Progress and History Part 3

None the less, and this is important, this world does not cease to be significant for him. He does not turn aside,--as some souls, intoxicated with the Divine, have done,--from this world altogether.

Because he holds that man can only advance by struggling to make this world better. Man's ordinary life may be like the life in a cave, as he says in his famous myth, but the true philosopher who has once risen out of the cave must go back into it again and teach the prisoners there what the universe really is (_Republic_, Book vi, _fin._; vii, _init._).

The very pa.s.sage that I quoted about man's real nature comes at the end of the _Republic_. Now the _Republic_ is a Utopia, and no one writes a Utopia unless he believes that the effort to reach it is of prime importance to man and helps him to advance.

Only, for Plato, the advance is not marked in the successive stages of history, as the modern faith in progress a.s.serts. The life on earth, for Plato, is like a school through which men pa.s.s and in which they may learn and grow, but the school itself does not go on growing. It is not that he does not envisage change in history, but what he seems to hope for at the best is nothing more hopeful than recurring cycles of better and worse. He tells a fable, in his dialogue 'The Statesman', of how at one time the world is set spinning in the right direction by G.o.d and then all goes well, and again how G.o.d ceases to control it, and then it gradually forgets the divine teaching and slips from good to bad and from bad to worse, until at last G.o.d takes pity on it once more to save it from utter destruction (_Polit._ 269 ff.). No doubt in this idea of cycles Plato is influenced by the popular thought of his time: this feeling that there had been a lost Golden Age in the past was deeply rooted in Greek mythology. We get it long before Plato, in Hesiod, and there are similar touches in Homer, and once men believe that they have sunk from glory, there is always the dread that if ever they recover it they will lose it again. And with Plato this dread is reinforced by his sense of something incurable in the world, the thwarting influence of spatial and temporal matter (_Theaet._ 176 A).

It is strange that, though he is always thinking of the individual soul as learning through experience in its pa.s.sage from one life to another, Plato does not seem to have the idea of mankind learning by the lessons of history, of knowledge being handed down from one age to another, and growing in the process. That is one of the most inspiring ideas in modern thought: a German writer has spoken of history as the long Odyssey of the human spirit, the common mind of Man coming at last through its wanderings to find out what it really wants, and where its true home lies.

And here, significantly enough, we find we are brought back in our modern way to something very like Plato's own conception of an eternal unchanging Reality. There are endless problems in the whole conception of the Eternal that I am quite unable even to attempt; but this much at least seems clear to me, that the whole idea of mankind learning by the experience of History, implies something of permanent value running through that experience. The very thought of continued progress implies that man can look back at the successive stages of the Past and say of each: In that lay values which I, to-day and always, can recognize as good, although I believe we have more good now. Seeley speaks in a n.o.ble pa.s.sage of how religion might conceive a progressive revelation which was, in a sense, the same through all its stages, and yet was a growing thing:--'each new revelation a.s.serts its own superiority to those which went before,' but the superiority is 'not of one thing to another thing--but of the developed thing to the undeveloped'. 'It is thus', he writes, 'that the ages should behave to one another.' This is the true 'understanding and concert with time'.[10] And though Plato does not live in the thought of historic progress, yet such a conception of progress which recognizes at different stages different expressions, more or less adequate, of one eternal value, such a way of thinking is entirely Platonic. When we look back at history in this mood we think not only of grasping the right principles for the Future, but of rejoicing in the definite achievements of the Past, and we feel this most poignantly, I think, of the achievements won by the spirit of Beauty. Great works of Art we are accustomed actually to call immortal, and we mean by this not merely that we think they will always be famous, but that there is something in them that makes it impossible for them ever to be superseded. In themselves they are inexhaustible: if they cease to interest us, it is our fault and not theirs. We may want more, we do want more, where they came from, but we never want to lose them, any more than we could bear to lose our old friends, though we may desire to make new ones. Of all the divine Ideas, said Plato, Beauty is the one that shows itself most plainly in the world of sense and speaks to us most plainly of the eternal realities.

