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Books: The Idea of Progress

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




The gravest weakness perhaps in his historical sketch is the
gratuitous assumption that man in the earliest stage of his
existence had animistic beliefs and that the first phase of his
progress was controlled by fetishism. There is no valid evidence
that fetishism is not a relatively late development, or that in the
myriads of years stretching back beyond our earliest records, during
which men decided the future of the human species by their technical
inventions and the discovery of fire, they had any views which could
be called religious or theological. The psychology of modern savages
is no clew to the minds of the people who wrought tools of stone in
the world of the mammoth and the RHINOCEROS TICHIRHINUS. If the
first stage of man's development, which was of such critical
importance for his destinies, was pre-animistic, Comte's law of
progress fails, for it does not cover the ground.

In another way, Comte's system may be criticised for failing to
cover the ground, if it is regarded as a philosophy of history. In
accordance with "the happy artifice of Condorcet," he assumes that
the growth of European civilisation is the only history that
matters, and discards entirely the civilisations, for instance, of
India and China. This assumption is much more than an artifice, and
he has not scientifically justified it. [Footnote: A propos of the
view that only European civilisation matters it has been well
observed that "human history is not unitary but pluralistic": F. J.
Teggart, The Processes of History, p. 24 (1918).]

The reader of the PHILOSOPHIE POSITIVE will also observe that Comte
has not grappled with a fundamental question which has to be faced
in unravelling the woof of history or seeking a law of events. I
mean the question of contingency. It must be remembered that
contingency does not in the least affect the doctrine of
determinism; it is compatible with the strictest interpretation of
the principle of causation. A particular example may be taken to
show what it implies. [Footnote: On contingency and the "chapter of
accidents" see Cournot, Considerations sur la marche des idees et
des evenements dans les temps modernes (1872), i. 16 sqq. I have
discussed the subject and given some illustrations in a short paper,
entitled "Cleopatra's Nose," in the Annual of the Rationalist Press
Association for 1916.]

It may plausibly be argued that a military dictatorship was an
inevitable sequence of the French Revolution. This may not be true,
but let us assume it. Let us further assume that, given Napoleon, it
was inevitable that he should be the dictator. But Napoleon's
existence was due to an independent causal chain which had nothing
whatever to do with the course of political events. He might have
died in his boyhood by disease or by an accident, and the fact that
he survived was due to causes which were similarly independent of
the causal chain which, as we are assuming, led necessarily to an
epoch of monarchical government. The existence of a man of his
genius and character at the given moment was a contingency which
profoundly affected the course of history. If he had not been there
another dictator would have grasped the helm, but obviously would
not have done what Napoleon did.

It is clear that the whole history of man has been modified at every
stage by such contingencies, which may be defined as the collisions
of two independent causal chains. Voltaire was perfectly right when
he emphasised the role of chance in history, though he did not
realise what it meant. This factor would explain the oscillations
and deflections which Comte admits in the movement of historical
progression. But the question arises whether it may not also have
once and again definitely altered the direction of the movement. Can
the factor be regarded as virtually negligible by those who, like
Comte, are concerned with the large perspective of human development
and not with the details of an episode? Or was Renouvier right in
principle when he maintained "the real possibility that the sequence
of events from the Emperor Nerva to the Emperor Charlemagne might
have been radically different from what it actually was"? [Footnote:
He illustrated this proposition by a fanciful reconstruction of
European history from l00 to 800 A.D. in his UCHRONIE, 1876. He
contended that there is no definite law of progress: "The true law
lies in the equal possibility of progress or regress for societies
as for individuals."]

6.

It does not concern us here to examine the defects of Comte's view
of the course of European history. But it interests us to observe
that his synthesis of human Progress is, like Hegel's, what I have
called a closed system. Just as his own absolute philosophy marked
for Hegel the highest and ultimate term of human development, so for
Comte the coming society whose organisation he adumbrated was the
final state of humanity beyond which there would be no further
movement. It would take time to perfect the organisation, and the
period would witness a continuous increase of knowledge, but the
main characteristics were definitely fixed. Comte did not conceive
that the distant future, could he survive to experience it, could
contain any surprises for him. His theory of Progress thus differed
from the eighteenth century views which vaguely contemplate an
indefinite development and only profess to indicate some general
tendencies. He expressly repudiated this notion of INDEFINITE
progress; the data, he said, justify only the inference of
CONTINUOUS progress, which is a different thing.

