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Books: The Idea of Progress

J >> J.B. Bury >> The Idea of Progress




The propaganda of which the Encyclopaedia was the centre was
reinforced by the independent publications of some of the leading
men who collaborated or were closely connected with their circle,
notably those of Diderot himself, Baron d'Holbach, and Helvetius.

3.

The optimism of the Encyclopaedists was really based on an intense
consciousness of the enlightenment of their own age. The
progressiveness of knowledge was taken as axiomatic, but was there
any guarantee that the light, now confined to small circles, could
ever enlighten the world and regenerate mankind? They found the
guarantee they required, not in an induction from the past
experience of the race, but in an a priori theory: the indefinite
malleability of human nature by education and institutions. This had
been, as we saw, assumed by the Abbe de Saint-Pierre. It pervaded
the speculation of the age, and was formally deduced from the
sensational psychology of Locke and Condillac. It was developed, in
an extreme form, in the work of Helvetius, De l'esprit (1758).

In this book, which was to exert a large influence in England,
Helvetius sought, among other things, to show that the science of
morals is equivalent to the science of legislation, and that in a
well-organised society all men are capable of rising to the highest
point of mental development. Intellectual and moral inequalities
between man and man arise entirely from differences in education and
social circumstances. Genius itself is not a gift of nature; the man
of genius is a product of circumstances--social, not physical, for
Helvetius rejects the influence of climate. It follows that if you
change education and social institutions you can change the
character of men.

The error of Helvetius in ignoring the irremovable physical
differences between individuals, the varieties of cerebral
organisation, was at once pointed out by Diderot. This error,
however, was not essential to the general theory of the immeasurable
power of social institutions over human character, and other
thinkers did not fall into it. All alike, indeed, were blind to the
factor of heredity. But the theory in its collective application
contains a truth which nineteenth century critics, biassed by their
studies in heredity, have been prone to overlook. The social
inheritance of ideas and emotions to which the individual is
submitted from infancy is more important than the tendencies
physically transmitted from parent to child. The power of education
and government in moulding the members of a society has recently
been illustrated on a large scale in the psychological
transformation of the German people in the life of a generation.

It followed from the theory expounded by Helvetius that there is no
impassable barrier between the advanced and the stationary or
retrograde races of the earth. [Footnote: The most informing
discussion of the relations between the Advanced and Backward races
is Bryce's Romanes Lecture (1902).] "True morality," Baron d'Holbach
wrote, "should be the same for all the inhabitants of the globe. The
savage man and the civilised; the white man, the red man, the black
man; Indian and European, Chinaman and Frenchman, Negro and Lapp
have the same nature. The differences between them are only
modifications of the common nature produced by climate, government,
education, opinions, and the various causes which operate on them.
Men differ only in the ideas they form of happiness and the means
which they have imagined to obtain it." Here again the eighteenth
century theorists held a view which can no longer be dismissed as
absurd. Some are coming round to the opinion that enormous
differences in capacity which seem fundamental are a result of the
differences in social inheritance, and that these again are due to a
long sequence of historical circumstances; and consequently that
there is no people in the world doomed by nature to perpetual
inferiority or irrevocably disqualified by race from playing a
useful part in the future of civilisation.

4.

This doctrine of the possibility of indefinitely moulding the
characters of men by laws and institutions--whether combined or not
with a belief in the natural equality of men's faculties--laid a
foundation on which the theory of the perfectibility of humanity
could be raised. It marked, therefore, an important stage in the
development of the doctrine of Progress.

It gave, moreover, a new and larger content to that doctrine by its
applicability, not only to the peoples which are at present in the
van of civilisation, but also to those which have lagged far behind
and may appear irreclaimably barbarous--thus potentially including
all humanity in the prospect of the future. Turgot had already
conceived "the total mass of the human race moving always slowly
forward"; he had declared that the human mind everywhere contains
the germs of progress and that the inequality of peoples is due to
the infinite variety of their circumstances. This enlarging
conception was calculated to add strength to the idea of Progress,
by raising it to a synthesis comprehending not merely the western
civilised nations but the whole human world.

