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Books: The Idea of Progress

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




The Enquiry concerning Political Justice, begun in 1791, appeared in
1793. The second edition, three years later, shows the influence of
Condorcet's Sketch, which had appeared in the meantime. Godwin says
that his original idea was to produce a work on political science to
supersede Montesquieu. The note of Montesquieu's political
philosophy was respect for social institutions. Godwin's principle
was that social institutions are entirely pernicious, that they
perpetuate harmful prejudices, and are an almost insuperable
obstacle to improvement. If he particularly denounced monarchical
government, he regarded all government as evil, and held that social
progress would consist, not in the reformation of government, but in
its abolition. While he recognised that man had progressed in the
past, he considered history mainly a sequence of horrors, and he was
incapable of a calm survey of the course of civilisation. In English
institutions he saw nothing that did not outrage the principles of
justice and benevolence. The present state of humanity is about as
bad as it could be.

It is easy to see the deep influence which the teaching of Rousseau
exercised on Godwin. Without accepting the theory of Arcadia Godwin
followed him in unsparing condemnation of existing conditions.
Rousseau and Godwin are the two great champions in the eighteenth
century of the toiling and suffering masses. But Godwin drew the
logical conclusion from Rousseau's premisses which Rousseau
hesitated to draw himself. The French thinker, while he extolled the
anarchical state of uncivilised society, and denounced government as
one of the sources of its corruption, nevertheless sought the remedy
in new social and political institutions. Godwin said boldly,
government is the evil; government must go. Humanity can never be
happy until all political authority and social institutions
disappear.

Now the peculiarity of Godwin's position as a doctrinaire of
Progress lies in the fact that he entertained the same pessimistic
view of some important sides of civilisation as Rousseau, and at the
same time adopted the theories of Rousseau's opponents, especially
Helvetius. His survey of human conditions seems to lead inevitably
to pessimism; then he turns round and proclaims the doctrine of
perfectibility.

The explanation of this argument was the psychological theory of
Helvetius. He taught, as we saw, and Godwin developed the view in
his own way, that the natures and characters of men are moulded
entirely by their environment--not physical, but intellectual and
moral environment, and therefore can be indefinitely modified. A man
is born into the world without innate tendencies. His conduct
depends on his opinions. Alter men's opinions and they will act
differently. Make their opinions conformable to justice and
benevolence, and you will have a just and benevolent society.
Virtue, as Socrates taught, is simply a question of knowledge. The
situation, therefore, is not hopeless. For it is not due to the
radical nature of man; it is caused by ignorance and prejudice, by
governments and institutions, by kings and priests. Transform the
ideas of men, and society will be transformed. The French
philosopher considered that a reformed system of educating children
would be one of the most powerful means for promoting progress and
bringing about the reign of reason; and Condorcet worked out a
scheme of universal state education. This was entirely opposed to
Godwin's principles. State schools would only be another instrument
of power in the hands of a government, worse even than a state
Church. They would strengthen the poisonous influence of kings and
statesmen, and establish instead of abolishing prejudices. He seems
to have relied entirely on the private efforts of enlightened
thinkers to effect a gradual conversion of public opinion.

In his study of the perfectibility of man and the prospect of a
future reign of general justice and benevolence, Godwin was even
more visionary than Condorcet, as in his political views he was more
radical than the Revolutionists. Condorcet had at least sought to
connect his picture of the future with a reasoned survey of the
past, and to find a chain of connection, but the perfectibility of
Godwin hung in the air, supported only by an abstract theory of the
nature of man.

It can hardly be said that he contributed anything to the
theoretical problem of civilisation. His significance is that he
proclaimed in England at an opportune moment, and in a more
impressive and startling way than a sober apostle like Priestley,
the creed of progress taught by French philosophers, though
considerably modified by his own anarchical opinions.

5.

