Books: The Idea of Progress
J >>
J.B. Bury >> The Idea of Progress
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 | 18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24
And here is the most striking difference between the theories of
Fichte and Hegel. Both saw the goal of human development in the
realisation of "freedom," but, while with Fichte the development
never ends as the goal is unattainable, with Hegel the development
is already complete, the goal is not only attainable but has now
been attained. Thus Hegel's is what we may call a closed system.
History has been progressive, but no path is left open for further
advance. Hegel views this conclusion of development with perfect
complacency. To most minds that are not intoxicated with the
Absolute it will seem that, if the present is the final state to
which the evolution of Spirit has conducted, the result is
singularly inadequate to the gigantic process. But his system is
eminently inhuman. The happiness or misery of individuals is a
matter of supreme indifference to the Absolute, which, in order to
realise itself in time, ruthlessly sacrifices sentient beings.
The spirit of Hegel's philosophy, in its bearing on social life, was
thus antagonistic to Progress as a practical doctrine. Progress
there had been, but Progress had done its work; the Prussian
monarchical state was the last word in history. Kant's
cosmopolitical plan, the liberalism and individualism which were
implicit in his thought, the democracies which he contemplated in
the future, are all cast aside as a misconception. Once the needs of
the Absolute Spirit have been satisfied, when it has seen its full
power and splendour revealed in the Hegelian philosophy, the world
is as good as it can be. Social amelioration does not matter, nor
the moral improvement of men, nor the increase of their control over
physical forces.
6.
The other great representative of German idealism, who took his
departure from Kant, also saw in history a progressive revelation of
divine reason. But it was the processes of nature, not the career of
humanity, that absorbed the best energies of Schelling, and the
elaboration of a philosophical idea of organic evolution was the
prominent feature of his speculation. His influence--and it was
wide, reaching even scientific biologists--lay chiefly in diffusing
this idea, and he thus contributed to the formation of a theory
which was afterwards to place the idea of Progress on a more
imposing base. [Footnote: Schelling's views notoriously varied at
various stages of his career. In his System of Transcendental
Idealism (1800) he distinguished three historical periods, in the
first of which the Absolute reveals itself as Fate, in the second as
Nature, in the third as Providence, and asserted that we are still
living in the second, which began with the expansion of Rome (Werke,
i. 3, p. 603). In this context he says that the conception of an
infinite "progressivity" is included in the conception of "history,"
but adds that the perfectibility of the race cannot be directly
inferred. For it may be said that man has no proper history but
turns round on a wheel of Ixion. The difficulty of establishing the
fact of Progress from the course of events lies in discovering a
criterion. Schelling rejects the criterion of moral improvement and
that of advance in science and arts as unpractical or misleading.
But if we see the sole object of history in a gradual realisation of
the ideal state, we have a measure of Progress which can be applied;
though it cannot be proved either by theory or by experience that
the goal will be attained. This must remain an article of faith (ib.
592 sqq.).]
Schelling influenced, among others, his contemporary Krause, a less
familiar name, who worked out a philosophy of history in which this
idea is fundamental. Krause conceived history, which is the
expression of the Absolute, as the development of life; society as
an organism; and social growth as a process which can be deduced
from abstract biological principles.
[Footnote: Krause divided man's earthly career into three Ages--
infancy, growth, and maturity. The second of these falls into three
periods characterised by (1) polytheism, (2) monotheism (Middle
Ages), (3) scepticism and liberty, and we are now in the third of
these periods. The third Age will witness the union of humanity in a
single social organism, and the universal acceptance of
"panentheism" (the doctrine of the unity of all in God), which is
the principle of Krause's philosophy and religion. But though this
will be the final stage on the earth, Krause contemplates an
ulterior career of humanity in other solar systems.
Krause never attracted attention in England, but he exerted some
influence in France and Spain, and especially in Belgium,
notwithstanding the grotesque jargon in which he obscured his
thoughts. See Flint, Philosophy of History, pp. 474-5. Flint's
account of his speculations is indulgent. The main ideas of his
philosophy of history will be found in the Introduction a la
philosophie (ed. 2, 1880) of G. Tiberghien, a Belgian disciple.]
All these transcendent speculations had this in common that they
pretended to discover the necessary course of human history on
metaphysical principles, independent of experience. But it has been
rightly doubted whether this alleged independence was genuine. We
may question whether any of them would have produced the same
sequence of periods of history, if the actual facts of history had
been to them a sealed book. Indeed we may be sure that they were
surreptitiously and subconsciously using experience as a guide,
while they imagined that abstract principles were entirely
responsible for their conclusions. And this is equivalent to saying
that their ideas of progressive movement were really derived from
that idea of Progress which the French thinkers of the eighteenth
century had attempted to base on experience.