This, however, is perhaps trenching on the subject of Progress in Art, and I should like to return to the general Greek conception of the tendency in all nature towards the Good, the perfect realization of perfect types.

Plato does not expressly insist that this tendency is of the nature of effort, though I think that is involved in his view. But Aristotle does.

Following Plato in essentials, he makes bold to say outright that every natural thing in its own way longs for the divine and desires to share in the divine life, so far as it can.[11] Every such thing in this world of s.p.a.ce and time has to cope with difficulties and is imperfect, but everything struggles towards the good. That good is in the life of G.o.d, a thinking life, an activity of thought, existing in some sense beyond this imperfect world; and this life is so supremely desirable that it makes everything else struggle to reach it. It moves the whole world, Aristotle says, in a famous pa.s.sage, because it is loved. It is the world's desire.[12]

Now this idea of effort--or of something a.n.a.logous to effort--const.i.tuting the inner nature of every natural thing reappears, with pregnant consequences, in modern thought, though seldom with these vast theological consequences. The idea of an upward effort through nature lies at the base of our most hopeful theories of evolution, and forms the true support of our modern faith in progress. Broadly speaking, our evolutionists are now divided into two schools: the adherents of the one believe that variations are purely accidental, and may occur in any direction whatsoever, the useful ones being preserved only because they happen to be useful for the life of the species, while the adherents of the other--the school that I would call the school of hope--believe that accident, even with natural selection to aid it, is utterly inadequate to account for the ordered beauty and harmony that we do see in natural things. They admit, as Plato and Aristotle admit, imperfection and difficulty in the world, but they insist on a movement towards value: in short, they conceive an order emerging that is brought about, to quote a modern writer, both in nature and in society, by 'a principle of movement and progress conflicting with a principle of inertia.'[13]

Aristotle, in words that are strikingly modern, raises the very question at issue here.[14] He asks whether we can suppose that nature does not aim at the good at all, but that variations arise by chance and are preserved just because they are useful, and he scouts the idea that chance could do more, as Zeller says, than 'bring about isolated and abnormal results'. He chooses instead the conception of purpose and effort, and this in spite of the difficulties in conceiving a purpose and an effort that are not definitely conscious. The sort of thing that is in Aristotle's mind when he speaks of nature aiming at the good, comes out in a pa.s.sage by Edward Carpenter in his little book _The Art of Creation_. Carpenter plunges boldly and compares the principle that makes a tree grow and propagate its kind with the impulse that makes a man express himself. Man, he says,

has a Will and Purpose, a Character, which, do what you will, tends to push outwards towards expression. You put George Fox in prison, you flog and persecute him, but the moment he has a chance he goes and preaches just the same as before.... But take a Tree and you notice exactly the same thing. A dominant Idea informs the life of the Tree; persisting, it forms the tree. You may snip the leaves as much as you like to a certain pattern, but they will only grow in their own shape. Finally, you may cut the tree down root and branch and burn it, but, if there is left a single seed, within that seed ... lurks the formative ideal, which under proper conditions will again spring into life and expression.[15]

Aristotle would have endorsed almost every word of this. In his pithy way, speaking of the distinction between natural and artificial objects, he says himself that if you planted a wooden bed and the wood could still grow, it would grow up, not a bed, but a tree.[16]