Interest in the remote peoples of the earth, in the unfamiliar
civilisations of the East, in the untutored races of America and
Africa, was vivid in France in the eighteenth century. Everyone
knows how Voltaire and Montesquieu used Hurons or Persians to hold
up the glass to Western manners and morals, as Tacitus used the
Germans to criticise the society of Rome. But very few ever look
into the seven volumes of the Abbe Raynal's History of the Two
Indies which appeared in 1772. It is however, one of the remarkable
books of the century. Its immediate practical importance lay in the
array of facts which it furnished to the friends of humanity in the
movement against negro slavery. But it was also an effective attack
on the Church and the sacerdotal system. The author's method was the
same which his greater contemporary Gibbon employed on a larger
scale. A history of facts was a more formidable indictment than any
declamatory attack.

Raynal brought home to the conscience of Europeans the miseries
which had befallen the natives of the New World through the
Christian conquerors and their priests. He was not indeed an
enthusiastic preacher of Progress. He is unable to decide between
the comparative advantages of the savage state of nature and the
most highly cultivated society. But he observes that "the human race
is what we wish to make it," that the felicity of man depends
entirely on the improvement of legislation; and in the survey of the
history of Europe to which the last Book of his work is devoted, his
view is generally optimistic. [Footnote: cp. Raynal, Histoire, vii.
214, 256. This book was first published anonymously; the author's
name appeared in the edition of 1780.]

5
.
Baron d'Holbach had a more powerful brain than Helvetius, but his
writings had probably less influence, though he was the spiritual
father of two prominent Revolutionaries, Hebert and Chaumette. His
System of Nature (1770) develops a purely naturalistic theory of the
universe, in which the prevalent Deism is rejected: there is no God;
material Nature stands out alone, self-sufficing, dominis privata
superbis. The book suggests how the Lucretian theory of development
might have led to the idea of Progress. But it sent a chilly shock
to the hearts of many and probably convinced few. The effective part
was the outspoken and passionate indictment of governments and
religions as causes of most of the miseries of mankind.

It is in other works, especially in his Social System, that his
views of Progress are to be sought. Man is simply a part of nature;
he has no privileged position, and he is born neither good nor bad.
Erras, as Seneca said, si existumas vitia nobiscum esse:
supervenerunt, ingesta sunt. [Footnote: Seneca, Ep. 124.] We are
made good or bad by education, public opinion, laws, government; and
here the author points to the significance of the instinct of
imitation as a social force, which a modern writer, M. Tarde, has
worked into a system.

The evils, which are due to the errors of tyranny and superstition,
the force of truth will gradually diminish if it cannot completely
banish them; for our governments and laws may be perfected by the
progress of useful knowledge. But the process will be a long one:
centuries of continuous mental effort in unravelling the causes of
social ill-being and repeated experiments to determine the remedies
(des experiences reiterees de la societe). In any case we cannot
look forward to the attainment of an unchangeable or unqualified
felicity. That is a mere chimera "incompatible with the nature of a
being whose feeble machine is subject to derangement and whose
ardent imagination will not always submit to the guidance of reason.
Sometimes to enjoy, sometimes to suffer, is the lot of man; to enjoy
more often than to suffer is what constitutes well-being."

D'Holbach was a strict determinist; he left no room for freewill in
the rigorous succession of cause and effect, and the pages in which
he drives home the theory of causal necessity are still worth
reading. From his naturalistic principles he inferred that the
distinction between nature and art is not fundamental; civilisation
is as rational as the savage state. Here he was at one with
Aristotle.

All the successive inventions of the human mind to change or perfect
man's mode of existence and render it happier were only the
necessary consequence of his essence and that of the existences
which act upon him. All we do or think, all we are or shall be, is
only an effect of what universal nature has made us. Art is only
nature acting by the aid of the instruments which she has fashioned.
[Footnote: The passages of d'Holbach specially referred to are:
Systeme social, i. 1, p. 13; Syst. de la nature, i. 6, p. 88; Syst.
soc. i. 15, p. 271; Syst. de la n. i. 1, p. 3.]