The influence, direct and indirect, of these German philosophers
reached far beyond the narrow circle of the bacchants or even the
wandbearers of idealism. They did much to establish the notion of
progressive development as a category of thought, almost as familiar
and indispensable as that of cause and effect. They helped to
diffuse the idea of "an increasing purpose" in history. Augustine or
Bossuet might indeed have spoken of an increasing purpose, but the
"purpose" of their speculations was subsidiary to a future life. The
purpose of the German idealists could be fulfilled in earthly
conditions and required no theory of personal immortality.
This atmosphere of thought affected even intelligent reactionaries
who wrote in the interest of orthodox Christianity and the Catholic
Church. Progressive development is admitted in the lectures on the
Philosophy of History of Friedrich von Schlegel. [Footnote:
Translated into English in 2 vols., 1835.] He denounced Condorcet,
and opposed to perfectibility the corruptible nature of man. But he
asserted that the philosophy of history is to be found in "the
principles of social progress." [Footnote: Op. cit. ii, p. 194,
sqq.] These principles are three: the hidden ways of Providence
emancipating the human race; the freewill of man; and the power
which God permits to the agents of evil,--principles which Bossuet
could endorse, but the novelty is that here they are arrayed as
forces of Progress. In fact, the point of von Schlegel's
pretentious, unilluminating book is to rehabilitate Christianity by
making it the key to that new conception of life which had taken
shape among the enemies of the Church.
7.
As biological development was one of the constant preoccupations of
Goethe, whose doctrine of metamorphosis and "types" helped to
prepare the way for the evolutionary hypothesis, we might have
expected to find him interested in theories of social progress, in
which theories of biological development find a logical extension.
But the French speculations on Progress did not touch his
imagination; they left him cool and sceptical. Towards the end of
his life, in conversation with Eckermann, he made some remarks which
indicate his attitude. [Footnote: Gesprache mit Goethe, 23 Oktober
1828.] "'The world will not reach its goal so quickly as we think
and wish. The retarding demons are always there, intervening and
resisting at every point, so that, though there is an advance on the
whole, it is very slow. Live longer and you will find that I am
right.'
"'The development of humanity,' said Eckermann, 'appears to be a
matter of thousands of years.'
"'Who knows?' Goethe replied, 'perhaps of millions. But let humanity
last as long as it will, there will always be hindrances in its way,
and all kinds of distress, to make it develop its powers. Men will
become more clever and discerning, but not better nor happier nor
more energetic, at least except for limited periods. I see the time
coming when God will take no more pleasure in the race, and must
again proceed to a rejuvenated creation. I am sure that this will
happen and that the time and hour in the distant future are already
fixed for the beginning of this epoch of rejuvenation. But that time
is certainly a long way off, and we can still for thousands and
thousands of years enjoy ourselves on this dear old playing-ground,
just as it is.'"
That is at once a plain rejection of perfectibility, and an opinion
that intellectual development is no highroad to the gates of a
golden city.
CHAPTER XIV
CURRENTS OF THOUGHT IN FRANCE AFTER THE REVOLUTION
1.
The failure of the Revolution to fulfil the visionary hopes which
had dazzled France for a brief period--a failure intensified by the
horrors that had attended the experiment--was followed by a reaction
against the philosophical doctrines and tendencies which had
inspired its leaders. Forces, which the eighteenth century had
underrated or endeavoured to suppress, emerged in a new shape, and
it seemed for a while as if the new century might definitely turn
its back on its predecessor. There was an intellectual
rehabilitation of Catholicism, which will always be associated with
the names of four thinkers of exceptional talent, Chateaubriand, De
Maistre, Bonald, and Lamennais.
