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Books: The Idea of Progress

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




The theories of Plato are only the most illustrious example of the
tendency characteristic of Greek philosophical thinkers to idealise
the immutable as possessing a higher value than that which varies.
This affected all their social speculations. They believed in the
ideal of an absolute order in society, from which, when it is once
established, any deviation must be for the worse. Aristotle,
considering the subject from a practical point of view, laid down
that changes in an established social order are undesirable, and
should be as few and slight as possible. [Footnote: Politics, ii.
5.] This prejudice against change excluded the apprehension of
civilisation as a progressive movement. It did not occur to Plato or
any one else that a perfect order might be attainable by a long
series of changes and adaptations. Such an order, being an
embodiment of reason, could be created only by a deliberate and
immediate act of a planning mind. It might be devised by the wisdom
of a philosopher or revealed by the Deity. Hence the salvation of a
community must lie in preserving intact, so far as possible, the
institutions imposed by the enlightened lawgiver, since change meant
corruption and disaster. These a priori principles account for the
admiration of the Spartan state entertained by many Greek
philosophers, because it was supposed to have preserved unchanged
for an unusually long period a system established by an inspired
legislator.

2.

Thus time was regarded as the enemy of humanity. Horace's verse,


Damnosa quid non imminuit dies?


"time depreciates the value of the world," expresses the pessimistic
axiom accepted in most systems of ancient thought.

The theory of world-cycles was so widely current that it may almost
be described as the orthodox theory of cosmic time among the Greeks,
and it passed from them to the Romans.

[Footnote: Plato's world-cycle. I have omitted details not
essential; e.g. that in the first period men were born from the
earth and only in the second propagated themselves. The period of
36,000 years, known as the Great Platonic Year, was probably a
Babylonian astronomical period, and was in any case based on the
Babylonian sexagesimal system and connected with the solar year
conceived as consisting of 360 days. Heraclitus seems to have
accepted it as the duration of the world between his periodic
universal conflagrations. Plato derived the number from
predecessors, but based it on operations with the numbers 3, 4, 5,
the length of the sides of the Pythagorean right-angled triangle.
The Great Year of the Pythagorean Philolaus seems to have been
different, and that of the Stoics was much longer (6,570,000 years).

I may refer here to Tacitus, Dialogus c. 16, as an appreciation of
historical perspective unusual in ancient writers: "The four hundred
years which separate us from the ancients are almost a vanishing
quantity if you compare them with the duration of the ages." See the
whole passage, where the Magnus Annus of 12,954 years is referred
to.]

According to some of the Pythagoreans [Footnote: See Simplicius,
Phys. 732, 26.] each cycle repeated to the minutest particular the
course and events of the preceding. If the universe dissolves into
the original chaos, there appeared to them to be no reason why the
second chaos should produce a world differing in the least respect
from its predecessor. The nth cycle would be indeed numerically
distinct from the first, but otherwise would be identical with it,
and no man could possibly discover the number of the cycle in which
he was living. As no end seems to have been assigned to the whole
process, the course of the world's history would contain an endless
number of Trojan Wars, for instance; an endless number of Platos
would write an endless number of Republics. Virgil uses this idea in
his Fourth Eclogue, where he meditates a return of the Golden Age:


Alter erit tum Tiphys, et altera quae uehat Argo
Delectos heroas; erunt etiam altera bella,
Atque iterum ad Troiam magnus mittetur Achilles.


The periodic theory might be held in forms in which this uncanny
doctrine of absolute identity was avoided; but at the best it meant
an endless monotonous iteration, which was singularly unlikely to
stimulate speculative interest in the future. It must be remembered
that no thinker had any means of knowing how near to the end of his
cycle the present hour might be. The most influential school of the
later Greek age, the Stoics, adopted the theory of cycles, and the
natural psychological effect of the theory is vividly reflected in
Marcus Aurelius, who frequently dwells on it in his Meditations.
"The rational soul," he says, "wanders round the whole world and
through the encompassing void, and gazes into infinite time, and
considers the periodic destructions and rebirths of the universe,
and reflects that our posterity will see nothing new, and that our
ancestors saw nothing greater than we have seen. A man of forty
years, possessing the most moderate intelligence, may be said to
have seen all that is past and all that is to come; so uniform is
the world." [Footnote: xi. I. The cyclical theory was curiously
revived in the nineteenth; century by Nietzsche, and it is
interesting to note his avowal that it took him a long time to
overcome the feeling of pessimism which the doctrine inspired.]