Perfectibility, as expounded by Condorcet and Godwin, encountered a
drastic criticism from Malthus, whose Essay on the Principle of
Population appeared in its first form anonymously in 1798. Condorcet
had foreseen an objection which might be raised as fatal to the
realisation of his future state. Will not the progress of industry
and happiness cause a steady increase in population, and must not
the time come when the number of the inhabitants of the globe will
surpass their means of subsistence? Condorcet did not grapple with
this question. He contented himself with saying that such a period
must be very far away, and that by then "the human race will have
achieved improvements of which we can now scarcely form an idea."
Similarly Godwin, in his fancy picture of the future happiness of
mankind, notices the difficulty and shirks it. "Three-fourths of the
habitable globe are now uncultivated. The parts already cultivated
are capable of immeasurable improvement. Myriads of centuries of
still increasing population may pass away and the earth be still
found sufficient for the subsistence of its inhabitants."

Malthus argued that these writers laboured under an illusion as to
the actual relations between population and the means of
subsistence. In present conditions the numbers of the race are only
kept from increasing far beyond the means of subsistence by vice,
misery, and the fear of misery. [Footnote: This observation had been
made (as Hazlitt pointed out) before Malthus by Robert Wallace (see
A Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind, p. 13, 1753). It was
another book of Wallace that suggested the difficulty to Godwin.] In
the conditions imagined by Condorcet and Godwin these checks are
removed, and consequently the population would increase with great
rapidity, doubling itself at least in twenty-five years. But the
products of the earth increase only in an arithmetical progression,
and in fifty years the food supply would be too small for the
demand. Thus the oscillation between numbers and food supply would
recur, and the happiness of the species would come to an end.

Godwin and his adherents could reply that one of the checks on over-
population is prudential restraint, which Malthus himself
recognised, and that this would come more extensively into operation
with that progress of enlightenment which their theory assumed.
[Footnote: This is urged by Hazlitt in his criticism of Malthus in
the Spirit of the Age.] But the criticisms of Malthus dealt a
trenchant blow to the doctrine that human reason, acting through
legislation and government, has a virtually indefinite power of
modifying the condition of society. The difficulty, which he stated
so vividly and definitely, was well calculated to discredit the
doctrine, and to suggest that the development of society could be
modified by the conscious efforts of man only within restricted
limits. [Footnote: The recent conclusions of Mr. Knibbs,
statistician to the Commonwealth of Australia, in vol. i. of his
Appendix to the Census of the Commonwealth, have an interest in this
connection. I quote from an article in the Times of August 5, 1918:
"An eminent geographer, the late Mr. E. G. Ravenstein, some years
ago, when the population of the earth was estimated at 1400 million,
foretold that about the middle of this century population would have
reached a limit beyond which increase would be disastrous. Mr.
Knibbs is not so pessimistic and is much more precise; though he
defers the disastrous culmination, he has no doubt as to its
inevitability. The limits of human expansion, he assures us, are
much nearer than popular opinion imagines; the difficulty of food
supplies will soon be most grave; the exhaustion of sources of
energy necessary for any notable increase of population, or advance
in the standards of living, or both combined, is perilously near.
The present rate of increase in the world's population cannot
continue for four centuries."]

6.

The Essay of Malthus afterwards became one of the sacred books of
the Utilitarian sect, and it is interesting to notice what Bentham
himself thought of perfectibility. Referring to the optimistic views
of Chastellux and Priestley on progressive amelioration he observed
that "these glorious expectations remind us of the golden age of
poetry." For perfect happiness "belongs to the imaginary region of
philosophy and must be classed with the universal elixir and the
philosopher's stone." There will always be jealousies through the
unequal gifts of nature and of fortune; interests will never cease
to clash and hatred to ensue; "painful labour, daily subjection, a
condition nearly allied to indigence, will always be the lot of
numbers"; in art and poetry the sources of novelty will probably be
exhausted. But Bentham was far from being a pessimist. Though he
believes that "we shall never make this world the abode of
happiness," he asserts that it may be made a most delightful garden
"compared with the savage forest in which men so long have
wandered." [Footnote: Works, vol. i. p. 193 seq.]

7.