A second point in which Comte in his view of Progress differed from
the French philosophers of the preceding age is this. Condorcet and
his predecessors regarded it exclusively from the eudaemonic point
of view. The goal of Progress for them was the attainment of human
felicity. With felicity Comte is hardly more concerned than Hegel.
The establishment of a fuller harmony between men and their
environment in the third stage will no doubt mean happiness. But
this consideration lies outside the theory, and to introduce it
would only intrude an unscientific element into the analysis. The
course of development is determined by intellectual ideas, and he
treats these as independent of, and indifferent to, eudaemonic
motives.

A third point to be noted is the authoritarian character of the
regime of the future. Comte's ideal state would be as ill to live in
for any unfortunate being who values personal liberty as a theocracy
or any socialistic Utopia. He had as little sympathy with liberty as
Plato or as Bossuet, and less than the eighteenth century
philosophers. This feature, common to Comte and the Saint-Simonians,
was partly due to the reaction against the Revolution, but it also
resulted from the logic of the man of science. If sociological laws
are positively established as certainly as the law of gravitation,
no room is left for opinion; right social conduct is definitely
fixed; the proper functions of every member of society admit of no
question; therefore the claim to liberty is perverse and irrational.
It is the same argument which some modern exponents of Eugenics use
to advocate a state tyranny in the matter of human breeding.

When Comte was writing, the progressive movement in Europe was
towards increase of liberty in all its forms, national, civic,
political, and economical. On one hand there was the agitation for
the release of oppressed nationalities, on the other the growth of
liberalism in England and France. The aim of the liberalism of that
period was to restrict the functions of government; its spirit was
distrust of the state. As a political theory it was defective, as
modern Liberals acknowledge, but it was an important expression of
the feeling that the interests of society are best furthered by the
free interplay of individual actions and aims. It thus implicitly
contained or pointed to a theory of Progress sharply opposed to
Comte's: that the realisation of the fullest possible measure of
individual liberty is the condition of ensuring the maximum of
energy and effectiveness in improving our environment, and therefore
the condition of attaining public felicity. Right or wrong, this
theory reckons with fundamental facts of human nature which Comte
ignored.

7.

Comte spent the later years of his life in composing another huge
work, on social reorganisation. It included a new religion, in which
Humanity was the object of worship, but made no other important
addition to the speculations of his earlier manhood, though he
developed them further.

The Course of Positive Philosophy was not a book that took the
public by storm. We are told by a competent student of social
theories in France that the author's name was little known in his
own country till about 1855, when his greatness began to win
recognition, and his influence to operate. [Footnote: Weill, Hist.
du mouvement social, p. 21.] Even then his work can hardly have been
widely read. But through men like Littre and Taine, whose
conceptions of history were moulded by his teaching, and men like
Mill, whom he stimulated, as well as through the disciples who
adopted Positivism as a religion, his leading principles, detached
from his system, became current in the world of speculation.

[Footnote: The influence of Comte. The manner in which ideas filter
through, as it were, underground and emerge oblivious of their
source is illustrated by the German historian Lamprecht's theory of
historical development. He surveyed the history of a people as a
series of what he called typical periods, each of which is marked by
a collective psychical character expressing itself in every
department of life. He named this a diapason. Lamprecht had never
read Comte, and he imagined that this principle, on which he based
his kulturhistorische Methode, was original. But his psychical
diapason is the psychical consensus of Comte, whose system, as we
have seen, depended on the proposition that a given social
organisation corresponds in a definite way to the contemporary stage
of mental development; and Comte had derived the principle from
Saint-Simon. Cf. his pamphlet Die kulturhistorische Methode (1900).
The succession of "typical period" was worked out for Germany in his
History of the German People.]

He laid the foundations of sociology, convincing many minds that the
history of civilisation is subject to general laws, or, in other
words, that a science of society is possible. In England this idea
was still a novelty when Mill's System of Logic appeared in 1843.