3.

And yet one Stoic philosopher saw clearly, and declared
emphatically, that increases in knowledge must be expected in the
future.

"There are many peoples to-day," Seneca wrote, "who are ignorant of
the cause of eclipses of the moon, and it has only recently been
demonstrated among ourselves. The day will come when time and human
diligence will clear up problems which are now obscure. We divide
the few years of our lives unequally between study and vice, and it
will therefore be the work of many generations to explain such
phenomena as comets. One day our posterity will marvel at our
ignorance of causes so clear to them.

"How many new animals have we first come to know in the present age?
In time to come men will know much that is unknown to us. Many
discoveries are reserved for future ages, when our memory will have
faded from men's minds. We imagine ourselves initiated in the
secrets of nature; we are standing on the threshold of her temple."

[Footnote: The quotations from Seneca will be found in Naturales
Quaestiones, vii. 25 and 31. See also Epist. 64. Seneca implies
continuity in scientific research. Aristotle had stated this
expressly, pointing out that we are indebted not only to the author
of the philosophical theory which we accept as true, but also to the
predecessors whose views it has superseded (Metaphysics, i. ii.
chap. 1). But he seems to consider his own system as final.]

But these predictions are far from showing that Seneca had the least
inkling of a doctrine of the Progress of humanity. Such a doctrine
is sharply excluded by the principles of his philosophy and his
profoundly pessimistic view of human affairs. Immediately after the
passage which I have quoted he goes on to enlarge on the progress of
vice. "Are you surprised to be told that human knowledge has not yet
completed its whole task? Why, human wickedness has not yet fully
developed."

Yet, at least, it may be said, Seneca believed in a progress of
knowledge and recognised its value. Yes, but the value which he
attributed to it did not lie in any advantages which it would bring
to the general community of mankind. He did not expect from it any
improvement of the world. The value of natural science, from his
point of view, was this, that it opened to the philosopher a divine
region, in which, "wandering among the stars," he could laugh at the
earth and all its riches, and his mind "delivered as it were from
prison could return to its original home." In other words, its value
lay not in its results, but simply in the intellectual activity; and
therefore it concerned not mankind at large but a few chosen
individuals who, doomed to live in a miserable world, could thus
deliver their souls from slavery.

For Seneca's belief in the theory of degeneration and the hopeless
corruption of the race is uncompromising. Human life on the earth is
periodically destroyed, alternately by fire and flood; and each
period begins with a golden age in which men live in rude
simplicity, innocent because they are ignorant not because they are
wise. When they degenerate from this state, arts and inventions
promote deterioration by ministering to luxury and vice.

Interesting, then, as Seneca's observations on the prospect of some
future scientific discoveries are, and they are unique in ancient
literature, [Footnote: They are general and definite. This
distinguishes them, for instance, from Plato's incidental hint in
the Republic as to the prospect of the future development of solid
geometry.] they were far from adumbrating a doctrine of the Progress
of man. For him, as for Plato and the older philosophers, time is
the enemy of man. [Footnote: The quotations and the references here
will be found in Nat. Quaest. i. Praef.; Epist. 104, Sec. 16 (cp.
110, Sec. 8; 117, Sec. 20, and the fine passage in 65, Sec. 16-21);
Nat. Quaest. iii. 28-30; and finally Epist. 90, Sec. 45, cp. Sec.
17. This last letter is a criticism on Posidonius, who asserted that
the arts invented in primitive times were due to philosophers.
Seneca repudiates this view: omnia enim ista sagacitas hominum, non
sapientia inuenit.

Seneca touches on the possibility of the discovery of new lands
beyond the ocean in a passage in his Medea (374 sqq.) which has been
often quoted:


uenient annis
secula seris, quibus oceanus
uincula rerum laxet et ingens
pateat tellus Tiphysque novos
detegat orbes, ...
nec sit terris ultima Thule.]

4.