He would not have gone so far as to talk about the _Will_ of a tree, but he would have admitted that what made the tree grow was the same sort of thing as Will. And in one respect he goes farther than Edward Carpenter does. For he considers that not only growth but even the movement of natural things through s.p.a.ce is somehow an expression of a tendency towards the good and the divine, a tendency which, when consciousness supervenes, we can call effort, an activity, even though, at its best, only an imperfect activity. He looks up at the splendour of the circling stars and asks if it is possible that so glorious an order can be anything but a manifestation of something akin to the divine. Here indeed he is speaking of movements made by existences he reckoned among the highest in the world, for he thought the stars were living beings higher than man. But he recognized a rudimentary form of such activity even in what we now call inanimate matter. Here we come to a leading conception of Aristotle's, and one most important for our purpose: the conception of a hierarchy of natural existences, all of them with some value, less or more. When Aristotle is truest to himself, he will tell us not to be afraid of studying the meanest forms of natural existence, because in everything there is something marvellous and divine. He quotes with much satisfaction the story of Heracleitus, who welcomed his friends into the bakehouse with the saying that 'there were G.o.ds in the bakehouse too'.[17]

Thus, at the lowest end of the scale, we have what we call inanimate matter, which Aristotle thinks of much as we do, namely, as something occupying s.p.a.ce, the different parts of it being endowed with different powers of movement, and with different properties, such as warmth or coldness, wetness or dryness. A natural thing, he says, is a thing that has a principle of activity in itself, something that makes it act in a definite way, whenever it is not interfered with by anything else.[18]

Aristotle speaks, for example, of fire having a natural tendency to mount up, much as we might speak of solids having a natural tendency to gravitate towards one another. Go back as far as we like, and, Aristotle thinks, we still find certain primitive differences which const.i.tute what we call the primitive elements. This, I imagine, is much the point of view of modern science.

And these primitive elements in Aristotle's view influence each other, unite with each other, or change into each other. As a rule, however, they exhibit no new powers. But given a happy concurrence of qualities, say a certain union of heat and cold, and a new power does become manifest: the power of life. Thus, in a sense, Aristotle does envisage the spontaneous generation of life; and he knows, roughly, what he means by life. The living thing can go through far more changes than the non-living, while yet remaining recognizably the same thing. For example, it shows in itself a greater advance to richness and also a decline, it uses other things to foster this advance, and it sends out fresh things, like itself, but independent of itself: in short, it grows, decays, feeds itself, and propagates its kind.[19]

As I understand Aristotle, for him there is not an entire and absolute difference between ordinary matter and living things, and yet there is a real difference, and one not to be explained away, for there is a new manifestation of active energy. And if we consider life of more value than mere motion, then we are right in saying there is a higher energy.

The quality of growth is a quality which could not be deduced from the quality of warmth or from the quality of mere movement in s.p.a.ce, and yet all three qualities are alike in this, that they are all manifestations of an energy which is somehow inherent in things, and not merely imposed on them from without. The manifestations of life are started, in a sense, by the different movements, 'mechanical', if you like to call them so, in the rudimentary forms of matter, the elements meeting each other in s.p.a.ce. The process of life could not have begun without such movements. But neither could it have begun if the elements, just as they appear, had been all there was. There had to be latent, that is, the possibility of a different and higher mode of action. This higher mode of action Aristotle calls a higher Form, a higher Idea. And I think it is true to him to say that he believes the lower Forms, the lower Ideas, do their most perfect work when they bring about the conditions under which the higher ones can operate. For when he speaks of that concurrence of elements that conditions life he speaks of the 'warmth and cold' as 'having mastered the matter'.[20]

In any case he conceives a whole series of higher and lower Forms, the higher coming nearer and nearer to that full and glorious activity which he conceives to be the life of G.o.d. Above the power of the thing to grow as a plant grows appears the power of sensation as it is present in animals, and above that again the power, first seen in man, of living the life of thought, perceiving what is beautiful and true in the 'forms', the characters, of all the things around him, and with this that further power of setting consciously before himself what he really wants to be and to do, the power of moral action strictly so-called.

Throughout this series, in every higher stage the lower is present as a kind of basis. In the man who thinks there is active not only the power of thought, but also the power of sensation, the faculty of growth, and the physical properties of the body. It would seem that Aristotle has only to take one step, and he would be a thoroughgoing evolutionist. He has only to say that the different stages are successive in time, the lower regularly preceding the higher. But this step he hesitates to take.

