Books: The Idea of Progress

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A conception of this kind could not be appreciated in Vico's day or
by the next generation. The "Scienza nuova" lay in Montesquieu's
library, and he made no use of it. But it was natural that it should
arouse interest in France at a time when the new idealistic
philosophies of Germany were attracting attention, and when
Frenchmen, of the ideological school, were seeking, like Vico
himself, a synthetic principle to explain social phenomena.
Different though Vico was in his point of departure as in his
methods from the German idealists, his speculations nevertheless had
something in common with theirs. Both alike explained history by the
nature of mind which necessarily determined the stages of the
process; Vico as little as Fichte or Hegel took eudaemonic
considerations into account. The difference was that the German
thinkers sought their principle in logic and applied it a priori,
while Vico sought his in concrete psychology and engaged in
laborious research to establish it a posteriori by the actual data
of history. But both speculations suggested that the course of human
development corresponds to the fundamental character of mental
processes and is not diverted either by Providential intervention or
by free acts of human will.

5.

These foreign influences co-operated in determining the tendencies
of French speculation in the period of the restored monarchy,
whereby the idea of Progress was placed on new basements and became
the headstone of new "religions." Before we consider the founders of
sects, we may glance briefly at the views of some eminent savants
who had gained the ear of the public before the July Revolution--
Jouffroy, Cousin, and Guizot.

Cousin, the chief luminary in the sphere of pure philosophy in
France in the first half of the nineteenth century, drew his
inspiration from Germany. He was professedly an eclectic, but in the
main his philosophy was Hegelian. He might endow God with
consciousness and speak of Providence, but he regarded the world-
process as a necessary evolution of thought, and he saw, not in
religion but in philosophy, the highest expression of civilisation.
In 1828 he delivered a course of lectures on the philosophy of
history. He divided history into three periods, each governed by a
master idea: the first by the idea of the infinite (the Orient); the
second by that of the finite (classical antiquity); the third by
that of the relation of finite to infinite (the modern age). As with
Hegel, the future is ignored, progress is confined within a closed
system, the highest circle has already been reached. As an opponent
of the ideologists and the sensational philosophy on which they
founded their speculations, Cousin appealed to the orthodox and all
those to whom Voltairianism was an accursed thing, and for a
generation he exercised a considerable influence. But his work--and
this is the important point for us--helped to diffuse the idea,
which the ideologists were diffusing on very different lines--that
human history has been a progressive development.

Progressive development was also the theme of Jouffroy in his slight
but suggestive introduction to the philosophy of history (1825),
[Footnote: "Reflexions sur la philosophie de l'histoire," in
Melanges philosophiques, 2nd edition, 1838.] in which he posed the
same problem which, as we shall see, Saint-Simon and Comte were
simultaneously attempting to solve. He had not fallen under the
glamour of German idealism, and his results have more affinity with
Vico's than with Hegel's.

He begins with some simple considerations which conduct to the
doubtful conclusion that all the historical changes in man's
condition are due to the operation of his intelligence. The
historian's business is to trace the succession of the actual
changes. The business of the philosopher of history is to trace the
succession of ideas and study the correspondence between the two
developments. This is the true philosophy of history: "the glory of
our age is to understand it."

Now it is admitted to-day, he says, that the human intelligence
obeys invariable laws, so that a further problem remains. The actual
succession of ideas has to be deduced from these necessary laws.
When that deduction is effected--a long time hence--history will
disappear; it will be merged in science.

Jouffroy then presented the world with what he calls the FATALITY OF
INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT, to take the place of Providence or
Destiny. It is a fatality, he is careful to explain, which, so far
from compromising, presupposes individual liberty. For it is not
like the fatality of sensual impulse which guides the brute
creation. What it implies is this: if a thousand men have the same
idea of what is good, this idea will govern their conduct in spite
of their passions, because, being reasonable and free, they are not
blindly submissive to passion, but can deliberate and choose.

This explanation of history as a necessary development of society
corresponding to a necessary succession of ideas differs in two
important points from the explanations of Hegel and Cousin. The
succession of ideas is not conceived as a transcendent logic, but is
determined by the laws of the HUMAN mind and belongs to the domain
of psychology. Here Jouffroy is on the same ground as Vico. In the
second place, it is not a closed system; room remains for an
indefinite development in the future.