Progress, therefore, is natural and necessary, and to criticise or
condemn it by appealing to nature is only to divide the house of
nature against itself.

If d'Holbach had pressed his logic further, he would have taken a
more indulgent and calmer view of the past history of mankind. He
would have acknowledged that institutions and opinions to which
modern reason may give short shrift were natural and useful in their
day, and would have recognised that at any stage of history the
heritage of the past is no less necessary to progress than the
solvent power of new ideas. Most thinkers of his time were inclined
to judge the past career of humanity anachronistically. All the
things that had been done or thought which could not be justified in
the new age of enlightenment, were regarded as gratuitous and
inexcusable errors. The traditions, superstitions, and customs, the
whole "code of fraud and woe" transmitted from the past, weighed
then too heavily in France to allow the school of reform to do
impartial justice to their origins. They felt a sort of resentment
against history. D'Alembert said that it would be well if history
could be destroyed; and the general tendency was to ignore the
social memory and the common heritage of past experiences which
mould a human society and make it something very different from a
mere collection of individuals.

Belief in Progress, however, took no extravagant form. It did not
beguile d'Holbach or any other of the leading thinkers of the
Encyclopaedia epoch into optimistic dreams of the future which might
await mankind. They had a much clearer conception of obstacles than
the good Abbe de Saint-Pierre. Helvetius agrees with d'Holbach that
progress will be slow, and Diderot is wavering and sceptical of the
question of indefinite social improvement. [Footnote: De l'esprit,
Disc. ii. cc. 24, 25.]

6.

The reformers of the Encyclopaedia group were not alone in
disseminating the idea of Progress. Another group of thinkers, who
widely differed in their principles, though some of them had
contributed articles to the Encyclopaedia, [Footnote: Quesnay and
Turgot, who, though not professedly a Physiocrat, held the same
views as the sect.] also did much to make it a power. The rise of
the special study of Economics was one of the most significant facts
in the general trend of thought towards the analysis of
civilisation. Economical students found that in seeking to discover
a true theory of the production, distribution, and employment of
wealth, they could not avoid the consideration of the constitution
and purpose of society. The problems of production and distribution
could not be divorced from political theory: production raises the
question of the functions of government and the limits of its
intervention in trade and industry; distribution involve questions
of property, justice, and equality. The employment of riches leads
into the domain of morals.

The French Economists or "Physiocrats," as they were afterwards
called, who formed a definite school before 1760--Quesnay the
master, Mirabeau, Mercier de la Riviere, and the rest--envisaged
their special subject from a wide philosophical point of view; their
general economic theory was equivalent to a theory of human society.
They laid down the doctrine of a Natural Order in political
communities, and from it they deduced their economic teaching.

They assumed, like the Encyclopaedists, that the end of society is
the attainment of terrestrial happiness by its members, and that
this is the sole purpose of government. The object of a treatise by
Mercier de la Riviere [Footnote: L'ordre naturel et essentiel des
societes politiqes, 1767.] (a convenient exposition of the views of
the sect) is, in his own words, to discover the natural order for
the government of men living in organised communities, which will
assure to them temporal felicity: an order in which everything is
well, necessarily well, and in which the interests of all are so
perfectly and intimately consolidated that all are happy, from the
ruler to the least of his subjects.

But in what does this happiness consist? His answer is that "humanly
speaking, the greatest happiness possible for us consists in the
greatest possible abundance of objects suitable to our enjoyment and
in the greatest liberty to profit by them." And liberty is necessary
not only to enjoy them but also to produce them in the greatest
abundance, since liberty stimulates human efforts. Another condition
of abundance is the multiplication of the race; in fact, the
happiness of men and their numbers are closely bound up together in
the system of nature. From these axioms may be deduced the Natural
Order of a human society, the reciprocal duties and rights whose
enforcement is required for the greatest possible multiplication of
products, in order to procure to the race the greatest sum of
happiness with the maximum population.