The book of Malthus was welcomed at the moment by all those who had
been thoroughly frightened by the French Revolution and saw in the
"modern philosophy," as it was called, a serious danger to society.
[Footnote: Both Hazlitt and Shelley thought that Malthus was playing
to the boxes, by sophisms "calculated to lull the oppressors of
mankind into a security of everlasting triumph" (Revolt of Islam,
Preface). Bentham refers in his Book of Fallacies (Works, ii. p.
462) to the unpopularity of the views of Priestley, Godwin, and
Condorcet: "to aim at perfection has been pronounced to be utter
folly or wickedness."] Vice and misery and the inexorable laws of
population were a godsend to rescue the state from "the precipice of
perfectibility." We can understand the alarm occasioned to believers
in the established constitution of things, for Godwin's work--now
virtually forgotten, while Malthus is still appealed to as a
discoverer in social science--produced an immense effect on
impressionable minds at the time. All who prized liberty,
sympathised with the downtrodden, and were capable of falling in
love with social ideals, hailed Godwin as an evangelist. "No one,"
said a contemporary, "was more talked of, more looked up to, more
sought after; and wherever liberty, truth, justice was the theme,
his name was not far off." Young graduates left the Universities to
throw themselves at the feet of the new Gamaliel; students of law
and medicine neglected their professional studies to dream of "the
renovation of society and the march of mind." Godwin carried with
him "all the most sanguine and fearless understandings of the time."
[Footnote: Hazlitt, Spirit of the Age: article on Godwin (written in
1814).]

The most famous of his disciples were the poets Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Southey, and afterwards Shelley. Wordsworth had been an
ardent sympathiser with the French Revolution. In its early days he
had visited Paris:


An emporium then
Of golden expectations and receiving
Freights every day from a new world of hope.


He became a Godwinian in 1795, when the Terror had destroyed his
faith in Revolutionary France. Southey, who had come under the
influence of Rousseau, was initiated by Coleridge into Godwin's
theories, and in their utopian enthusiasm they formed the design of
founding a "pantisocratic" settlement in America, to show how
happiness could be realised in a social environment in which duty
and interest coincide and consequently all are virtuous. The plan
anticipated the experiments of Owen and Cabet; but the pantisocrats
did not experience the disappointments of the socialists, for it was
never carried out. Coleridge and Southey as well as Wordsworth soon
abandoned their Godwinian doctrines. [Footnote: In letters of 1797
and 1798 Coleridge repudiated the French doctrines and Godwin's
philosophy. See Cestre, La Revolution francaise et les poetes
anglais (1789-1809), pp. 389, 414.] They had, to use a phrase of
Hazlitt, lost their way in Utopia, and they gave up the abstract and
mechanical view of society which the French philosophy of the
eighteenth century taught, for an organic conception in which
historic sentiment and the wisdom of our ancestors had their due
place. Wordsworth could presently look back and criticise his
Godwinian phase as that of


A proud and most presumptuous confidence
In the transcendent wisdom of the age
And its discernment. [Footnote: Excursion, Book ii.]


He and Southey became conservative pillars of the state. Yet
Southey, reactionary as he was in politics, never ceased to believe
in social Progress. [Footnote: See his Colloquies; and Shelley,
writing in 1811, says that Southey "looks forward to a state when
all shall be perfected and matter become subjected to the
omnipotence of mind" (Dowden, Life of Shelley, i. p. 212). Compare
below, p. 325.] Amelioration was indeed to be effected by slow and
cautious reforms, with the aid of the Church, but the intellectual
aberrations of his youth had left an abiding impression.

While these poets were sitting at Godwin's feet, Shelley was still a
child. But he came across Political Justice at Eton; in his later
life he reread it almost every year; and when he married Godwin's
daughter he was more Godwinian than Godwin himself. Hazlitt, writing
in 1814, says that Godwin's reputation had "sunk below the horizon,"
but Shelley never ceased to believe in his theory, though he came to
see that the regeneration of man would be a much slower process than
he had at first imagined. In the immature poem Queen Mab the
philosophy of Godwin was behind his description of the future, and
it was behind the longer and more ambitious poems of his maturer
years. The city of gold, of the Revolt of Islam, is Godwin's future
society, and he describes that poem as "an experiment on the temper
of the public mind as to how far a thirst for a happier condition of
moral and political society survives, among the enlightened and
refined, the tempests which have shaken the age in which we live."
As to Prometheus Unbound his biographer observes: [Footnote: Dowden,
ib. ii. p. 264. Elsewhere Dowden remarks on the singular
insensibility of Shelley's mind "to the wisdom or sentiment of
history" (i. p. 55).]