6.

While Cousin was discoursing on philosophy at Paris in the days of
the last Bourbon king, Guizot was drawing crowded audiences to his
lectures on the history of European civilisation, [Footnote:
Histoire de la civilisation en Europe.] and the keynote of these
lectures was Progress. He approached it with a fresh mind,
unencumbered with any of the philosophical theories which had
attended and helped its growth.

Civilisation, he said, is the supreme fact so far as man is
concerned, "the fact par excellence, the general and definite fact
in which all other facts merge." And "civilisation" means progress
or development. The word "awakens, when it is pronounced, the idea
of a people which is in motion, not to change its place but to
change its state, a people whose condition is expanding and
improving. The idea of progress, development, seems to me to be the
fundamental idea contained in the word CIVILISATION."

There we have the most important positive idea of eighteenth century
speculation, standing forth detached and independent, no longer
bound to a system. Fifty years before, no one would have dreamed of
defining civilisation like that and counting on the immediate
acquiescence of his audience. But progress has to be defined. It
does not merely imply the improvement of social relations and public
well-being. France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was
behind Holland and England in the sum and distribution of well-being
among individuals, and yet she can claim that she was the most
"civilised" country in those ages. The reason is that civilisation
also implies the development of the individual life, of men's
private faculties, sentiments, and ideas. The progress of man
therefore includes both these developments. But they are intimately
connected. We may observe how moral reformers generally recommend
their proposals by promising social amelioration as a result, and
that progressive politicians maintain that the progress of society
necessarily induces moral improvement. The connection may not always
be apparent, and at different times one or other kind of progress
predominates. But one is followed by the other ultimately, though it
may be after a long interval, for "la Providence a ses aises dans le
temps." The rise of Christianity was one of the crises of
civilisation, yet it did not in its early stages aim at any
improvement of social conditions; it did not attack the great
injustices which were wrought in the world. It meant a great crisis
because it changed the beliefs and sentiments of individuals; social
effects came afterwards.

The civilisation of modern Europe has grown through a period of
fifteen centuries and is still progressing. The rate of progress has
been slower than that of Greek civilisation, but on the other hand
it has been continuous, uninterrupted, and we can see "the vista of
an immense career."

The effects of Guizot's doctrine in propagating the idea of Progress
were all the greater for its divorce from philosophical theory. He
did not touch perplexing questions like fatality, or discuss the
general plan of the world; he did not attempt to rise above common-
sense; and he did not essay any premature scheme of the universal
history of man. His masterly survey of the social history of Europe
exhibited progressive movement as a fact, in a period in which to
the thinkers of the eighteenth century it had been almost invisible.
This of course was far from proving that Progress is the key to the
history of the world and human destinies. The equation of
civilisation with progress remains an assumption. For the question
at once arises: Can civilisation reach a state of equilibrium from
which no further advance is possible; and if it can, does it cease
to be civilisation? Is Chinese civilisation mis-called, or has there
been here too a progressive movement all the time, however slow?
Such questions were not raised by Guizot. But his view of history
was effective in helping to establish the association of the two
ideas of civilisation and progress, which to-day is taken for
granted as evidently true.

7.

The views of these eminent thinkers Cousin, Jouffroy, and Guizot
show that--quite apart from the doctrines of ideologists and of the
"positivists," Saint-Simon and Comte, of whom I have still to speak-
-there was a common trend in French thought in the Restoration
period towards the conception of history as a progressive movement.
Perhaps there is no better illustration of the infectiousness of
this conception than in the Historical Studies which Chateaubriand
gave to the world in 1831. He had learned much, from books as well
as from politics, since he wrote the GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY. He had
gained some acquaintance with German philosophy and with Vico. And
in this work of his advanced age he accepts the idea of Progress, so
far as it could be accepted by an orthodox son of the Church. He
believes that the advance of knowledge will lead to social progress,
and that society, if it seems sometimes to move backward, is always
really moving forward. Bossuet, for whom he had no word of criticism
thirty years before, he now convicts of "an imposing error." That
great man, he writes, "has confined historical events in a circle as
rigorous as his genius. He has imprisoned them in an inflexible
Christianity--a terrible hoop in which the human race would turn in
a sort of eternity, without progress or improvement." The admission
from such a quarter shows eloquently how the wind was setting.