He often comes very near it. He speaks of nature pa.s.sing gradually from inanimate things through living things to living animals. He speaks of what is first in itself, first inherently, 'prior' in the logical sense because it is the goal and the completion of the thing, as appearing later in time. For instance, he believes that man can only find his real happiness and develop his real nature in the State, but the State appears later in time than the primitive a.s.sociations of the household and the family.[21] What came earlier in history were barbarous communities such as those of the Cyclopes, where 'each man laid down the law for his wife and children and obeyed no other law'.

But Aristotle does not go on from this belief to the belief in a universal upward process throughout all history. The developed State, it is true, may always have been preceded by a lower form, but that lower form may itself have been preceded by a higher.

Aristotle, in short, is haunted, like Plato, by the idea of cycles, alternations, decline and progress, progress and decline. He feels this both in the life of States and in the whole life of the world. He speaks of the same discoveries being made over and over again, an infinite number of times, in the history of civilization. And his words recall the sad pa.s.sage in Plato's _Laws_ (676) referring to the numberless nations and states, ten thousand times ten thousand, that had risen and fallen all over the world, pa.s.sing from worse to better and from better to worse. Similarly Aristotle will speak of degraded animal forms, and sometimes write as though the animal world could sink back into the vegetable altogether.

Admitting, however, something like progress within the different cycles, we must ask a little more about the kind of progress which Aristotle would have desired. (I take Aristotle again as a typical Greek.) Man at his best, he clearly holds, in trying to realize his true nature should aim at a happiness which involves a harmony of all his faculties, a harmony inspired and led by the highest faculty of all, the Reason which rejoices in the contemplation of what is at once true and good and beautiful.

Now in this aim, we must ask, does a man need other men and other creatures, and in what sense does he need them? Here, I think, we come on two inconsistent tendencies in Aristotle's thought, connected with two different ways of regarding the hierarchy of existences. We say that one existence is higher than another. Does this mean that what we call the lower are only so many blundering attempts to reach the higher? That every creature, for example, which is not a thinking man is, on the whole, a mistake? Aristotle often does speak like that. Woman, he says in one pa.s.sage, is only a mutilated male.[22] The principle which ought to develop into the active power of thought could not, he explains, in women master the recalcitrant element which is always thwarting perfection, and thus woman is man _manque_. On these lines of thought it is easy to slip into looking on all other forms of existence as merely valuable in so far as they serve the direct purposes of men, and indeed only of a few men, those namely who are able to think as philosophers.

This is the kind of view according to which, as the satirist suggests, cork-trees only grow in order to make corks for champagne-bottles, and the inferior races of mankind only exist to furnish slaves for the higher. And Aristotle does, on occasion, lend himself to such a view: he justifies a slavery in which, as he says, some men are to be treated merely as living tools. And yet on his own principles every man ought to aim at realizing his own end, and not merely the ends of others.

But there is a widely different view, also present in Aristotle, and truer to the essence of his thought. It is a view instinct with that reverence for all existence of which I spoke at first, and it holds that all the different natural types, high or low, could all be united in one harmony, like an ordered army, as Aristotle himself would say, in which the divine spirit was present even as the spirit of a general is present in his men. The greatest thing in man, Aristotle thinks, is the G.o.dlike power of apprehending the different characters of all the things around him, and this of itself suggests the belief that all these characters have a value of their own, unique and indispensable, each aiming at a distinct aspect of the Divine, each, if it fulfilled its inner nature, finding, as Plato might have said, the place where it was best for it to be. Again, it is clear from Aristotle's whole treatment of the State, that when he wrote his famous phrase, 'Man is by nature a political animal', he meant that man, as we should say, is essentially social. It is part of man's goal to live with others; it is not merely a means to the goal. His highest happiness lies in the contemplation of the good, and the good, Aristotle says, can be contemplated far better in others than in ourselves. This is a profound saying, and from this thought springs the deep significance of friends.h.i.+p in Aristotle's system. The crown of the civic life he takes to be the community of friends who recognize the good in each other, and enjoy each other through this. The wider this community, then, we must surely say, the better.