The publication of this work, which attempted to define the rules
for the investigation of truth in all fields of inquiry and to
provide tests for the hypotheses of science, was a considerable
event, whether we regard its value and range or its prolonged
influence on education. Mill, who had followed recent French thought
attentively and was particularly impressed by the system of Comte,
recognised that a new method of investigating social phenomena had
been inaugurated by the thinkers who set out to discover the "law"
of human progression. He proclaimed and welcomed it as superior to
previous methods, and at the same time pointed out its limitations.

Till about fifty years ago, he said, generalisations on man and
society have erred by implicitly assuming that human nature and
society will for ever revolve in the same orbit and exhibit
virtually the same phenomena. This is still the view of the
ostentatiously practical votaries of common sense in Great Britain;
whereas the more reflective minds of the present age, analysing
historical records more minutely, have adopted the opinion that the
human race is in a state of necessary progression. The reciprocal
action between circumstances and human nature, from which social
phenomena result, must produce either a cycle or a trajectory. While
Vico maintained the conception of periodic cycles, his successors
have universally adopted the idea of a trajectory or progress, and
are endeavouring to discover its law. [Footnote: Philosophical
writers in England in the middle of the century paid more attention
to Cousin than to Comte or Saint-Simon. J. D. Morell, in his
forgotten History and Critical View of Speculative Philosophy
(1846), says that eclecticism is the philosophy of human progress
(vol. ii. 635, 2nd ed.). He conceived the movement of humanity as
that of a spiral, ever tending to a higher perfection (638).]

But they have fallen into a misconception in imagining that if they
can find a law of uniformity in the succession of events they can
infer the future from the past terms of the series. For such a law
would only be an "empirical law"; it would not be a causal law or an
ultimate law. However rigidly uniform, there is no guarantee that it
would apply to phenomena outside those from which it was derived. It
must itself depend on laws of mind and character (psychology and
ethology). When those laws are known and the nature of the
dependence is explained, when the determining causes of all the
changes constituting the progress are understood, then the empirical
law will be elevated to a scientific law, then only will it be
possible to predict.

Thus Mill asserted that if the advanced thinkers who are engaged on
the subject succeed in discovering an empirical law from the data of
history, it may be converted into a scientific law by deducing it a
priori from the principles of human nature. In the meantime, he
argued that what is already known of those principles justifies the
important conclusion that the order of general human progression
will mainly depend on the order of progression in the intellectual
convictions of mankind.

Throughout his exposition Mill uses "progress" in a neutral sense,
without implying that the progression necessarily means improvement.
Social science has still to demonstrate that the changes determined
by human nature do mean improvement. But in warning the reader of
this he declares himself to be personally an optimist, believing
that the general tendency, saving temporary exceptions, is in the
direction of a better and happier state.

8.

Twenty years later [Footnote: In later editions of the Logic.] Mill
was able to say that the conception of history as subject to general
laws had "passed into the domain of newspaper and ordinary political
discussion." Buckle's HISTORY OF CIVILISATION IN ENGLAND [Footnote:
2 Vol. i. appeared in 1857, vol. ii. in 1861.] which enjoyed an
immediate success, did a great deal to popularise the idea. In this
stimulating work Buckle took the fact of Progress for granted; his
purpose was to investigate its causes. Considering the two general
conditions on which all events depend, human nature and external
nature, he arrived at two conclusions: (1) In the early stage of
history the influence of man's external environment is the more
decisive factor; but as time goes on the roles are gradually
inverted, and now it is his own nature that is principally
responsible for his development. (2) Progress is determined, not by
the emotional and moral faculties, but by the intellect; [Footnote:
This was the view of Jouffroy, Comte, and Mill; Buckle popularised
it.] the emotional and moral faculties are stationary, and therefore
religion is not a decisive influence in the onward movement of
humanity. "I pledge myself to show that the progress Europe has made
from barbarism to civilisation is entirely due to its intellectual
activity. . . . In what may be called the innate and original morals
of mankind there is, so far as we are aware, no progress."
[Footnote: Buckle has been very unjustly treated by some critics,
but has found an able defender in Mr. J.M. Robertson (Buckle and his
Critics (1895)). The remarks of Benn (History of Rationalism in the
Nineteenth Century, ii. 182 sqq.) are worth reading.]

