Books: The Idea of Progress
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J.B. Bury >> The Idea of Progress
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He tells us that all his speculations and controversial activities
are penetrated with the idea of Progress, which he described as "the
railway of liberty"; and his radical criticism on current social
theories, whether conservative or democratic, was that they did not
take Progress seriously though they invoked it.
"What dominates in all my studies, what forms their beginning and
end, their summit and their base, their reason, what makes my
originality as a thinker (if I have any), is that I affirm Progress
resolutely, irrevocably, and everywhere, and deny the Absolute. All
that I have ever written, all I have denied or affirmed, I have
written, denied or affirmed in the name of one unique idea,
Progress. My adversaries, on the other hand, are all partisans of
the Absolute, IN OMNI GENERE, CASU, ET NUMERO, to use the phrase of
Sganarelle." [Footnote: Philosophie du progres, Premiere lettre
(1851).]
4.
A vague confidence in Progress had lain behind and encouraged the
revolution of 1789, but in the revolution of 1848 the idea was
definitely enthroned as the regnant principle. It presided over the
session of the Committee which drew up the Constitution of the
second Republic. Armand Marrast, the most important of the men who
framed that document, based the measure of universal suffrage upon
"the invisible law which rules societies," the law of progress which
has been so long denied but which is rooted in the nature of man.
His argument was this: Revolutions are due to the repression of
progress, and are the expression and triumph of a progress which has
been achieved. But such convulsions are an undesirable method of
progressing; how can they be avoided? Only by organising elastic
institutions in which new ideas of amelioration can easily be
incorporated, and laws which can be accommodated without struggle or
friction to the rise of new opinions. What is needed is a flexible
government open to the penetration of ideas, and the key to such a
government is universal suffrage.
[Footnote: Marrast, "the invisible law"; "Oui," he continues, "toute
societe est progressive, parce que tout individu est educable,
perfectible; on peut mesurer, limiter, peut-etre les facultes d'un
individu; on ne saurait limiter, mesurer ce que peuvent, dans
l'ordre des idees, les intelligences dont les produits ne s'ajoutent
pas seulement mais se fecondent et se multiplient dans une
progression indefinie." No. 393 Republique francoise. Assemblee
nationale. Projet de Constitution ... precede par un rapport fait au
nom de la Commission par le citoyen Armand Marrast. Seance du 30
aout, 1848.]
Universal suffrage was practical politics, but the success of the
revolution fluttered agreeably all the mansions of Utopia, and
social reformers of every type sought to improve the occasion. In
the history of the political struggles of 1848 the names are written
of Proudhon, of Victor Considerant the disciple of Fourier, of
Pierre Leroux the humanitarian communist, and his devoted pupil
George Sand. The chief title of Leroux to be remembered is just his
influence over the soul of the great novelist. Her later romances
are pervaded by ideas derived from his teaching. His communism was
vague and ineffectual, but he was one of the minor forces in the
thought of the period, and there are some features in his theory
which deserve to be pointed out.
Leroux had begun as a member of the Saint-Simonian school, but he
diverged into a path of his own. He reinstated the ideal of equality
which Saint-Simon rejected, and made the approach to that ideal the
measure of Progress. The most significant process in history, he
held, is the gradual breaking down of caste and class: the process
is now approaching its completion; "today MAN is synonymous with
EQUAL."
In order to advance to the city of the future we must have a force
and a lever. Man is the force, and the lever is the idea of
Progress. It is supplied by the study of history which displays the
improvement of our faculties, the increase of our power over nature,
the possibility of organising society more efficaciously. But the
force and the lever are not enough. A fulcrum is also required, and
this is to be found in the "solidarity" of the human race. But this
conception meant for Leroux something different from what is
ordinarily meant by the phrase, a deeper and even mystical bond.
Human "solidarity" was a corollary from the pantheistic religion of
the Saint-Simonians, but with Leroux, as with Fourier, it was
derived from the more difficult doctrine of palingenesis. We of this
generation, he believed, are not merely the sons and descendants of
past generations, we are the past generations themselves, which have
come to birth again in us.
