that it cannot be final. No man of his time was more open-minded and free from prejudice than Fontenelle. This quality of mind helped him to turn his eyes to the future. Perrault and his predecessors were absorbed in the interest of the present and the past.

Descartes was too much engaged in his own original discoveries to do more than throw a pa.s.sing glance at posterity.

Now the prospect of the future was one of the two elements which were still needed to fas.h.i.+on the theory of the progress of knowledge. All the conditions for such a theory were present. Bodin and Bacon, Descartes and the champions of the Moderns--the reaction against the Renaissance, and the startling discoveries of science--had prepared the way; progress was established for the past and present. But the theory of the progress of knowledge includes and acquires its value by including the indefinite future. This step was taken by Fontenelle. The idea had been almost excluded by Bacon's misleading metaphor of old age, which Fontenelle expressly rejects. Man will have no old age; his intellect will never degenerate; and "the sound views of intellectual men in successive generations will continually add up."

But progress must not only be conceived as extending indefinitely into the future; it must also be conceived as necessary and certain. This is the second essential feature of the theory. The theory would have little value or significance, if the prospect of progress in the future depended on chance or the unpredictable discretion of an external will.

Fontenelle a.s.serts implicitly the certainty of progress when he declares that the discoveries and improvements of the modern age would have been made by the ancients if they exchanged places with the moderns; for this amounts to saying that science will progress and knowledge increase independently of particular individuals. If Descartes had not been born, some one else would have done his work; and there could have been no Descartes before the seventeenth century. For, as he says in a later work, [Footnote: Preface des elemens de la geometrie de l'infini (OEuvres, x. p. 40, ed. 1790).] "there is an order which regulates our progress. Every science develops after a certain number of preceding sciences have developed, and only then; it has to await its turn to burst its sh.e.l.l."

Fontenelle, then, was the first to formulate the idea of the progress, of knowledge, as a complete doctrine. At the moment the import and far-reaching effects of the idea were not realised, either by himself or by others, and his pamphlet, which appeared in the company of a perverse theory of pastoral poetry, was acclaimed merely as an able defence of the Moderns.

8.

If the theory of the indefinite progress of knowledge is true, it is one of those truths which were originally established by false reasoning. It was established on a principle which excluded degeneration, but equally excluded evolution; and the whole conception of nature which Fontenelle had learned from Descartes is long since dead and buried.

But it is more important to observe that this principle, which seemed to secure the indefinite progress of knowledge, disabled Fontenelle from suggesting a theory of the progress of society. The invariability of nature, as he conceived it, was true of the emotions and the will, as well as of the intellect. It implied that man himself would be psychically always the same--unalterable, incurable. L'ordre general de la Nature a Fair bien constant. His opinion of the human race was expressed in the Dialogues of the Dead, [Footnote: It may be seen too in the Plurality of Worlds.] and it never seems to have varied. The world consists of a mult.i.tude of fools, and a mere handful of reasonable men.

Men's pa.s.sions will always be the same and will produce wars in the future as in the past. Civilisation makes no difference; it is little more than a veneer.

Even if theory had not stood in his way, Fontenelle was the last man who was likely to dream dreams of social improvement. He was temperamentally an Epicurean, of the same refined stamp as Epicurus himself, and he enjoyed throughout his long life--he lived to the age of a hundred--the tranquillity which was the true Epicurean ideal. He was never troubled by domestic cares, and his own modest ambition was satisfied when, at the age of forty, he was appointed permanent Secretary of the Academy of Sciences. He was not the man to let his mind dwell on the woes and evils of the world; and the follies and perversities which cause them interested him only so far as they provided material for his wit.

It remains, however, noteworthy that the author of the theory of the progress of knowledge, which was afterwards to expand into a general theory of human Progress, would not have allowed that this extension was legitimate; though it was through this extension that Fontenelle's idea acquired human value and interest and became a force in the world.

9.

Fontenelle did a good deal more than formulate the idea. He reinforced it by showing that the prospect of a steady and rapid increase of knowledge in the future was certified.

The postulate of the immutability of the laws of nature, which has been the indispensable basis for the advance of modern science, is fundamental with Descartes. But Descartes did not explicitly insist on it, and it was Fontenelle, perhaps more than any one else, who made it current coin. That was a service performed by the disciple; but he seems to have been original in introducing the fruitful idea of the sciences as confederate and intimately interconnected [Footnote: Roger Bacon, as we saw, had a glimpse of this principle.]; not forming a number of isolated domains, as. .h.i.therto, but const.i.tuting a system in which the advance of one will contribute to the advance of the others. He exposed with masterly ability the reciprocal relations of physics and mathematics. No man of his day had a more comprehensive view of all the sciences, though he made no original contributions to any. His curiosity was universal, and as Secretary of the Academy he was obliged, according to his own high standard of his duty, to keep abreast of all that was being done in every branch of knowledge. That was possible then; it would be impossible now.