But the outstanding fame of these great reactionaries must not
mislead us into exaggerating the reach of this reaction. The spirit
and tendencies of the past century still persisted in the circles
which were most permanently influential. Many eminent savants who
had been imbued with the ideas of Condillac and Helvetius, and had
taken part in the Revolution and survived it, were active under the
Empire and the restored Monarchy, still true to the spirit of their
masters, and commanding influence by the value of their scientific
work. M. Picavet's laborious researches into the activities of this
school of thinkers has helped us to understand the transition from
the age of Condorcet to the age of Comte. The two central figures
are Cabanis, the friend of Condorcet, [Footnote: He has already
claimed our notice, above, p. 215.] and Destutt de Tracy. M. Picavet
has grouped around them, along with many obscurer names, the great
scientific men of the time, like Laplace, Bichat, Lamarck, as all in
the direct line of eighteenth century thought. "Ideologists" he
calls them. [Footnote: Ideology is now sometimes used to convey a
criticism; for instance, to contrast the methods of Lamarck with
those of Darwin.] Ideology, the science of ideas, was the word
invented by de Tracy to distinguish the investigation of thought in
accordance with the methods of Locke and Condillac from old-
fashioned metaphysics. The guiding principle of the ideologists was
to apply reason to observed facts and eschew a priori deductions.
Thinkers of this school had an influential organ, the Decade
philosophique, of which J. B. Say the economist was one of the
founders in 1794. The Institut, which had been established by the
Convention, was crowded with "ideologists," and may be said to have
continued the work of the Encyclopaedia. [Footnote: Picavet, op.
cit. p. 69. The members of the 2nd Class of the Institut, that of
moral and political science, were so predominantly Ideological that
the distrust of Napoleon was excited, and he abolished it in 1803,
distributing its members among the other Classes.] These men had a
firm faith in the indefinite progress of knowledge, general
enlightenment, and "social reason."
2.
Thus the ideas of the "sophists" of the age of Voltaire were alive
in the speculative world, not withstanding political, religious, and
philosophical reaction. But their limitations were to be
transcended, and account taken of facts and aspects which their
philosophy had ignored or minimised. The value of the reactionary
movement lay in pressing these facts and aspects on the attention,
in reopening chambers of the human spirit which the age of Voltaire
had locked and sealed.
The idea of Progress was particularly concerned in the general
change of attitude, intellectual and emotional, towards the Middle
Ages. A fresh interest in the great age of the Church was a natural
part of the religious revival, but extended far beyond the circle of
ardent Catholics. It was a characteristic feature, as every one
knows, of the Romantic movement. It did not affect only creative
literature, it occupied speculative thinkers and stimulated
historians. For Guizot, Michelet, and Auguste Comte, as well as for
Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo, the Middle Ages have a significance
which Frenchmen of the previous generation could hardly have
comprehended.
We saw how that period had embarrassed the first pioneers who
attempted to trace the course of civilisation as a progressive
movement, how lightly they passed over it, how unconvincingly they
explained it away. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the
medieval question was posed in such a way that any one who undertook
to develop the doctrine of Progress would have to explore it more
seriously. Madame de Stael saw this when she wrote her book on
Literature considered in its Relation to Social Institutions (1801).
She was then under the influence of Condorcet and an ardent believer
in perfectibility, and the work is an attempt to extend this theory,
which she testifies was falling into discredit, to the realm of
literature. She saw that, if man regressed instead of progressing
for ten centuries, the case for Progress was gravely compromised,
and she sought to show that the Middle Ages contributed to the
development of the intellectual faculties and to the expansion of
civilisation, and that the Christian religion was an indispensable
agent. This contention that Progress was uninterrupted is an advance
on Condorcet and an anticipation of Saint-Simon and Comte.
A more eloquent and persuasive voice was raised in the following
year from the ranks of reaction. Chateaubriand's Genie du
Christianisme appeared in 1802, "amidst the ruins of our temples,"
as the author afterwards said, when France was issuing from the
chaos of her revolution. It was a declaration of war against the
spirit of the eighteenth century which had treated Christianity as a
barbarous system whose fall was demanded in the name of Progress.
But it was much more than polemic. Chateaubriand arrayed arguments
in support of orthodox dogmas, original sin, primitive degeneration,
and the rest; but the appeal of the book did not lie in its logic,
it lay in the appreciation of Christianity from a new point of view.
He approached it in the spirit of an artist, as an aesthete, not as
a philosopher, and so far as he proved anything he proved that
Christianity is valuable because it is beautiful, not because it is
true. He aimed at showing that it can "enchanter l'ame aussi
divinement que les dieux de Virgile et d'Homere." He might call to
his help the Fathers of the Church, but it was on Dante, Milton,
Racine that his case was really based. The book is an apologia, from
the aesthetic standpoint of the Romantic school. "Dieu ne defend pas
les routes fleuries quand elles servent a revenir a lui."