Through many pages of the two volumes [Footnote: De l'humanite, 1840
(dedicated to Beranger).] in which he set forth his thesis, Leroux
expended much useless learning in endeavouring to establish this
doctrine, which, were it true, might be the central principle in a
new religion of humanity, a transformed Pythagoreanism. It is easy
to understand the attractiveness of palingenesis to a believer in
Progress: for it would provide a solution of the anomaly that
generations after generations are sacrificed for the sake of
posterity, and so appear to have no value in themselves. Believers
in Progress, who are sensitive to the sufferings of mankind, past
and present, need a stoical resolution to face this fact. We saw how
Herder refused to accept it. A pantheistic faith, like that of the
Saint-Simonian Church, may help some, it cannot do more, to a
stoical acquiescence. The palingenesis of Leroux or Fourier removes
the radical injustice. The men of each generation are sacrificed and
suffer for the sake of their descendants, but as their descendants
are themselves come to life again, they are really suffering in
their own interests. They will themselves reach the desirable state
to which the slow, painful process of history is tending.
But palingenesis, notwithstanding all the ancient opinions and
traditions that the researches of Leroux might muster, could carry
little conviction to those who were ceasing to believe in the
familiar doctrine of a future life detached from earth, and Madame
Dudevant was his only distinguished convert.
5.
The ascendency of the idea of Progress among thoughtful people in
France in the middle of the last century is illustrated by the work
which Ernest Renan composed under the immediate impression of the
events of 1848. He desired to understand the significance of the
current revolutionary doctrines, and was at once involved in
speculation on the future of humanity. This is the purport of
L'AVENIR DE LA SCIENCE. [Footnote: L'Avenir de la science--Pensees
de (1848). Published in 1890.]
[Footnote: The ascendency of the idea of Progress at this epoch may
be further illustrated by E. Pelletan's Profession de foi du dix-
neuvieme siecle, 1852 (4th ed., 1857), where Progress is described
as the general law of the universe; and by Jean Reynaud's
Philosophie religieuse: Terre et ciel (3rd ed., 1858), a religious
but not orthodox book, which acclaims the "sovran principle of
perfectibility" (cp. p. 138). I may refer also to the rhetorical
pages of E. Vacherot on the Doctrine du progres, printed (as part of
an essay on the Philosophy of History) in his Essais de philosophie
critique (1864).]
The author was then convinced that history has a goal, and that
mankind tends perpetually, though in an oscillating line, towards a
more perfect state, through the growing dominion of reason over
instinct and caprice. He takes the French Revolution as the critical
moment in which humanity first came to know itself. That revolution
was the first attempt of man to take the reins into his own hands.
All that went before we may call, with Owen, the irrational period
of human existence.
We have now come to a point at which we must choose between two
faiths. If we despair of reason, we may find a refuge from utter
scepticism in a belief in the external authority of the Roman
Church. If we trust reason, we must accept the march of the human
mind and justify the modern spirit. And it can be justified only by
proving that it is a necessary step towards perfection. Renan
affirmed his belief in the second alternative, and felt confident
that science--including philology, on the human bearings of which he
enlarged,--philosophy, and art would ultimately enable men to
realise an ideal civilisation, in which all would be equal. The
state, he said, is the machine of Progress, and the Socialists are
right in formulating the problem which man has to solve, though
their solution is a bad one. For individual liberty, which socialism
would seriously limit, is a definite conquest, and ought to be
preserved inviolate.
Renan wrote this work in 1848 and 1849, but did not publish it at
the time. He gave it to the world forty years later. Those forty
years had robbed him of his early optimism. He continues to believe
that the unfortunate conditions of our race might be ameliorated by
science, but he denounces the view that men can ever be equal.
Inequality is written in nature; it is not only a necessary
consequence of liberty, but a necessary postulate of Progress. There
will always be a superior minority. He criticises himself too for
having fallen into the error of Hegel, and assigned to man an unduly
important place in the universe.
[Footnote: Renan, speaking of the Socialists, paid a high tribute to
Bazard (L'Avenir de la science, p. 104). On the other hand, he
criticised Comte severely (p. 149).
Renan returned to speculation on the future in 1863, in a letter to
M. Marcellin-Berthelot (published in Dialogues et fragments
philosophiques, 1876): "Que sera Ie monde quand un million de fois
se sera reproduit ce qui s'est passe depuis 1763 quand la chimie, au
lieu de quatre-vingt ans de progres, en aura cent millions?" (p.
183). And again in the Dialogues written in 1871 (ib.), where it is
laid down that the end of humanity is to produce great men: "le
grand oeuvre s'accomplira par la science, non par la democratic.
Rien sans grands hommes; le salut se fera par des grands hommes" (p.
103).]