The notions of development and continuity which were to control all
departments of historical study in the later nineteenth century were
at the same time being independently promoted by the young
historical school in Germany which is associated with the names of
Eichhorn, Savigny, and Niebuhr. Their view that laws and
institutions are a natural growth or the expression of a people's
mind, represents another departure from the ideas of the eighteenth
century. It was a repudiation of that "universal reason" which
desired to reform the world and its peoples indiscriminately without
taking any account of their national histories.

CHAPTER XV

THE SEARCH FOR A LAW OF PROGRESS:

I. SAINT-SIMON

Amid the intellectual movements in France described in the last
chapter the idea of Progress passed into a new phase of its growth.
Hitherto it had been a vague optimistic doctrine which encouraged
the idealism of reformers and revolutionaries, but could not guide
them. It had waited like a handmaid on the abstractions of Nature
and Reason; it had hardly realised an independent life. The time had
come for systematic attempts to probe its meaning and definitely to
ascertain the direction in which humanity is moving. Kant had said
that a Kepler or a Newton was needed to find the law of the movement
of civilisation. Several Frenchmen now undertook to solve the
problem. They did not solve it; but the new science of sociology was
founded; and the idea of Progress, which presided at its birth, has
been its principal problem ever since.

1.

The three thinkers who claimed to have discovered the secret of
social development had also in view the practical object of
remoulding society on general scientific principles, and they became
the founders of sects, Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Comte. They all
announced a new era of development as a necessary sequel of the
past, an inevitable and desirable stage in the march of humanity,
and delineated its features.

Comte was the successor of Saint-Simon, as Saint-Simon himself was
the successor of Condorcet. Fourier stands quite apart. He claimed
that he broke entirely new ground, and acknowledged no masters. He
regarded himself as a Newton for whom no Kepler or Galileo had
prepared the way. The most important and sanest part of his work was
the scheme for organising society on a new principle of industrial
co-operation. His general theory of the universe and man's destinies
which lay behind his practical plans is so fantastic that it sounds
like the dream of a lunatic. Yet many accepted it as the apocalypse
of an evangelist.

Fourier was moved by the far-reaching effects of Newton's discovery
to seek a law which would coordinate facts in the moral world as the
principle of gravitation had co-ordinated facts in the physical
world, and in 1808 he claimed to have found the secret in what he
called the law of Passional Attraction. [Footnote: Theorie des
quatre mouvements et des destinees generales. General accounts of
his theories will be found in Charles Fourier, sa vie et sa theorie,
by his disciple Dr. Ch. Pellarin (2nd ed., 1843), and in Flint,
Hist. of Philosophy of History in France, etc., pp. 408 sqq.] The
human passions have hitherto been sources of misery; the problem for
man is to make them sources of happiness. If we know the law which
governs them, we can make such changes in our environment that none
of the passions will need to be curbed, and the free indulgence of
one will not hinder or compromise the satisfaction of the others.

His worthless law for harmonising the passions without restraining
them need not detain us. The structure of society, by which he
proposed to realise the benefits of his discovery, was based on co-
operation, but was not socialistic. The family as a social unit was
to be replaced by a larger unit (PHALANGE), economically self-
sufficing, and consisting of about 1800 persons, who were to live
together in a vast building (PHALANSTERE), surrounded by a domain
sufficient to produce all they required. Private property is not
abolished; the community will include both rich and poor; all the
products of their work are distributed in shares according to the
labour, talents, and capital of each member, but a fixed minimum is
assured to every one. The scheme was actually tried on a small scale
near the forest of Rambouillet in 1832.