In the famous series of obituary discourses which he delivered on savants who were members of the Academy, Fontenelle probably thought that he was contributing to the realisation of this ideal of "solidarity," for they amounted to a chronicle of scientific progress in every department. They are free from technicalities and extraordinarily lucid, and they appealed not only to men of science, but to those of the educated public who possessed some scientific curiosity. This brings us to another important role of Fontenelle--the role of interpreter of the world of science to the world outside. It is closely related to our subject.

For the popularisation of science, which was to be one of the features of the nineteenth century, was in fact a condition of the success of the idea of Progress. That idea could not insinuate itself into the public mind and become a living force in civilised societies until the meaning and value of science had been generally grasped, and the results of scientific discovery had been more or less diffused. The achievements of physical science did more than anything else to convert the imaginations of men to the general doctrine of Progress.

Before the later part of the seventeenth century, the remarkable physical discoveries of recent date had hardly escaped beyond academic circles. But an interest in these subjects began to become the fas.h.i.+on in the later years of Louis XIV. Science was talked in the salons; ladies studied mechanics and anatomy. Moliere's play, Les Femmes savantes, which appeared in 1672, is one of the first indications. In 1686 Fontenelle published his Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, in which a savant explains the new astronomy to a lady in the park of a country house. [Footnote: The Marquise of the Plurality of Worlds is supposed to be Madame de la Mesangere, who lived near Rouen, Fontenelle's birthplace. He was a friend and a frequent visitor at her chateau. See Maigron, Fontenelle, p. 42. The English translation of 1688 was by Glanvill. A new translation was published at Dublin as late as 1761.] It is the first book--at least the first that has any claim to be remembered--in the literature of popular science, and it is one of the most striking. It met with the success which it deserved. It was reprinted again and again, and it was almost immediately translated into English.

The significance of the Plurality of Worlds is indeed much greater than that of a pioneer work in popularisation and a model in the art of making technical subjects interesting. We must remember that at this time the belief that the sun revolves round the earth still prevailed.

Only the few knew better. The cosmic revolution which is a.s.sociated with the names of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo was slow in producing its effects. It was rejected by Bacon; and the condemnation of Galileo by the Church made Descartes, who dreaded nothing so much as a collision with the ecclesiastical authorities unwilling to insist on it.

[Footnote: Cp. Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartesienne, i. p.

42-3.] Milton's Raphael, in the Eighth Book of Paradise Lost (published 1667), does not venture to affirm the Copernican system; he explains it sympathetically, but leaves the question open. [Footnote: Ma.s.son (Milton's Poetical Works, vol. 2) observes that Milton's life (1608-74) "coincides with the period of the struggle between the two systems"

(p. 90). Milton's friends, the Smectymnians, in answer to Bishop Hall's Humble Remonstrance (1641), "had cited the Copernican doctrine as an unquestionable instance of a supreme absurdity." Ma.s.son has some apposite remarks on the influence of the Ptolemaic system "upon the thinkings and imaginations of mankind everywhere on all subjects whatsoever till about two hundred years ago."] Fontenelle's book was an event. It disclosed to the general public a new picture of the universe, to which men would have to accustom their imaginations.

We may perhaps best conceive all that this change meant by supposing what a difference it would make to us if it were suddenly discovered that the old system which Copernicus upset was true after all, and that we had to think ourselves back into a strictly limited universe of which the earth is the centre. The loss of its privileged position by our own planet; its degradation, from a cosmic point of view, to insignificance; the necessity of admitting the probability that there may be many other inhabited worlds--all this had consequences ranging beyond the field of astronomy. It was as if a man who dreamed that he was living in Paris or London should awake to discover that he was really in an obscure island in the Pacific Ocean, and that the Pacific Ocean was immeasurably vaster than he had imagined. The Marquise, in the Plurality of Worlds, reacts to the startling illumination: "Voila l'univers si grand que je m'y perds, je ne sais plus ou je suis; je ne suis plus rien.--La terre est si effroyablement pet.i.te!"

Such a revolution in cosmic values could not fail to exert a penetrating influence on human thought. The privileged position of the earth had been a capital feature of the whole doctrine, as to the universe and man's destinies, which had been taught by the Church, and it had made that doctrine more specious than it might otherwise have seemed. Though the Churches could reform their teaching to meet the new situation, the fact remained that the Christian scheme sounded less plausible when the central importance of the human race was shown to be an illusion. Would man, stripped of his cosmic pretensions, and finding himself lost in the immensities of s.p.a.ce, invent a more modest theory of his destinies confined to his own little earth--si effroyablement pet.i.te? The eighteenth century answered this question by the theory of Progress.