There was however a school of philosophical speculation, which might
have led to the foundation of a theory of Progress, if the
historical outlook of the Greeks had been larger and if their temper
had been different. The Atomic theory of Democritus seems to us now,
in many ways, the most wonderful achievement of Greek thought, but
it had a small range of influence in Greece, and would have had less
if it had not convinced the brilliant mind of Epicurus. The
Epicureans developed it, and it may be that the views which they put
forward as to the history of the human race are mainly their own
superstructure. These philosophers rejected entirely the doctrine of
a Golden Age and a subsequent degeneration, which was manifestly
incompatible with their theory that the world was mechanically
formed from atoms without the intervention of a Deity. For them, the
earliest condition of men resembled that of the beasts, and from
this primitive and miserable condition they laboriously reached the
existing state of civilisation, not by external guidance or as a
consequence of some initial design, but simply by the exercise of
human intelligence throughout a long period. [Footnote: Lucretius v.
1448 sqq. (where the word PROGRESS is pronounced):

Usus et impigrae simul experientia mentis
Paulatim docuit pedetemtim progredientis.
Sic unum quicquid paulatim protrahit aetas
In medium ratioque in luminis erigit oras.
Namque alid ex alio clarescere et ordine debet
Artibus, ad summum donee uenere cacumen.]

The gradual amelioration of their existence was marked by the
discovery of fire and the use of metals, the invention of language,
the invention of weaving, the growth of arts and industries,
navigation, the development of family life, the establishment of
social order by means of kings, magistrates, laws, the foundation of
cities. The last great step in the amelioration of life, according
to Lucretius, was the illuminating philosophy of Epicurus, who
dispelled the fear of invisible powers and guided man from
intellectual darkness to light.

But Lucretius and the school to which he belonged did not look
forward to a steady and continuous process of further amelioration
in the future. They believed that a time would come when the
universe would fall into ruins, [Footnote: Ib. 95.] but the
intervening period did not interest them. Like many other
philosophers, they thought that their own philosophy was the final
word on the universe, and they did not contemplate the possibility
that important advances in knowledge might be achieved by subsequent
generations. And, in any case, their scope was entirely
individualistic; all their speculations were subsidiary to the aim
of rendering the life of the individual as tolerable as possible
here and now. Their philosophy, like Stoicism, was a philosophy of
resignation; it was thoroughly pessimistic and therefore
incompatible with the idea of Progress. Lucretius himself allows an
underlying feeling of scepticism as to the value of civilisation
occasionally to escape. [Footnote: His eadem sunt omnia semper (iii.
945) is the constant refrain of Marcus Aurelius.]

Indeed, it might be said that in the mentality of the ancient Greeks
there was a strain which would have rendered them indisposed to take
such an idea seriously, if it had been propounded. No period of
their history could be described as an age of optimism. They were
never, by their achievements in art or literature, in mathematics or
philosophy, exalted into self-complacency or lured into setting high
hopes on human capacity. Man has resourcefulness to meet everything-
-[words in Greek],--they did not go further than that.

This instinctive pessimism of the Greeks had a religious tinge which
perhaps even the Epicureans found it hard entirely to expunge. They
always felt that they were in the presence of unknown incalculable
powers, and that subtle dangers lurked in human achievements and
gains. Horace has taken this feeling as the motif of a criticism on
man's inventive powers. A voyage of Virgil suggests the reflection
that his friend's life would not be exposed to hazards on the high
seas if the art of navigation had never been discovered--if man had
submissively respected the limits imposed by nature. But man is
audacious:


Nequiquam deus abscidit
Prudens oceano dissociabili Terras.


In vain a wise god sever'd lands
By the dissociating sea.


Daedalus violated the air, as Hercules invaded hell. The discovery
of fire put us in possession of a forbidden secret. Is this
unnatural conquest of nature safe or wise? Nil mortalibus ardui est:

Man finds no feat too hard or high;
Heaven is not safe from man's desire.
Our rash designs move Jove to ire,
He dares not lay his thunder by.


The thought of this ode [Footnote: i. 3.] roughly expresses what
would have been the instinctive sense of thoughtful Greeks if the
idea of Progress had been presented to them. It would have struck
them as audacious, the theory of men unduly elated and perilously at
ease in the presence of unknown incalculable powers.