In 1890 there was nothing left of the sentimental socialism which he
had studied in 1848; it had been blown away by the cold wind of
scientific socialism which Marx and Engels created. And Renan had
come to think that in this new form socialism would triumph.
[Footnote: He reckoned without the new forces, opposed to socialism
as well as to parliamentary democracy, represented by Bakunin and
men like Georges Sorel.] He had criticised Comte for believing that
"man lives exclusively by science, or rather little verbal tags,
like geometrical theorems, dry formulae." Was he satisfied by the
concrete doctrine of Marx that all the phenomena of civilisation at
a given period are determined by the methods of production and
distribution which then prevail? But the future of socialism is a
minor issue, and the ultimate goal of humanity is quite uncertain.
"Ce qu'il y a de consolant, c'est qu'on arrive necessairement
quelque part." We may console ourselves with the certainty that we
must get somewhere.
6.
Proudhon described the idea of Progress as the railway of liberty.
It certainly supplied motive power to social ideals which were
repugnant and alarming to the authorities of the Catholic Church. At
the Vatican it was clearly seen that the idea was a powerful engine
driven by an enemy; and in the famous SYLLABUS of errors which Pope
Pius IX. flung in the face of the modern world at the end of 1864,
Progress had the honour of being censured. The eightieth error,
which closes the list, runs thus:
Romanus Pontifex potest ac debet cum progressu, cum liberalismo et
cum recenti civilitate sese reconciliare et componere.
"The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, be reconciled and come to
terms with progress, with liberalism, and with modern civilisation."
No wonder, seeing that Progress was invoked to justify every
movement that offended the nostrils of the Vatican--liberalism,
toleration, democracy, and socialism. And the Roman Church well
understood the intimate connection of the idea with the advance of
rationalism.
CHAPTER XVIII
MATERIAL PROGRESS: THE EXHIBITION OF 1851
1.
It is not easy for a new idea of the speculative order to penetrate
and inform the general consciousness of a community until it has
assumed some external and concrete embodiment or is recommended by
some striking material evidence. In the case of Progress both these
conditions were fulfilled in the period 1820 to 1850. In the Saint-
Simonian Church, and in the attempts of Owen and Cabet to found
ideal societies, people saw practical enterprises inspired by the
idea. They might have no sympathy with these enterprises, but their
attention was attracted. And at the same time they were witnessing a
rapid transformation of the external conditions of life, a movement
to the continuation of which there seemed no reason for setting any
limit in the future. The spectacular results of the advance of
science and mechanical technique brought home to the mind of the
average man the conception of an indefinite increase of man's power
over nature as his brain penetrated her secrets. This evident
material progress which has continued incessantly ever since has
been a mainstay of the general belief in Progress which is prevalent
to-day.
England was the leader in this material progress, of which the
particulars are familiar and need not be enumerated here. The
discovery of the power of steam and the potentialities of coal
revolutionised the conditions of life. Men who were born at the
beginning of the century had seen, before they had passed the age of
thirty, the rapid development of steam navigation, the illumination
of towns and houses by gas, the opening of the first railway.
It was just before this event, the opening of the Liverpool and
Manchester railway, which showed how machinery would abbreviate
space as it had SIR THOMAS MORE, OR COLLOQUIES ON THE PROGRESS OF
SOCIETY (1829). There we see the effect of the new force on his
imagination. "Steam," he says, "will govern the world next, ... and
shake it too before its empire is established." The biographer of
Nelson devotes a whole conversation to the subject of "steam and
war." But the theme of the book is the question of moral and social
progress, on which the author inclines to the view that "the world
will continue to improve, even as it has hitherto been continually
improving; and that the progress of knowledge and the diffusion of
Christianity will bring about at last, when men become Christian in
reality as well as in name, something like that Utopian state of
which philosophers have loved to dream." This admission of Progress,
cautious though it was, circumscribed by reserves and compromised by
hesitations, coming from such a conservative pillar of Church and
State as Southey, is a notable sign of the times, when we remember
that the idea was still associated then with revolution and heresy.
It is significant too that at the same time an octogenarian
mathematician of Aberdeen was composing a book on the same subject.
Hamilton's PROGRESS OF SOCIETY is now utterly forgotten, but it must
have contributed in its day to propagating the same moderate view of
Progress, consistent with orthodoxy, which Southey held. "The belief
of the perfectibility of human nature and the attainment of a golden
age in which vice and misery have no place, will only be entertained
by an enthusiast; but an inquiry into the means of improving our
nature and enlarging our happiness is consistent with sober reason,
and is the most important subject, merely human, that can engage the
mind of man."[Footnote: P. 13. The book was published posthumously
by Murray in 1830, a year after the author's death.] [Footnote:
"Progress of Society." The phrase was becoming common; e.g.