10.

Fontenelle is one of the most representative thinkers of that period--we have no distinguis.h.i.+ng name for it--which lies between the characteristic thinkers of the seventeenth century and the characteristic thinkers of the eighteenth. It is a period of over sixty years, beginning about 1680, for though Montesquieu and Voltaire were writing long before 1740, the great influential works of the "age of illumination" begin with the Esprit des lois in 1748. The intellectual task of this intervening period was to turn to account the ideas provided by the philosophy of Descartes, and use them as solvents of the ideas handed down from the Middle Ages. We might almost call it the Cartesian period for, though Descartes was dead, it was in these years that Cartesianism performed its task and transformed human thought.

When we speak of Cartesianism we do not mean the metaphysical system of the master, or any of his particular views such as that of innate ideas. We mean the general principles, which were to leave an abiding impression on the texture of thought: the supremacy of reason over authority, the stability of the laws of Nature, rigorous standards of proof. Fontenelle was far from accepting all the views of Descartes, whom he does not scruple to criticise; but he was a true Cartesian in the sense that he was deeply imbued with these principles, which generated, to use an expression of his own, "des especes de rebelles, qui conspiraient contre l'ignorance et les prejuges dominants."

[Footnote: Eloge de M. Lemery.] And of all these rebels against ruling prejudices he probably did more than any single man to exhibit the consequences of the Cartesian ideas and drive them home.

The Plurality of Worlds was a contribution to the task of transforming thought and abolis.h.i.+ng ancient error; but the History of Oracles which appeared in the following year was more characteristic. It was a free adaptation of an unreadable Latin treatise by a Dutchman, which in Fontenelle's skilful hands becomes a vehicle for applying Cartesian solvents to theological authority. The thesis is that the Greek oracles were a sacerdotal imposture, and not, as ecclesiastical tradition said, the work of evil spirits, who were stricken silent at the death of Jesus Christ. The effect was to discredit the authority of the early Fathers of the Church, though the writer has the discretion to repudiate such an intention. For the publication was risky; and twenty years later a Jesuit Father wrote a treatise to confute it, and exposed the secret poison, with consequences which might have been disastrous for Fontenelle if he had not had powerful friends among the Jesuits themselves. Fontenelle had none of the impetuosity of Voltaire, and after the publication of the History of Oracles he confined his criticism of tradition to the field of science. He was convinced that "les choses fort etablies ne peuvent etre attaquees que par degrez."

[Footnote: Eloge de M. Lemery.]

The secret poison, of which Fontenelle prepared this remarkable dose with a touch which reminds us of Voltaire, was being administered in the same Cartesian period, and with similar precautions, by Bayle. Like Fontenelle, this great sceptic, "the father of modern incredulity" as he was called by Joseph de Maistre, stood between the two centuries and belonged to both. Like Fontenelle, he took a gloomy view of humanity; he had no faith in that goodness of human nature which was to be a characteristic dogma of the age of illumination. But he was untouched by the discoveries of science; he took no interest in Galileo or Newton; and while the most important work of Fontenelle was the interpretation of the positive advances of knowledge, Bayle's was entirely subversive.

The principle of unchangeable laws in nature is intimately connected with the growth of Deism which is a note of this period. The function of the Deity was virtually confined to originating the machine of nature, which, once regulated, was set beyond any further interference on His part, though His existence might be necessary for its conservation. A view so sharply opposed to the current belief could not have made way as it did without a penetrating criticism of the current theology.

Such criticism was performed by Bayle. His works were a school for rationalism for about seventy years. He supplied to the thinkers of the eighteenth century, English as well as French, a magazine of subversive arguments, and he helped to emanc.i.p.ate morality both from theology and from metaphysics.

This intellectual revolutionary movement, which was propagated in salons as well as by books, shook the doctrine of Providence which Bossuet had so eloquently expounded. It meant the enthronement of reason--Cartesian reason--before whose severe tribunal history as well as opinions were tried. New rules of criticism were introduced, new standards of proof.

When Fontenelle observed that the existence of Alexander the Great could not be strictly demonstrated and was no more than highly probable, [Footnote: Plurality des mondes, sixieme soir.] it was an undesigned warning that tradition would receive short shrift at the hands of men trained in a.n.a.lytical Cartesian methods.

11.