All the glittering fallacies of "Political Justice"--now
sufficiently tarnished--together with all its encouraging and
stimulating truths, may be found in the caput mortuum left when the
critic has reduced the poetry of the "Prometheus" to a series of
doctrinaire statements.

The same dream inspired the final chorus of Hellas. Shelley was the
poet of perfectibility.

8.

The attraction of perfectibility reached beyond the ranks of men of
letters, and in Robert Owen, the benevolent millowner of Lanark, it
had an apostle who based upon it a very different theory from that
of Political Justice and became one of the founders of modern
socialism.

The success of the idea of Progress has been promoted by its
association with socialism. [Footnote: The word was independently
invented in England and France. An article in the Poor Man's
Guardian (a periodical edited by H. Hetherington, afterwards by
Bronterre O'Brien), Aug. 24, 1833, is signed "A Socialist"; and in
1834 socialisme is opposed to individualism by P. Leroux in an
article in the Revue Encyclopedique. The word is used in the New
Moral World, and from 1836 was applied to the Owenites. See
Dolleans, Robert Owen (1907), p. 305.] The first phase of socialism,
what has been called its sentimental phase, was originated by Saint-
Simon in France and Owen in England at about the same time; Marx was
to bring it down from the clouds and make it a force in practical
politics. But both in its earlier and in its later forms the
economical doctrines rest upon a theory of society depending on the
assumption, however disguised, that social institutions have been
solely responsible for the vice and misery which exist, and that
institutions and laws can be so changed as to abolish misery and
vice. That is pure eighteenth century doctrine; and it passed from
the revolutionary doctrinaires of that period to the constructive
socialists of the nineteenth century.

Owen learned it probably from Godwin, and he did not disguise it.
His numerous works enforce it ad nauseam. He began the propagation
of his gospel by his "New View of Society, or Essays on the
formation of the human character, preparatory to the development of
a plan for gradually ameliorating the condition of mankind," which
he dedicated to the Prince Regent. [Footnote: 3rd ed. 1817. The
Essays had appeared separately in 1813-14.] Here he lays down that
"any general character, from the best to the worst, may be given to
any community, even to the world at large, by the application of
proper means; which means are to a great extent at the command and
under the control of those who have influence in the affairs of
men." [Footnote: P. 19.] The string on which he continually harps is
that it is the cardinal error in government to suppose that men are
responsible for their vices and virtues, and therefore for their
actions and characters. These result from education and
institutions, and can be transformed automatically by transforming
those agencies. Owen founded several short-lived journals to diffuse
his theories. The first number of the New Moral World (1834-36)
[Footnote: This was not a journal, but a series of pamphlets which
appeared in 1836-1844. Other publications of Owen were: Outline of
the Rational System of Society (6th ed., Leeds, 1840); The
Revolution in the Mind and Practice of the Human Race, or the coming
change from Irrationality to Rationality (1849); The Future of the
Human Race, or a great, glorious and peaceful Revolution, near at
hand, to be effected through the agency of departed spirits of good
and superior men and women (1853); The New Existence of Man upon
Earth, Parts i.-viii., 1854-55.] proclaimed the approach of an ideal
society in which there will be no ignorance, no poverty, and no
charity--a system "which will ensure the happiness of the human race
throughout all future ages," to replace one "which, so long as it
shall be maintained, must produce misery to all." His own
experimental attempt to found such a society on a miniature scale in
America proved a ludicrous failure.

It is to be observed that in these socialist theories the conception
of Progress as indefinite tends to vanish or to lose its
significance. If the millennium can be brought about at a stroke by
a certain arrangement of society, the goal of development is
achieved; we shall have reached the term, and shall have only to
live in and enjoy the ideal state--a menagerie of happy men. There
will be room for further, perhaps indefinite, advance in knowledge,
but civilisation in its social character becomes stable and rigid.
Once man's needs are perfectly satisfied in a harmonious environment
there is no stimulus to cause further changes, and the dynamic
character of history disappears.