Now, individual property is the indispensable condition for full
enjoyment of the products of human labour; "property is the measure
of liberty, and liberty is the measure of property." Hence, to
realise general happiness it is only necessary to maintain property
and consequently liberty in all their natural extent. The fatal
error which has made history what it is has been the failure to
recognise this simple fact; for aggression and conquest, the causes
of human miseries, violate the law of property which is the
foundation of happiness.

The practical inference was that the chief function of government
was to protect property and that complete freedom should be left to
private enterprise to exploit the resources of the earth. All would
be well if trade and industry were allowed to follow their natural
tendencies. This is what was meant by Physiocracy, the supremacy of
the Natural Order. If rulers observed the limits of their true
functions, Mercier thought that the moral effect would be immense.
"The public system of government is the true education of moral man.
Regis ad exemplum totus componitur orbis." [Footnote: The
particulars of the Physiocratic doctrine as to the relative values
of agriculture and commerce which Adam Smith was soon to criticise
do not concern us; nor is it necessary to repeat the obvious
criticisms on a theory which virtually reduced the science of
society to a science of production and distribution.]

While they advocated a thorough reform of the principles which ruled
the fiscal policy of governments, the Economists were not idealists,
like the Encyclopaedic philosophers; they sowed no seeds of
revolution. Their starting-point was that which is, not that which
ought to be. And, apart from their narrower point of view, they
differed from the philosophers in two very important points. They
did not believe that society was of human institution, and therefore
they did not believe that there could be any deductive science of
society based simply on man's nature. Moreover, they held that
inequality of condition was one of its immutable features, immutable
because it is a consequence of the inequality of physical powers.

But they believed in the future progress of society towards a state
of happiness through the increase of opulence which would itself
depend on the growth of justice and "liberty"; and they insisted on
the importance of the increase and diffusion of knowledge. Their
influence in promoting a belief in Progress is vouched for by
Condorcet, the friend and biographer of Turgot. As Turgot stands
apart from the Physiocrats (with whom indeed he did not identify
himself) by his wider views on civilisation, it might be suspected
that it is of him that Condorcet was chiefly thinking. Yet we need
not limit the scope of his statement when we remember that as a sect
the Economists assumed as their first principle the eudaemonic value
of civilisation, declared that temporal happiness is attainable, and
threw all their weight into the scales against the doctrine of
Regress which had found a powerful advocate in Rousseau.

7.

By liberty the Economists meant economic liberty. Neither they nor
the philosophers nor Rousseau, the father of modern democracy, had
any just conception of what political liberty means. They
contributed much to its realisation, but their own ideas of it were
narrow and imperfect. They never challenged the principle of a
despotic government, they only contended that the despotism must be
enlightened. The paternal rule of a Joseph or a Catherine, acting
under the advice of philosophers, seemed to them the ideal solution
of the problem of government; and when the progressive and
disinterested Turgot, whom they might regard as one of themselves,
was appointed financial minister on the accession of Louis XVI., it
seemed that their ideal was about to be realised. His speedy fall
dispelled their hopes, but did not teach them the secret of liberty.
They had no quarrel with the principle of the censorship, though
they writhed under its tyranny; they did not want to abolish it.
They only complained that it was used against reason and light, that
is against their own writings; and, if the Conseil d'Etat or the
Parlement had suppressed the works of their obscurantist opponents,
they would have congratulated themselves that the world was marching
quickly towards perfection. [Footnote: The principle that
intolerance on the part of the wise and strong towards the ignorant
and weak is a good thing is not alien to the spirit of the French
philosophers, though I do not think any of them expressly asserted
it. In the following century it was formulated by Colins, a Belgian
(author of two works on social science, 1857-60), who believed that
an autocratic government suppressing liberty of conscience is the
most effective instrument of Progress. It is possible that democracy
may yet try the experiment.]

CHAPTER IX

WAS CIVILISATION A MISTAKE? ROUSSEAU, CHASTELLUX

1.