This transformation of society, which is to have the effect of
introducing harmony among the passions, will mark the beginning of a
new epoch. The duration of man's earthly career is 81,000 years, of
which 5000 have elapsed. He will now enter upon a long period of
increasing harmony, which will be followed by an equal period of
decline--like the way up and the way down of Heraclitus. His brief
past, the age of his infancy, has been marked by a decline of
happiness leading to the present age of "civilisation" which is
thoroughly bad--here we see the influence of Rousseau--and from it
Fourier's discovery is the clue to lead humanity forth into the
epoch in which harmony begins to emerge. But men who have lived in
the bad ages need not be pitied, and those who live to-day need not
be pessimistic. For Fourier believed in metempsychosis, and could
tell you, as if he were the private secretary of the Deity
calculating the arithmetical details of the cosmic plan, how many
very happy, tolerably happy, and unhappy lives fall to the lot of
each soul during the whole 81,000 years. Nor does the prospect end
with the life of the earth. The soul of the earth and the human
souls attached to it will live again in comets, planets, and suns,
on a system of which Fourier knew all the particulars. [Footnote:
Details will be found in the Theorie de l'unite universelle,
originally published under the title Association domestique-agricole
in 1822.]

These silly speculations would not deserve even this slight
indication of their purport were it not that Fourier founded a sect
and had a considerable body of devoted followers. His "discovery"
was acclaimed by Beranger:

Fourier nous dit: Sors de la fange,
Peuple en proie aux deceptions,
Travaille, groupe par phalange,
Dans un cercle d'attractions;
La terre, apres tant de desastres,
Forme avec le ciel un hymen,
Et la loi qui regit les astres,
Donne la paix au genre humain.

Ten years after his death (1837) an English writer tells us that
"the social theory of Fourier is at the present moment engrossing
the attention and exciting the apprehensions of thinking men, not
only in France but in almost every country in Europe." [Footnote: R.
Blakey, History of the Philosophy of Mind, vol. iv. p. 293 (1848).
Fourier, born 1772, died in 1837. His principal disciple was Victor
Considerant.] Grotesque as was the theoretical background of his
doctrines, he helped to familiarise the world with the idea of
indefinite Progress.

2.

"The imagination of poets has placed the golden age in the cradle of
the human race. It was the age of iron they should have banished
there. The golden age is not behind us, but in front of us. It is
the perfection of social order. Our fathers have not seen it; our
children will arrive there one day, and it is for us to clear the
way for them."

The Comte de Saint-Simon, who wrote these words in 1814, was one of
the liberal nobles who had imbibed the ideas of the Voltairian age
and sympathised with the spirit of the Revolution. In his literary
career from 1803 to his death in 1825 he passed through several
phases of thought, [Footnote: They are traced in G. Weill's valuable
monograph, Saint-Simon et son oeuvre, 1894.] but his chief masters
were always Condorcet and the physiologists, from whom he derived
his two guiding ideas that ethics and politics depend ultimately on
physics and that history is progress.

Condorcet had interpreted history by the progressive movement of
knowledge. That, Saint-Simon said, is the true principle, but
Condorcet applied it narrowly, and committed two errors. He did not
understand the social import of religion, and he represented the
Middle Ages as a useless interruption of the forward movement. Here
Saint-Simon learned from the religious reaction. He saw that
religion has a natural and legitimate social role and cannot be
eliminated as a mere perversity. He expounded the doctrine that all
social phenomena cohere. A religious system, he said, always
corresponds to the stage of science which the society wherein it
appears has reached; in fact, religion is merely science clothed in
a form suitable to the emotional needs which it satisfies. And as a
religious system is based on the contemporary phase of scientific
development, so the political system of an epoch corresponds to the
religious system. They all hang together. Medieval Europe does not
represent a temporary triumph of obscurantism, useless and
deplorable, but a valuable and necessary stage in human progress. It
was a period in which an important principle of social organisation
was realised, the right relation of the spiritual and temporal
powers.

It is evident that these views transformed the theory of Condorcet
into a more acceptable shape. So long as the medieval tract of time
appeared to be an awkward episode, contributing nothing to the
forward movement but rather thwarting and retarding it, Progress was
exposed to the criticism that it was an arbitrary synthesis, only
partly borne out by historical facts and supplying no guarantees for
the future. And so long as rationalists of the Encyclopaedic school
regarded religion as a tiresome product of ignorance and deceit, the
social philosophy which lay behind the theory of Progress was
condemned as unscientific; because, in defiance of the close
cohesion of social phenomena, it refused to admit that religion, as
one of the chief of those phenomena, must itself participate and co-
operate in Progress.