Buckle was convinced that social phenomena exhibit the same
undeviating regularity as natural phenomena. In this belief he was
chiefly influenced by the investigations of the Belgian statistician
Quetelet (1835). "Statistics," he said, "has already thrown more
light on the study of human nature than all the sciences put
together." From the regularity with which the same crimes recur in
the same state of society, and many other constant averages, he
inferred that all actions of individuals result directly from the
state of society in which they live, and that laws are operating
which, if we take large enough numbers into account, scarcely
undergo any sensible perturbation. [Footnote: Kant had already
appealed to statistics in a similar sense; see above, p. 243.] Thus
the evidence of statistics points to the conclusion that progress is
not determined by the acts of individual men, but depends on general
laws of the intellect which govern the successive stages of public
opinion. The totality of human actions at any given time depends on
the totality of knowledge and the extent of its diffusion.

There we have the theory that history is subject to general laws in
its most unqualified form, based on a fallacious view of the
significance of statistical facts. Buckle's attempt to show the
operation of general laws in the actual history of man was
disappointing. When he went on to review the concrete facts of the
historical process, his own political principles came into play, and
he was more concerned with denouncing the tendencies of which he did
not approve than with extricating general laws from the sequence of
events. His comments on religious persecution and the obscurantism
of governments and churches were instructive and timely, but they
did not do much to exhibit a set of rigid laws governing and
explaining the course of human development.

The doctrine that history is under the irresistible control of law
was also popularised by an American physiologist, J. W. Draper,
whose HISTORY OF THE INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT OF EUROPE appeared in
1864 and was widely read. His starting-point was a superficial
analogy between a society and an individual. "Social advancement is
as completely under the control of natural law as a bodily growth.
The life of an individual is a miniature of the life of a nation,"
and "particles" in the individual organism answer to persons in the
political organism. Both have the same epochs--infancy, childhood,
youth, manhood, old age--and therefore European progress exhibits
five phases, designated as Credulity, Inquiry, Faith, Reason,
Decrepitude. Draper's conclusion was that Europe, now in the fourth
period, is hastening to a long period of decrepitude. The prospect
did not dismay him; decrepitude is the culmination of Progress, and
means the organisation of national intellect. That has already been
achieved in China, and she owes to it her well-being and longevity.
"Europe is inevitably hastening to become what China is. In her we
may see what we shall be like when we are old."

Judged by any standard, Draper's work is much inferior to Buckle's,
but both these books, utterly different though they were in both
conception and treatment, performed a similar function. Each in its
own way diffused the view which had originated in France, that
civilisation is progression and, like nature, subject to general
laws.

CHAPTER XVII

"PROGRESS" IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT (1830-1851)

1.

In 1850 there appeared at Paris a small book by M. A. Javary, with
the title DE L'IDEE DU PROGRES. Its interest lies in the express
recognition that Progress was the characteristic idea of the age,
ardently received by some, hotly denounced by others. [Footnote:
Lamartine denounced in his monthly journal Le Conseiller du peuple,
vol. i. (1849), all the progressive gospels of the day, socialist,
communist, Saint-Simonian, Fourierist, Icarian--in fact every school
of social reform since the First Republic--as purely materialistic,
sprung from the "cold seed of the century of Helvetius" (pp. 224,
287).]

"If there is any idea," he says, "that belongs properly to one
century, at least by the importance accorded to it, and that,
whether accepted or not, is familiar to all minds, it is the idea of
Progress conceived as the general law of history and the future of
humanity."

He observes that some, intoxicated by the spectacle of the material
improvements of modern civilisation and the results of science, set
no limits to man's power or his hopes; while others, unable to deny
the facts, say that this progress serves only the lower part of
human nature, and refuse to look with complacency on a movement
which means, they assert, a continuous decadence of the nobler part.
To which it is replied that, If moral decadence is a fact, it is
only transient; it is a necessary phase of a development which means
moral progress in the end, for it is due to the process by which the
beliefs, ideas, and institutions of the past disappear and make way
for new and better principles.