It was a matter of course that the defender of original sin should
reject the doctrine of perfectibility. "When man attains the highest
point of civilisation," wrote Chateaubriand in the vein of Rousseau,
"he is on the lowest stair of morality; if he is free, he is rude;
by civilising his manners, he forges himself chains. His heart
profits at the expense of his head, his head at the expense of his
heart." And, apart from considerations of Christian doctrine, the
question of Progress had little interest for the Romantic school.
Victor Hugo, in the famous Preface to his Cromwell (1827), where he
went more deeply than Chateaubriand into the contrasts between
ancient and modern art, revived the old likeness of mankind to an
individual man, and declared that classical antiquity was the time
of its virility and that we are now spectators of its imposing old
age.
From other points of view powerful intellects were reverting to the
Middle Ages and eager to blot out the whole development of modern
society since the Reformation, as the Encyclopaedic philosophers had
wished to blot out the Middle Ages. The ideal of Bonald, De Maistre,
and Lamennais was a sacerdotal government of the world, and the
English constitution was hardly less offensive to their minds than
the Revolution which De Maistre denounced as "satanic." Advocates as
they were of the dead system of theocracy, they contributed,
however, to the advance of thought, not only by forcing medieval
institutions on the notice of the world but also by their perception
that society had been treated in the eighteenth century in too
mechanical a way, that institutions grow, that the conception of
individual men divested of their life in society is a misleading
abstraction. They put this in extravagant and untenable forms, but
there was a large measure of truth in their criticism, which did its
part in helping the nineteenth century to revise and transcend the
results of eighteenth century speculation.
In this reactionary literature we can see the struggle of the
doctrine of Providence, declining before the doctrine of Progress,
to gain the upper-hand again. Chateaubriand, Bonald, De Maistre,
Lamennais firmly held the dogma of an original golden age and the
degradation of man, and denounced the whole trend of progressive
thought from Bacon to Condorcet. These writers were unconsciously
helping Condorcet's doctrine to assume a new and less questionable
shape. [Footnote: Bonald indeed in his treatise De pouvoir adopted
the idea of development and applied it to religion (as Newman did
afterwards) for the purpose of condemning the Reformation as a
retrograde movement.]
3.
Along with the discovery of the Middle Ages came the discovery of
German literature. In the intellectual commerce between the two
countries in the age of Frederick the Great, France had been
exclusively the giver, Germany the recipient. It was due, above all,
to Madame de Stael that the tide began to flow the other way. Among
the writers of the Napoleonic epoch, Madame de Stael is easily first
in critical talent and intellectual breadth. Her study of the
Revolution showed a more dispassionate appreciation of that
convulsion than any of her contemporaries were capable of forming.
But her chef-d'oeuvre is her study of Germany, De l'Allemagne,
[Footnote: A.D. 1813.] which revealed the existence of a world of
art and thought, unsuspected by the French public. Within the next
twenty years Herder and Lessing, Kant and Hegel were exerting their
influence at Paris. She did in France what Coleridge was doing in
England for the knowledge of German thought.
Madame de Stael had raised anew the question which had been raised
in the seventeenth century and answered in the negative by Voltaire:
is there progress in aesthetic literature? Her early book on
Literature had clearly defined the issue. She did not propose the
thesis that there is any progress or improvement (as some of the
Moderns had contended in the famous Quarrel) in artistic form.
Within the limits of their own thought and emotional experience the
ancients achieved perfection of expression, and perfection cannot be
surpassed. But as thought progresses, as the sum of ideas increases
and society changes, fresh material is supplied to art, there is "a
new development of sensibility" which enables literary artists to
compass new kinds of charm. The Genie du Christianisme embodied a
commentary on her contention, more arresting than any she could
herself have furnished. Here the reactionary joined hands with the
disciple of Condorcet, to prove that there is progress in the domain
of art. Madame de Stael's masterpiece, Germany, was a further
impressive illustration of the thesis that the literature of the
modern European nations represents an advance on classical
literature, in the sense that it sounds notes which the Greek and
Roman masters had not heard, reaches depths which they had not
conjectured, unlocks chambers which to them were closed,--as a
result of the progressive experiences of the human soul. [Footnote:
German literature was indeed already known, in some measure, to
readers of the Decade philosophique, and Kant had been studied in
France long before 1813, the year of the publication of De
l'Allemagne. See Picavet, Les Ideologues, p. 99.] [Footnote: We can
see the effect of her doctrine in Guizot's remarks (Histoire de la
civilisation en Europe, 2e lecon) where he says of modern
literatures that "sous le point de vue du fond des sentiments et des
idees elles sont plus fortes et plus riches [than the ancient]. On
voit que l'ame humaine a ete remuee sur un plus grand nombre de
points a une plus grande profondeur"--and to this very fact he
ascribes their comparative imperfection in form.]