Russell's History of Modern Europe (1822) has the sub-title A view
of the Progress of Society, etc. The didactic poem of Payne Knight,
The Progress of Civil Society (1796), a very dull performance, was
quite unaffected by the dreams of Priestley or Godwin. It was
towards the middle of the nineteenth century that Progress, without
any qualifying phrase, came into use.]
2.
We have been told by Tennyson that when he went by the first train
from Liverpool to Manchester (1830) he thought that the wheels ran
in grooves.
"Then I made this line:
Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of
change." [Footnote: See Tennyson, Memoir by his Son, vol. i. p.
195.]
LOCKSLEY HALL, which was published in 1842, illustrates how the idea
of Progress had begun to creep into the imagination of Englishmen.
Though subsidiary to a love story, it is the true theme of the poem.
The pulsation of eager interest in the terrestrial destinies of
humanity, the large excitement of living in a "wondrous Mother-age,"
dreams of the future, quicken the passion of the hero's youth. His
disappointment in love disenchants him; he sees the reverse side of
civilisation, but at last he finds an anodyne for his palsied heart
in a more sober version of his earlier faith, a chastened belief in
his Mother-age. He can at least discern an increasing purpose in
history, and can be sure that "the thoughts of men are widened with
the process of the suns." The novelty of the poem lay in finding a
cathartic cure for a private sorrow, not in religion or in nature,
but in the modern idea of Progress. It may be said to mark a stage
in the career of the idea.
The view of civilisation which Tennyson took as his MOTIF had no
revolutionary implications, suggested no impatience or anger with
the past. The startling prospect unfolding itself before "the long
result of time," and history is justified by the promise of to-day:
The centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed.
Very different was the spirit in which another great poet composed,
nearly twenty years later, a wonderful hymn of Progress. Victor
Hugo's PLEIN CEIL, in his epic LA LEGENDE DES SIECLES,[Footnote:
A.D. 1859.] announces a new era of the world in which man, the
triumphant rebel, delivered from his past, will move freely forward
on a glorious way. The poet is inspired not by faith in a continuous
development throughout the ages, but by the old spirit of the
Revolution, and he sees in the past only a heavy chain which the
race at last flings off. The horrible past has gone, not to return:
"ce monde est mort"; and the poem is at once a paean on man's
victorious rebellion against it and a dithyramb on the prospect of
his future.
Man is imagined as driving through the heavens an aerial car to
which the four winds are harnessed, mounting above the clouds, and
threatening to traverse the ether.
Superbe, il plane, avec un hymne en ses agres;
Et l'on voit voir passer la strophe du progres.
Il est la nef, il est le phare!
L'homme enfin prend son sceptre et jette son baton.
Et l'on voit s'envoler le calcul de Newton
Monte sur l'ode de Pindare.
But if this vision foreshadows the conquest of the air, its
significance is symbolic rather than literal, and, like Pindar
checking the steeds of his song, Hugo returns to earth:
Pas si loin! pas si haut! redescendons. Restons
L'homme, restons Adam; mais non l'homme a tatons,
Mais non l'Adam tombe! Tout autre reve altere
L'espece d'ideal qui convient a la terre.
Contentons-nous du mot: meilleur! ecrit partout.
Dawn has appeared, after six thousand years in the fatal way, and
man, freed by "the invisible hand" from the weight of his chains,
has embarked for new shores:
Ou va-t-il ce navire? II va, de jour vetu,
A l'avenir divin et pur, a la vertu,
A la science qu'on voit luire,
A la mort des fleaux, a l'oubli genereux,
A l'abondance, au caime, au rire, a l'homme heureux,
Il va, ce glorieux navire.
Oh! ce navire fait le voyage sacre!
C'est l'ascension bleue a son premier degre;
Hors de l'antique et vil decombre,
Hors de la pesanteur, c'est l'avenir fonde;
C'est le destin de l'homme a la fin evade,
Qui leve l'ancre et sort de l'ombre!
The union of humanity in a universal commonwealth, which Tennyson
had expressed as "the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the
World," the goal of many theorists of Progress, becomes in Hugo's
imagination something more sublime. The magic ship of man's destiny
is to compass the cosmopolis of the Stoics, a terrestrial order in
harmony with the whole universe.