This feeling or attitude was connected with the idea of Moira. If we
were to name any single idea as generally controlling or pervading
Greek thought from Homer to the Stoics, [Footnote: The Stoics
identified Moira with Pronoia, in accordance with their theory that
the universe is permeated by thought.] it would perhaps be Moira,
for which we have no equivalent. The common rendering "fate" is
misleading. Moira meant a fixed order in the universe; but as a fact
to which men must bow, it had enough in common with fatality to
demand a philosophy of resignation and to hinder the creation of an
optimistic atmosphere of hope. It was this order which kept things
in their places, assigned to each its proper sphere and function,
and drew a definite line, for instance, between men and gods. Human
progress towards perfection--towards an ideal of omniscience, or an
ideal of happiness, would have been a breaking down of the bars
which divide the human from the divine. Human nature does not alter;
it is fixed by Moira.

5.

We can see now how it was that speculative Greek minds never hit on
the idea of Progress. In the first place, their limited historical
experience did not easily suggest such a synthesis; and in the
second place, the axioms of their thought, their suspiciousness of
change, their theories of Moira, of degeneration and cycles,
suggested a view of the world which was the very antithesis of
progressive development. Epicurean, philosophers made indeed what
might have been an important step in the direction of the doctrine
of Progress, by discarding the theory of degeneration, and
recognising that civilisation had been created by a series of
successive improvements achieved by the effort of man alone. But
here they stopped short. For they had their eyes fixed on the lot of
the individual here and now, and their study of the history of
humanity was strictly subordinate to this personal interest. The
value of their recognition of human progress in the past is
conditioned by the general tenor and purpose of their theory of
life. It was simply one item in their demonstration that man owed
nothing to supernatural intervention and had nothing to fear from
supernatural powers. It is however no accident that the school of
thought which struck on a path that might have led to the idea of
Progress was the most uncompromising enemy of superstition that
Greece produced.

It might be thought that the establishment of Roman rule and order
in a large part of the known world, and the civilising of barbarian
peoples, could not fail to have opened to the imagination of some of
those who reflected on it in the days of Virgil or of Seneca, a
vista into the future. But there was no change in the conditions of
life likely to suggest a brighter view of human existence. With the
loss of freedom pessimism increased, and the Greek philosophies of
resignation were needed more than ever. Those whom they could not
satisfy turned their thoughts to new mystical philosophies and
religions, which were little interested in the earthly destinies of
human society.

II

1.

The idea of the universe which prevailed throughout the Middle Ages,
and the general orientation of men's thoughts were incompatible with
some of the fundamental assumptions which are required by the idea
of Progress. According to the Christian theory which was worked out
by the Fathers, and especially by St. Augustine, the whole movement
of history has the purpose of securing the happiness of a small
portion of the human race in another world; it does not postulate a
further development of human history on earth. For Augustine, as for
any medieval believer, the course of history would be satisfactorily
complete if the world came to an end in his own lifetime. He was not
interested in the question whether any gradual amelioration of
society or increase of knowledge would mark the period of time which
might still remain to run before the day of Judgment. In Augustine's
system the Christian era introduced the last period of history, the
old age of humanity, which would endure only so long as to enable
the Deity to gather in the predestined number of saved people. This
theory might be combined with the widely-spread belief in a
millennium on earth, but the conception of such a dispensation does
not render it a theory of Progress.

Again, the medieval doctrine apprehends history not as a natural
development but as a series of events ordered by divine intervention
and revelations. If humanity had been left to go its own way it
would have drifted to a highly undesirable port, and all men would
have incurred the fate of everlasting misery from which supernatural
interference rescued the minority. A belief in Providence might
indeed, and in a future age would, be held along with a belief in
Progress, in the same mind; but the fundamental assumptions were
incongruous, and so long as the doctrine of Providence was
undisputedly in the ascendant, a doctrine of Progress could not
arise. And the doctrine of Providence, as it was developed in
Augustine's "City of God," controlled the thought of the Middle
Ages.

There was, moreover, the doctrine of original sin, an insuperable
obstacle to the moral amelioration of the race by any gradual
process of development. For since, so long as the human species
endures on earth, every child will be born naturally evil and worthy
of punishment, a moral advance of humanity to perfection is plainly
impossible. [Footnote: It may be added that, as G. Monod observed,
"les hommes du moyen age n'avaient pas conscience des modifications
successives que le temps apporte avec lui dans les choses humaines"
(Revue Historique, i. p. 8).]

2.