This view is based on the general propositions that all social
phenomena closely cohere and that literature is a social phenomenon;
from which it follows that if there is a progressive movement in
society generally, there is a progressive movement in literature.
Her books were true to the theory; they inaugurated the methods of
modern criticism, which studies literary works in relation to the
social background of their period.
4.
France, then, under the Bourbon Restoration began to seek new light
from the obscure profundities of German speculation which Madame de
Stael proclaimed. Herder's "Ideas" were translated by Edgar Quinet,
Lessing's Education by Eugene Rodrigues. Cousin sat at the feet of
Hegel. At the same time a new master, full of suggestiveness for
those who were interested in the philosophy of history, was
discovered in Italy. The "Scienza nuova" of Vico was translated by
Michelet.
The book of Vico was now a hundred years old. I did not mention him
in his chronological place, because he exercised no immediate
influence on the world. His thought was an anachronism in the
eighteenth century, it appealed to the nineteenth. He did not
announce or conceive any theory of Progress, but his speculation,
bewildering enough and confused in its exposition, contained
principles which seemed predestined to form the basis of such a
doctrine. His aim was that of Cabanis and the ideologists, to set
the study of society on the same basis of certitude which had been
secured for the study of nature through the work of Descartes and
Newton. [Footnote: Vico has sometimes been claimed as a theorist of
Progress, but incorrectly. See B. Croce, The Philosophy of
Giambattista Vico (Eng. tr., 1913), p. 132--an indispensable aid to
the study of Vico. The first edition of the Scienza nuova appeared
in 1725; the second, which was a new work, in 1730.
Vico influenced Ballanche, a writer who enjoyed a considerable
repute in his day. He taught the progressive development of man
towards liberty and equality within the four corners of the
Christian religion, which he regarded as final. His Palingenesie
sociale appeared in 1823-30.]
His fundamental idea was that the explanation of the history of
societies is to be found in the human mind. The world at first is
felt rather than thought; this is the condition of savages in the
state of nature, who have no political organisation. The second
mental state is imaginative knowledge, "poetical wisdom"; to this
corresponds the higher barbarism of the heroic age. Finally, comes
conceptual knowledge, and with it the age of civilisation. These are
the three stages through which every society passes, and each of
these types determines law, institutions, language, literature, and
the characters of men.
Vico's strenuous researches in the study of Homer and early Roman
history were undertaken in order to get at the point of view of the
heroic age. He insisted that it could not be understood unless we
transcended our own abstract ways of thinking and looked at the
world with primitive eyes, by a forced effort of imagination. He was
convinced that history had been vitiated by the habit of ignoring
psychological differences, by the failure to recapture the ancient
point of view. Here he was far in advance of his own times.
Concentrating his attention above all on Roman antiquity, he
adopted--not altogether advantageously for his system--the
revolutions of Roman history as the typical rule of social
development. The succession of aristocracy (for the early kingship
of Rome and Homeric royalty are merely forms of aristocracy in
Vico's view), democracy, and monarchy is the necessary sequence of
political governments. Monarchy (the Roman Empire) corresponds to
the highest form of civilisation. What happens when this is reached?
Society declines into an anarchical state of nature, from which it
again passes into a higher barbarism or heroic age, to be followed
once more by civilisation. The dissolution of the Roman Empire and
the barbarian invasions are followed by the Middle Ages, in which
Dante plays the part of Homer; and the modern period with its strong
monarchies corresponds to the Roman Empire. This is Vico's principle
of reflux. If the theory were sound, it would mean that the
civilisation of his day must again relapse into barbarism and the
cycle begin again. He did not himself state this conclusion directly
or venture on any prediction. It is obvious how readily his doctrine
could be adapted to the conception of Progress as a spiral movement.
Evidently the corresponding periods in his cycles are not identical
or really homogeneous. Whatever points of likeness may be discovered
between early Greek or Roman and medieval societies, the points of
unlikeness are still more numerous and manifest. Modern civilisation
differs in fundamental and far-reaching ways from Greek and Roman.
It is absurd to pretend that the general movement brings man back
again and again to the point from which he started, and therefore,
if there is any value in Vico's reflux, it can only mean that the
movement of society may be regarded as a spiral ascent, so that each
stage of an upward progress corresponds, in certain general aspects,
to a stage which has already been traversed, this correspondence
being due to the psychical nature of man.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 | 18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24