Theories of Progress are thus differentiating into two distinct
types, corresponding to two radically opposed political theories and
appealing to two antagonistic temperaments. The one type is that of
constructive idealists and socialists, who can name all the streets
and towers of "the city of gold," which they imagine as situated
just round a promontory. The development of man is a closed system;
its term is known and is within reach. The other type is that of
those who, surveying the gradual ascent of man, believe that by the
same interplay of forces which have conducted him so far and by a
further development of the liberty which he has fought to win, he
will move slowly towards conditions of increasing harmony and
happiness. Here the development is indefinite; its term is unknown,
and lies in the remote future. Individual liberty is the motive
force, and the corresponding political theory is liberalism; whereas
the first doctrine naturally leads to a symmetrical system in which
the authority of the state is preponderant, and the individual has
little more value than a cog in a well-oiled wheel: his place is
assigned; it is not his right to go his own way. Of this type the
principal example that is not socialistic is, as we shall see, the
philosophy of Comte.

CHAPTER XIII

GERMAN SPECULATIONS ON PROGRESS

1.

The philosophical views current in Germany during the period in
which the psychology of Locke was in fashion in France and before
the genius of Kant opened a new path, were based on the system of
Leibnitz. We might therefore expect to find a theory of Progress
developed there, parallel to the development in France though
resting on different principles. For Leibnitz, as we saw, provided
in his cosmic optimism a basis for the doctrine of human Progress,
and he had himself incidentally pointed to it. This development,
however, was delayed. It was only towards the close of the period--
which is commonly known as the age of "Illumination"--that Progress
came to the front, and it is interesting to observe the reason.

Wolf was the leading successor and interpreter of Leibnitz. He
constrained that thinker's ideas into a compact logical system which
swayed Germany till Kant swept it away. In such cases it usually
happens that some striking doctrines and tendencies of the master
are accentuated and enforced, while others are suffered to drop out
of sight.

So it was here. In the Wolfian system, Leibnitz's conception of
development was suffered to drop out of sight, and the dynamic
element which animated his speculation disappeared. In particular,
he had laid down that the sum of motive forces in the physical world
is constant. His disciples proceeded to the inference that the sum
of morality in the ethical world is constant. This dogma obviously
eliminates the possibility of ethical improvement for collective
humanity. And so we find Mendelssohn, who was the popular exponent
of Wolf's philosophy, declaring that "progress is only for the
individual; but that the whole of humanity here below in the course
of time shall always progress and perfect itself seems to me not to
have been the purpose of Providence." [Footnote: See Bock, Jakob
Wegelin als Geschichtstheoretiker, in Leipsiger Studien, ix. 4, pp.
23-7 (1902).]

The publication of the Nouveaux Essais in 1765 induced some thinkers
to turn from the dry bones of Wolf to the spirit of Leibnitz
himself. And at the same time French thought was penetrating. In
consequence of these influences the final phase of the German
"Illumination" is marked by the appearance of two or three works in
which Progress is a predominating idea.

We see this reaction against Wolf and his static school in a little
work published by Herder in 1774--"a philosophy of history for the
cultivation of mankind." There is continuous development, he
declares, and one people builds upon the work of another. We must
judge past ages, not by the present, but relatively to their own
particular conditions. What exists now was never possible before,
for everything that man accomplishes is conditioned by time,
climate, and circumstances.

Six years later Lessing's pamphlet on the Education of the Human
Race appeared, couched in the form of aphoristic statements, and to
a modern reader, one may venture to say, singularly wanting in
argumentative force. The thesis is that the drama of history is to
be explained as the education of man by a progressive series of
religions, a series not yet complete, for the future will produce
another revelation to lift him to a higher plane than that to which
Christ has drawn him up. This interpretation of history proclaimed
Progress, but assumed an ideal and applied a measure very different
from those of the French philosophers. The goal is not social
happiness, but a full comprehension of God. Philosophy of religion
is made the key to the philosophy of history. The work does not
amount to more than a suggestion for a new synthesis, but it was
opportune and arresting.

Herder meanwhile had been thinking, and in 1784 he gave the German
world his survey of man's career--Ideas of the Philosophy of the
History of Humanity. In this famous work, in which we can mark the
influence of French thinkers, especially Montesquieu, as well as of
Leibnitz, he attempted, though on very different lines, the same
task which Turgot and Condorcet planned, a universal history of
civilisation.