The optimistic theory of civilisation was not unchallenged by
rationalists. In the same year (1750) in which Turgot traced an
outline of historical Progress at the Sorbonne, Rousseau laid before
the Academy of Dijon a theory of historical Regress. This Academy
had offered a prize for the best essay on the question whether the
revival of sciences and arts had contributed to the improvement of
morals. The prize was awarded to Rousseau. Five years later the same
learned body proposed another subject for investigation, the origin
of Inequality among men. Rousseau again competed but failed to win
the prize, though this second essay was a far more remarkable
performance.

The view common to these two discourses, that social development has
been a gigantic mistake, that the farther man has travelled from a
primitive simple state the more unhappy has his lot become, that
civilisation is radically vicious, was not original. Essentially the
same issue had been raised in England, though in a different form,
by Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, the scandalous book which aimed
at proving that it is not the virtues and amiable qualities of man
that are the cement of civilised society, but the vices of its
members which are the support of all trades and employments.
[Footnote: The expanded edition was published in 1723.] In these
vices, he said, "we must look for the true origin of all arts and
sciences"; "the moment evil ceases the society must be spoiled, if
not totally dissolved."

The significance of Mandeville's book lay in the challenge it flung
to the optimistic doctrines of Lord Shaftesbury, that human nature
is good and all is for the best in this harmonious world. "The ideas
he had formed," wrote Mandeville, "of the goodness and excellency of
our nature were as romantic and chimerical as they are beautiful and
amiable; he laboured hard to unite two contraries that can never be
reconciled together, innocence of manners and worldly greatness."

Of these two views Rousseau accepted one and rejected the other. He
agreed with Shaftesbury as to the natural goodness of man; he agreed
with Mandeville that innocence of manners is incompatible with the
conditions of a civilised society. He was an optimist in regard to
human nature, a pessimist in regard to civilisation.

In his first Discourse he begins by appreciating the specious
splendour of modern enlightenment, the voyages of man's intellect
among the stars, and then goes on to assever that in the first place
men have lost, through their civilisation, the original liberty for
which they were born, and that arts and science, flinging garlands
of flowers on the iron chains which bind them, make them love their
slavery; and secondly that there is a real depravity beneath the
fair semblance and "our souls are corrupted as our sciences and arts
advance to perfection." Nor is this only a modern phenomenon; "the
evils due to our vain curiosity are as old as the world." For it is
a law of history that morals fall and rise in correspondence with
the progress and decline of the arts and sciences as regularly as
the tides answer to the phases of the moon. This "law" is
exemplified by the fortunes of Greece, Rome, and China, to whose
civilisations the author opposes the comparative happiness of the
ignorant Persians, Scythians, and ancient Germans. "Luxury,
dissoluteness, and slavery have been always the chastisement of the
ambitious efforts we have made to emerge from the happy ignorance in
which the Eternal Wisdom had placed us." There is the theological
doctrine of the tree of Eden in a new shape.

Rousseau's attempt to show that the cultivation of science produces
specific moral evils is feeble, and has little ingenuity; it is a
declamation rather than an argument; and in the end he makes
concessions which undo the effect of his impeachment. The essay did
not establish even a plausible case, but it was paradoxical and
suggestive, and attracted more attention than Turgot's thoughtful
discourse in the Sorbonne. D'Alembert deemed it worthy of a
courteous expression of dissent; [Footnote: In the Disc. Prel. to
the Encyclopaedia.] and Voltaire satirised it in his Timon.

2.

In the Discourse on Inequality Rousseau dealt more directly with the
effect of civilisation on happiness. He proposed to explain how it
came about that right overcame the primitive reign of might, that
the strong were induced to serve the weak, and the people to
purchase a fancied tranquillity at the price of a real felicity. So
he stated his problem; and to solve it he had to consider the "state
of nature" which Hobbes had conceived as a state of war and Locke as
a state of peace. Rousseau imagines our first savage ancestors
living in isolation, wandering in the forests, occasionally co-
operating, and differing from the animals only by the possession of
a faculty for improving themselves (la faculte de se perfectionner).
After a stage in which families lived alone in a more or less
settled condition, came the formation of groups of families, living
together in a definite territory, united by a common mode of life
and sustenance, and by the common influence of climate, but without
laws or government or any social organisation.