But there are certain features in the medieval theory of which we
must not ignore the significance. In the first place, while it
maintained the belief in degeneration, endorsed by Hebrew mythology,
it definitely abandoned the Greek theory of cycles. The history of
the earth was recognised as a unique phenomenon in time; it would
never occur again or anything resembling it. More important than all
is the fact that Christian theology constructed a synthesis which
for the first time attempted to give a definite meaning to the whole
course of human events, a synthesis which represents the past as
leading up to a definite and desirable goal in the future. Once this
belief had been generally adopted and prevailed for centuries men
might discard it along with the doctrine of Providence on which it
rested, but they could not be content to return again to such views
as satisfied the ancients, for whom human history, apprehended as a
whole, was a tale of little meaning. [Footnote: It may be observed
that Augustine (De Civ. Dei, x. 14) compares the teaching (recta
eruditio) of the people of God, in the gradual process of history,
to the education of an individual. Prudentius has a similar
comparison for a different purpose (c. Symmachum, ii. 315 sqq.):

Tardis semper processibus aucta Crescit vita hominis et longo
proficit usu. Sic aevi mortalis habet se mobilis ordo, Sic variat
natura vices, infantia repit, etc.

Floras (Epitome, ad init.) had already divided Roman history into
four periods corresponding to infancy, adolescence, manhood, and old
age.]

They must seek for some new synthesis to replace it.

Another feature of the medieval theory, pertinent to our inquiry,
was an idea which Christianity took over from Greek and Roman
thinkers. In the later period of Greek history, which began with the
conquests of Alexander the Great, there had emerged the conception
of the whole inhabited world as a unity and totality, the idea of
the whole human race as one. We may conveniently call it the
ecumenical idea--the principle of the ecumene or inhabited world, as
opposed to the principle of the polis or city. Promoted by the vast
extension of the geographical limits of the Greek world resulting
from Alexander's conquests, and by his policy of breaking down the
barriers between Greek and barbarian, the idea was reflected in the
Stoic doctrine that all men are brothers, and that a man's true
country is not his own particular city, but the ecumene. [Footnote:
Plutarch long ago saw the connection between the policy of Alexander
and the cosmopolitan teaching of Zeno. De Alexandri Magni virtute,
i. Sec. 6.] It soon became familiar, popularised by the most popular
of the later philosophies of Greece; and just as it had been implied
in the imperial aspiration and polity of Alexander, so it was
implied, still more clearly, in the imperial theory of Rome. The
idea of the Roman Empire, its theoretical justification, might be
described as the realisation of the unity of the world by the
establishment of a common order, the unification of mankind in a
single world-embracing political organism. The term "world," orbis
(terrarum), which imperial poets use freely in speaking of the
Empire, is more than a mere poetical or patriotic exaggeration; it
expresses the idea, the unrealised ideal of the Empire. There is a
stone from Halicarnassus in the British Museum, on which the idea is
formally expressed from another point of view. The inscription is of
the time of Augustus, and the Emperor is designated as "saviour of
the community of mankind." There we have the notion of the human
race apprehended as a whole, the ecumenical idea, imposing upon Rome
the task described by Virgil as regere imperio populos, and more
humanely by Pliny as the creation of a single fatherland for all the
peoples of the world. [Footnote: Pliny, Nat. Hist. iii. 6. 39.]

This idea, which in the Roman Empire and in the Middle Ages took the
form of a universal State and a universal Church, passed afterwards
into the conception of the intercohesion of peoples as contributors
to a common pool of civilisation--a principle which, when the idea
of Progress at last made its appearance in the world, was to be one
of the elements in its growth.

3.

One remarkable man, the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, [Footnote: c.
A.D. 1210-92. Of Bacon's Opus Majus the best and only complete
edition is that of J. H. Bridges, 2 vols. 1897 (with an excellent
Introduction). The associated works, Opus Minus and Opus Tertium,
have been edited by Brewer, Fr. Rogeri Bacon Opera Inedita,
1859.]who stands on an isolated pinnacle of his own in the Middle
Ages, deserves particular consideration. It has been claimed for him
that he announced the idea of Progress; he has even been compared to
Condorcet or Comte. Such claims are based on passages taken out of
their context and indulgently interpreted in the light of later
theories. They are not borne out by an examination of his general
conception of the universe and the aim of his writings.