For Aristotle then, man's perfection ought to mean the perfection of every individual, and progress, so far as he conceives it, involve progress towards this end. This should lead on to belief in the supreme importance of the individual soul, and to Kant's great principle that we should always treat each man as an end in himself.

Thus, if we concentrate on the hopeful elements in Plato and Aristotle, we may fairly say, I think, that we can see outlined in their philosophies something like the following belief: every natural thing in this world, and every natural creature, so far as it is good,--and all are more or less good,--tends to express some distinct aspect of a perfect harmony: we human beings are the first on earth to be definitely conscious of such a tendency, the first to be able definitely to direct it to its true goal, and our business in life is therefore threefold: to make actual our own function in this harmony, to help other creatures to actualize theirs, and to contemplate every such manifestation, in men or in things, with reverence and rejoicing.

The harmony, if complete, would be a manifestation of a divine reality, and thus the love of G.o.d, the love of our neighbour, the love of nature, self-development, political life, scientific study, poetic contemplation, and philosophic speculation, would all unite in one comprehensive and glorious task.

This, surely, is hopeful enough. But the Greek hope faltered and sank.

Could this harmony ever be realized? Would not the thwarting element in the world always drag it down again and again, and drag some men down always, so that after all progress was impossible, and for some men should not even be attempted? As a matter of fact, Plato and Aristotle do limit their exhortations to a narrow circle of cultured Greeks, and even with them they doubt of success.

Now this despondency came partly, I think, through the very sensitiveness of the h.e.l.lenic nature. The spectacle of the ever-baffled struggle in Nature and Man they felt at times almost intolerable.

Aristotle saw that this perpetual failure in the heart of glorious good made the very essence of tragedy. The tragic hero is the man of innate n.o.bleness who yet has some one defect that lays him open to ruin. Man is set in a world full of difficulties, a world much of which is dark and strange to him: his action and those of others have results which he did not, and in his ignorance could not, foresee; he is not strong enough for his great task.

All the Greek poets have this deep sadness. Homer has it, in and through his intense feeling for the beauty and energy of life. There has never been such war-poetry as Homer's, and yet there has never been any which felt more poignantly the senselessness in war. 'And I must come here', Achilles says to his n.o.ble enemy at the close, 'to torture you and your children.'

In the next place, the sadness of the world could not be lightened for the Greeks by the vision that the modern theory of evolution has opened up to us of the long advance in the history of life on the planet. Even their knowledge of history in the strict sense was scanty, and it is only a long view of history that is likely to be comforting. What history they did know could bring them little comfort. In the first place it showed them a series of great civilizations, rising and falling, and those that had fallen seemed at least as good as those that followed them. A Greek like Plato knew of the Homeric civilization, simpler indeed, but fresher and purer than his own. And he believed, what we now know to be the fact, that even before the Homeric there had been a wonderful island-culture, what we call the Minoan, flouris.h.i.+ng before the Homeric. 'There had been kings before Agamemnon.'

And behind Minos and Agamemnon lay the great, and by that time the ossifying, kingdom of Egypt, compared to which the Greeks were, and felt themselves to be, but children. Plato had seen, finally, the degeneration of the Persian Empire--once so magnificent and mighty.

This fact of recurrent decay is one of the heaviest that the human spirit can shoulder. Any theory of progress must come to terms with it, for Progress through history is certainly not an uninterrupted ascent; a spiral is the better image. And the weight must lie most heavily on a generation which feels its own self to be in peril of decay. Now Plato and Aristotle lived at such a period. Greece had gone through the bitter experiences of the Peloponnesian War, and the shadow of it lay on them, as on its historian Thucydides. In that fratricidal conflict Greece tore herself to pieces. It was a struggle between the two leaders of the then civilized world, and it has a terrible likeness to the struggle that is going on now. From its devastating influence Greece never recovered.