Nef magique et supreme! elle a, rien qu'eri marchant,
Change le cri terrestre en pur et joyeux chant,
Rajeuni les races fletries,
Etabli l'ordre vrai, montre le chemin sur,
Dieu juste! et fait entrer dans l'homme tant d'azur
Qu'elle a supprime les patries!
Faisant a l'homme avec le ciel une cite,
Une pensee avec toute l'immensite,
Elle abolit les vieilles regles;
Elle abaisse les monts, elle annule les tours;
Splendide, elle introduit les peuples, marcheurs lourds,
Dans la communion des aigles.
3.
Between 1830 and 1850 railway transport spread throughout Great
Britain and was introduced on the Continent, and electricity was
subdued to man's use by the invention of telegraphy. The great
Exhibition of London in 1851 was, in one of its aspects, a public
recognition of the material progress of the age and the growing
power of man over the physical world. Its aim, said a contemporary,
was "to seize the living scroll of human progress, inscribed with
every successive conquest of man's intellect."[Footnote: Edinburgh
Review (October 1851), p. 562, in a review of the Official Catalogue
of the Exhibition.] The Prince Consort, who originated the
Exhibition, explained its significance in a public speech:
"Nobody who has paid any attention to the peculiar features of our
present era will doubt for a moment that we are living at a period
of most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to accomplish that
great end to which indeed all history points--THE REALISATION OF THE
UNITY OF MANKIND. ... The distances which separated the different
nations and parts of the globe are rapidly vanishing before the
achievements of modern invention, and we can traverse them with
incredible ease; the languages of all nations are known, and their
acquirements placed within the reach of everybody; thought is
communicated with the rapidity, and even by the power, of lightning.
On the other hand, the GREAT PRINCIPLE OF DIVISION OF LABOUR, which
may be called the moving power of civilisation, is being extended to
all branches of science, industry, and art... Gentlemen, the
Exhibition of 1851 is to give us a true test and a living picture of
the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived
in this great task, and a new starting-point from which all nations
will be able to direct their further exertions." [Footnote: Martin,
Life of the Prince Consort (ed. 3), iii. p. 247. The speech was
delivered at a banquet at the Mansion House on March 21, 1850.]
The point emphasised here is the "solidarity" of the world. The
Exhibition is to bring home to men's consciousness the community of
all the inhabitants of the earth. The assembled peoples, wrote
Thackeray, in his "May-day Ode," [Footnote: Published in the Times,
April 30, 1851. The Exhibition was opened on May I.] See the
sumptuous banquet set, The brotherhood of nations met Around the
feast.
And this was the note struck in the leading article of the Times on
the opening day: "The first morning since the creation that all
peoples have assembled from all parts of the world and done a common
act." It was claimed that the Exhibition signified a new,
intelligent, and moral movement which "marks a great crisis in the
history of the world," and foreshadows universal peace.
England, said another writer, produced Bacon and Newton, the two
philosophers "who first lent direction and force to the stream of
industrial science; we have been the first also to give the widest
possible base to the watch-tower of international progress, which
seeks the formation of the physical well-being of man and the
extinction of the meaner jealousies of commerce."[Footnote:
Edinburgh Review, loc. cit.]
These quotations show that the great Exhibition was at the time
optimistically regarded, not merely as a record of material
achievements, but as a demonstration that humanity was at last well
on its way to a better and happier state, through the falling of
barriers and the resulting insight that the interests of all are
closely interlocked. A vista was suggested, at the end of which far-
sighted people might think they discerned Tennyson's "Federation of
the World."
4.
Since the Exhibition, western civilisation has advanced steadily,
and in some respects more rapidly than any sober mind could have
predicted--civilisation, at least, in the conventional sense, which
has been not badly defined as "the development of material ease, of
education, of equality, and of aspirations to rise and succeed in
life." [Footnote: B. Kidd, Social Evolution, p. 368.] The most
striking advance has been in the technical conveniences of life--
that is, in the control over natural forces. It would be superfluous
to enumerate the discoveries and inventions since 1850 which have
abridged space, economised time, eased bodily suffering, and reduced
in some ways the friction of life, though they have increased it in
others. This uninterrupted series of technical inventions,
proceeding concurrently with immense enlargements of all branches of
knowledge, has gradually accustomed the least speculative mind to
the conception that civilisation is naturally progressive, and that
continuous improvement is part of the order of things.
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