Condorcet had suggested that the value of history lies in affording
data for foreseeing the future. Saint-Simon raised this suggestion
to a dogma. But prevision was impossible on Condorcet's unscientific
method. In order to foretell, the law of the movement must be
discovered, and Condorcet had not found or even sought a law. The
eighteenth century thinkers had left Progress a mere hypothesis
based on a very insufficient induction; their successors sought to
lift it to the rank of a scientific hypothesis, by discovering a
social law as valid as the physical law of gravitation. This was the
object both of Saint-Simon and of Comte.

The "law" which Saint-Simon educed from history was that epochs of
organisation or construction, and epochs of criticism or revolution,
succeed each other alternately. The medieval period was a time of
organisation, and was followed by a critical, revolutionary period,
which has now come to an end and must be succeeded by another epoch
of organisation. Having discovered the clew to the process, Saint-
Simon is able to predict. As our knowledge of the universe has
reached or is reaching a stage which is no longer conjectural but
POSITIVE in all departments, society will be transformed
accordingly; a new PHYSICIST religion will supersede Christianity
and Deism; men of science will play the role of organisers which the
clergy played in the Middle Ages.

As the goal of the development is social happiness, and as the
working classes form the majority, the first step towards the goal
will be the amelioration of the lot of the working classes. This
will be the principal problem of government in reorganising society,
and Saint-Simon's solution of the problem was socialism. He rejected
the watchwords of liberalism--democracy, liberty, and equality--with
as much disdain as De Maistre and the reactionaries.

The announcement of a future age of gold, which I quoted above, is
taken from a pamphlet which he issued, in conjunction with his
secretary, Augustin Thierry the historian, after the fall of
Napoleon. [Footnote: De la reorganisation de la societe europeenne,
p. 111 (1814).] In it he revived the idea of the Abbe de Saint-
Pierre for the abolition of war, and proposed a new organisation of
Europe more ambitious and Utopian than the Abbe's league of states.
At this moment he saw in parliamentary government, which the
restored Bourbons were establishing in France, a sovran remedy for
political disorder, and he imagined that if this political system
were introduced in all the states of Europe a long step would have
been taken to the perpetuation of peace. If the old enemies France
and England formed a close alliance there would be little difficulty
in creating ultimately a European state like the American
Commonwealth, with a parliamentary government supreme over the state
governments. Here is the germ of the idea of a "parliament of man."

3.

Saint-Simon, however, did not construct a definite system for the
attainment of social perfection. He left it to disciples to develop
the doctrine which he sketched. In the year of his death (1825)
Olinde Rodrigues and Enfantin founded a journal, the Producteur, to
present to humanity the one thing which humanity, in the opinion of
their master, then most needed, a new general doctrine. [Footnote:
The best study of the Saint-Simonian school is that of G. Weill,
L'Ecole saint-simonienne, son histoire, son influence jusqu'a nos
jours (1896), to which I am much indebted.]

History shows that peoples have been moving from isolation to union,
from war to peace, from antagonism to association. The programme for
the future is association scientifically organised. The Catholic
Church in the Middle Ages offered the example of a great social
organisation resting on a general doctrine. The modern world must
also be a social organisation, but the general doctrine will be
scientific, not religious. The spiritual power must reside, not in
priests but in savants, who will direct the progress of science and
public education. Each member of the community will have his place
and duties assigned to him. Society consists of three classes of
workers--industrial workers, savants, and artists. A commission of
eminent workers of each class will determine the place of every
individual according to his capacities. Complete equality is absurd;
inequality, based on merit, is reasonable and necessary. It is a
modern error to distrust state authority. A power directing national
forces is requisite, to propose great ideas and to make the
innovations necessary for Progress. Such an organisation will
promote progress in all domains: in science by co-operation, in
industry by credit, and in art too, for artists will learn to
express the ideas and sentiments of their own age. There are signs
already of a tendency towards something of this kind; its
realisation must be procured, not by revolution but by gradual
change.

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