Historians still dispute, and always will, as to the exact proportion of praise and blame between the two. But Thucydides himself, a true-hearted Athenian, brings out the tyrannical side in the Athenian temper. Not indeed towards her own people, but towards all who were not of her own immediate stock. Because Athens thought herself the fairest city in the world, as indeed she was, because she thought herself menaced by Sparta, and menaced she was, she allowed herself to tyrannize and lightly took up the burden of war between brethren. There are few pa.s.sages in history more stately than the Funeral Oration of Pericles in which he calls Athens the School of h.e.l.las, but even in it there is a certain deadly coldness of heart. And few things are more terrible than the coa.r.s.ening of temper which Thucydides depicts as the war goes on and Pericles is succeeded by his caricature Cleon, the man who means to prosecute the war vigorously, and by vigour means ruthlessness. Nor was there ever a sterner indictment of aggression than that given in the dialogue between the spokesmen of Melos, the little island that desired to stand out of the conflict, and the Athenian representatives who were determined to force her into their policy. And after that dialogue comes, in Thucydides' great drama, the fall of Athens.

The city recovered in some measure from her fall, but only to face another disaster. If she sinned in the Peloponnesian War through the spirit of aggression, she sinned in the struggle with Macedon through slackness and cowardice. In the one struggle she lost comrades.h.i.+p; in the other she lost liberty. And with the loss of the two she lost buoyancy. In a deeper sense than Pericles used the phrase, 'the springtime went out of her year'. Ultimately, perhaps, we cannot explain why this should be so. Other nations have had as disheartening experiences and yet risen above them. Some of the most inspired prophecies in the Hebrew writings came after the tiny state of Judaea had been torn in pieces by the insensate conflict between North and South, and after the whole people had been swept into captivity. But whatever the ultimate reason, Athens did not recover. We must not end, however, on a note of despair. Far from it. The work of Aristotle and Plato and of the Greeks generally, was cramped for lack of sympathy and lack of hope, and, strangely enough, it was after they had pa.s.sed and their glory with them that sympathy grew in the world, and after sympathy grew, hope returned.

For it is exactly in those failing years, when the h.e.l.lenic gave way to the h.e.l.lenistic, that men first grasped, and grasped so firmly that it could hardly be lost again, one of the fundamental principles on which the whole fabric of our later civilization has rested, or ought to rest, the great principle of personal equality, the claim of every individual to transcendent value, irrespective of race and creed and endowment. The conquering rule of Alexander, whatever else it did, broke down the barriers of the little city-states and made men of different races feel themselves members of mankind. There rose among the Stoics the conviction that all men do belong together and are all made for each other. And with the advent of Christianity came the belief that every man, however mean and unworthy, can receive a power that will make him all he ought to be. The highest is within his reach. There is no reason now why the glorious life that h.e.l.lenism conceived for a few should not lie open to all men.

Finally, we might say, and truly, that the vast political organization built up by Rome gave us Europeans, once and for all, the vision of a united Europe.

That dream has never left it. Even to-day, here and now, in spite of our disasters, our blunders, and our crimes, let us not forget it, that dream which is 'not all a dream', the dream of once again constructing a system in which we might, all of us, all nations and all men and women, make progress together in the common task.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

G. L. d.i.c.kinson, _The Greek View of Life_.

Zeller, _Aristotle and the Earlier Peripatetics_.

Edited by Evelyn Abbott, _h.e.l.lenica_.

Bury, _History of Greece_.

Davies and Vaughan, _Plato's Republic_.

Welldon, _Aristotle's Politics_.

Peters, _Aristotle's Ethics_.

Bridges, _The Spirit of Man_.