And Javary notes a prevailing tendency in France to interpret every
contemporary movement as progressive, while all the social
doctrinaires justify their particular reforms by invoking the law of
Progress. It was quite true that during the July monarchy nearly all
serious speculations on society and history were related to that
idea. It was common to Michelet and Quinet, who saw in the march of
civilisation the gradual triumph of liberty; to Leroux and Cabet,
who preached humanitarian communism; to Louis Blanc and to Proudhon;
to the bourgeois, who were satisfied with the regime of Louis
Philippe and grew rich, following the precept of Guizot, as well as
to the workers who overthrew it. It is significant that the journal
of Louis Blanc, in which he published his book on the ORGANISATION
OF WORK (1839), was entitled REVUS DES PROGRES. The political
question as to the due limits between government and individual
freedom was discussed in terms of Progress: is personal liberty or
state authority the efficient means of progressing? The metaphysical
question of necessity and freewill acquired a new interest: is
Progress a fatality, independent of human purposes, determined by
general, ineluctable, historical laws? Quinet and Michelet argued
vigorously against the optimism of Cousin, who with Hegel held that
history is just what it ought to be and could not be improved.

2.

Among the competing theories of the time, and sharply opposed to the
views of Comte, was the idea, derived from the Revolution, that the
world is moving towards universal equality and the obliteration of
class distinctions, that this is the true direction of Progress.
This view, represented by leaders of the popular movement against
the bourgeois ascendency, derived powerful reinforcement from one of
the most enlightened political thinkers of the day. The appearance
of de Tocqueville's renowned study of American democracy was the
event of 1834. He was convinced that he had discovered on the other
side of the Atlantic the answer to the question whither the world is
tending. In American society he found that equality of conditions is
the generating fact on which every other fact depends. He concluded
that equality is the goal of humanity, providentially designed.

"The gradual development of equality of conditions has the principal
characteristics of a providential fact. It is universal, it is
permanent, it eludes human power; all events and all men serve this
development. . . . This whole book has been written under the
impression of a sort of religious terror produced in the author's
soul by the view of this irresistible revolution which for so many
centuries has been marching across all obstacles, and which is to-
day seen still advancing in the midst of the ruins it has made. ...
If the men of our time were brought to see that the gradual and
progressive development of equality is at once the past and the
future of their history, this single discovery would give that
development the sacred character of the will of the sovran master."

Here we have a view of the direction of Progress and the meaning of
history, pretending to be based upon the study of facts and
announced with the most intense conviction. And behind it is the
fatalistic doctrine that the movement cannot be arrested or
diverted; that it is useless to struggle against it; that men,
whatever they may do, cannot deflect the clock-like motion regulated
by a power which de Tocqueville calls Providence but to which his
readers might give some other name.

3.

It has been conjectured, [Footnote: Georges Sorel, Les Illusions du
progres, pp. 247-8 (1908).] and seems probable enough, that de
Tocqueville's book was one of the influences which wrought upon the
mind of Proudhon. The speculations of this remarkable man, who, like
Saint-Simon and Comte, sought to found a new science of society,
attracted general attention in the middle of the century. [Footnote:
Compare the appreciation by Weill in Histoire du mouvement social en
France 1852-1910 (1911, ed. 2), p. 41: "Le grande ecrivain
revolutionnaire et anarchiste n'etait au fond ni un revolutionnaire
ni un anarchiste, mais un reformateur pratique et modere qui a fait
illusion par le ton vibrant de ses pamphlets centre la societe
capitaliste."]His hostility to religion, his notorious dictum that
"property is theft," his gospel of "anarchy," and the defiant,
precipitous phrases in which he clothed his ideas, created an
impression that he was a dangerous anti-social revolutionary. But
when his ideas are studied in their context and translated into
sober language, they are not so unreasonable. Notwithstanding his
communistic theory of property and his ideal of equality, he was a
strong individualist. He held that the future of civilisation
depends on the energy of individuals, that liberty is a condition of
its advance, and that the end to be kept in view is the
establishment of justice, which means equality. He saw the
difficulty of reconciling liberty with complete equality, but hoped
that the incompatibility would be overcome by a gradual reduction of
the natural differences in men's capacities. He said, "I am an
anarchist," but his anarchy only meant that the time would come when
government would be superfluous, when every human being could be
trusted to act wisely and morally without a restraining authority or
external sanctions. Nor was he a Utopian. He comprehended that such
a transformation of society would be a long, slow process, and he
condemned the schools of Saint-Simon and Fourier for imagining that
a millennium might be realised immediately by a change of
organisation.