That the issue between the claims of antiquity and the modern age should have been debated independently in England and France indicates that the controversy was an inevitable incident in the liberation of the human spirit from the authority of the ancients. Towards the end of the century the debate in France aroused attention in England and led to a literary quarrel, less important but not less acrimonious than that which raged in France. Sir William Temple's Essay, Wotton's Reflexions, and Swift's satire the Battle of the Books are the three outstanding works in the episode, which is however chiefly remembered on account of its connection with Bentley's masterly exposure of the fabricated letters of Phalaris.

The literary debate in France, indeed, could not have failed to reverberate across the Channel; for never perhaps did the literary world in England follow with more interest, or appreciate more keenly the productions of the great French writers of the time. In describing Will's coffee-house, which was frequented by Dryden and all who pretended to be interested in polite letters, Macaulay says, "there was a faction for Perrault and the moderns, a faction for Boileau and the ancients." In the discussions on this subject a remarkable Frenchman who had long lived in England as an exile, M. de Saint Evremond, must have constantly taken part. The disjointed pieces of which Saint Evremond's writings consist are tedious and superficial, but they reveal a mind of much cultivation and considerable common sense. His judgement on Perrault's Parallel is that the author "has discovered the defects of the ancients better than he has made out the advantage of the moderns; his book is good and capable of curing us of abundance of errors."

[Footnote: In a letter to the d.u.c.h.ess of Mazarin, Works, Eng. tr., iii.

418.] He was not a partisan. But his friend, Sir William Temple, excited by the French depreciations of antiquity, rushed into the lists with greater courage than discretion.

Temple was ill equipped for the controversy, though his Essay on Ancient and Modern Learning (1690) is far from deserving the disdain of Macaulay, who describes its matter as "ludicrous and contemptible to the last degree." [Footnote: The only point in it which need be noted here is that the author questioned the cogency of Fontenelle's argument, that the forces of nature being permanent human ability is in all ages the same. "May there not," he asks, "many circ.u.mstances concur to one production that do not to any other in one or many ages?" Fontenelle speaks of trees. It is conceivable that various conditions and accidents "may produce an oak, a fig, or a plane-tree, that shall deserve to be renowned in story, and shall not perhaps be paralleled in other countries or times. May not the same have happened in the production, growth, and size of wit and genius in the world, or in some parts or ages of it, and from many more circ.u.mstances that contributed towards it than what may concur to the stupendous growth of a tree or animal?"] And it must be confessed that the most useful result of the Essay was the answer which it provoked from Wotton. For Wotton had a far wider range of knowledge, and a more judicious mind, than any of the other controversialists, with the exception of Fontenelle; and in knowledge of antiquity he was Fontenelle's superior. His inquiry stands out as the most sensible and unprejudiced contribution to the whole debate. He accepts as just the reasoning of Fontenelle "as to the comparative force of the geniuses of men in the several ages of the world and of the equal force of men's understandings absolutely considered in all times since learning first began to be cultivated amongst mankind." But this is not incompatible with the thesis that in some branches the ancients excelled all who came after them. For it is not necessary to explain such excellence by the hypothesis that there was a particular force of genius evidently discernible in former ages, but extinct long since, and that nature is now worn out and spent. There is an alternative explanation.

There may have been special circ.u.mstances "which might suit with those ages which did exceed ours, and with those things wherein they did exceed us, and with no other age nor thing besides."

But we must begin our inquiry by sharply distinguis.h.i.+ng two fields of mental activity--the field of art, including poetry, oratory, architecture, painting, and statuary; and the field of knowledge, including mathematics, natural science, physiology, with all their dependencies. In the case of the first group there is room for variety of opinion; but the superiority of the Greeks and Romans in poetry and literary style may be admitted without prejudice to the mental equality of the moderns, for it may be explained partly by the genius of their languages and partly by political circ.u.mstances--for example, in the case of oratory, [Footnote: This had been noted by Fontenelle in his Digression.] by the practical necessity of eloquence. But as regards the other group, knowledge is not a matter of opinion or taste, and a definite judgement is possible. Wotton then proceeds to review systematically the field of science, and easily shows, with more completeness and precision than Perrault, the superiority of modern methods and the enormous strides which had been made.

As to the future, Wotton expresses himself cautiously. It is not easy to say whether knowledge will advance in the next age proportionally to its advance in this. He has some fears that there may be a falling away, because ancient learning has still too great a hold over modern books, and physical and mathematical studies tend to be neglected. But he ends his Reflexions by the speculation that "some future age, though perhaps not the next, and in a country now possibly little thought of, may do that which our great men would be glad to see done; that is to say, may raise real knowledge, upon foundations laid in this age, to the utmost possible perfection to which it may be brought by mortal men in this imperfect state."