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Books: The Idea of Progress

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




In all this we have a definite recognition of the fact that
knowledge progresses. Bacon did not come into close quarters with
the history of civilisation, but he has thrown out some observations
which amount to a rough synthesis. [Footnote: Advancement, ii. 1, 6;
Nov. Org. i. 78, 79, 85.] Like Bodin, he divided, history into three
periods--(1) the antiquities of the world; (2) the middle part of
time which comprised two sections, the Greek and the Roman; (3)
"modern history," which included what we now call the Middle Ages.
In this sequence three particular epochs stand out as fertile in
science and favourable to progress--the Greek, the Roman, and our
own--"and scarcely two centuries can with justice be assigned to
each." The other periods of time are deserts, so far as philosophy
and science are concerned. Rome and Greece are "two exemplar States
of the world for arms, learning, moral virtue, policy, and laws."
But even in those two great epochs little progress was made in
natural philosophy. For in Greece moral and political speculation
absorbed men's minds; in Rome, meditation and labour were wasted on
moral philosophy, and the greatest intellects were devoted to civil
affairs. Afterwards, in the third period, the study of theology was
the chief occupation of the Western European nations. It was
actually in the earliest period that the most useful discoveries for
the comfort of human life were made, "so that, to say the truth,
when contemplation and doctrinal science began, the discovery of
useful works ceased."

So much for the past history of mankind, during which many things
conspired to make progress in the subjugation of nature slow,
fitful, and fortuitous. What of the future? Bacon's answer is: if
the errors of the past are understood and avoided there is every
hope of steady progress in the modern age.

But it might be asked. Is there not something in the constitution of
things which determines epochs of stagnation and vigour, some force
against which man's understanding and will are impotent? Is it not
true that in the revolutions of ages there are floods and ebbs of
the sciences, which flourish now and then decline, and that when
they have reached a certain point they can proceed no further? This
doctrine of Returns or ricorsi [Footnote: Bodin's conversiones.] is
denounced by Bacon as the greatest obstacle to the advancement of
knowledge, creating, as it does, diffidence or despair. He does not
formally refute it, but he marshals the reasons for an optimistic
view, and these reasons supply the disproof The facts on which the
fatalistic doctrine of Returns is based can be explained without
resorting to any mysterious law. [Footnote: Nov. Org. i. 92 sqq.]
Progress has not been steady or continuous on account of the
prejudices and errors which hindered men from setting to work in the
right way. The difficulties in advancing did not arise from things
which are not in our power; they were due to the human
understanding, which wasted time and labour on improper objects. "In
proportion as the errors which have been committed impeded the past,
so do they afford reason to hope for the future."

4.

But will the new period of advance, which Bacon expected and strove
to secure, be of indefinite duration? He does not consider the
question. His view that he lived in the old age of the world implies
that he did not anticipate a vast tract of time before the end of
mankind's career on earth. And an orthodox Christian of that time
could hardly be expected to predict. The impression we get is that,
in his sanguine enthusiasm, he imagined that a "prudent
interrogation" of nature could extort all her secrets in a few
generations. As a reformer he was so engaged in the immediate
prospect of results that his imagination did not turn to the
possibilities of a remoter future, though these would logically
follow from his recognition of "the inseparable propriety of time
which is ever more and more to disclose truth." He hopes everything
from his own age in which learning has made her third visitation to
the world, a period which he is persuaded will far surpass that of
Grecian and Roman learning. [Footnote: Advancement, ii. 24.] If he
could have revisited England in 1700 and surveyed what science had
performed since his death his hopes might have been more than
satisfied.

But, animated though he was with the progressive spirit, as Leonardo
da Vinci had been before him, all that he says of the prospects of
an increase of knowledge fails to amount to the theory of Progress.
He prepares the way, he leads up to it; but his conception of his
own time as the old age of humanity excludes the conception of an
indefinite advance in the future, which is essential if the theory
is to have significance and value. And in regard to progress in the
past, though he is clearer and more emphatic than Bodin, he hardly
adds anything to what Bodin had observed. The novelty of his view
lies not in his recognition of the advance of knowledge and its
power to advance still further, but in the purpose which he assigned
to it. [Footnote: Campanella held its purpose to be the
contemplation of the wisdom of God; cp., for instance, De sensu
rerum, Bk. iv. epilogus, where the world is described as statua Dei
altissimi (p. 370; ed. 1620).] The end of the sciences is their
usefulness to the human race. To increase knowledge is to extend the
dominion of man over nature, and so to increase his comfort and
happiness, so far as these depend on external circumstances. To
Plato or Seneca, or to a Christian dreaming of the City of God, this
doctrine would seem material and trivial; and its announcement was
revolutionary: for it implied that happiness on earth was an end to
be pursued for its own sake, and to be secured by co-operation for
mankind at large. This idea is an axiom which any general doctrine
of Progress must presuppose; and it forms Bacon's great contribution
to the group of ideas which rendered possible the subsequent rise of
that doctrine.

Finally, we must remember that by Bacon, as by most of his
Elizabethan contemporaries, the doctrine of an active intervening
Providence, the Providence of Augustine, was taken as a matter of
course, and governed more or less their conceptions of the history
of civilisation. But, I think, we may say that Bacon, while he
formally acknowledged it, did not press it or emphasise it.
[Footnote: See Advancement, iii. II. On the influence of the
doctrine on historical writing in England at the beginning of the
seventeenth century see Firth, Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the
World (Proc. of British Academy, vol. viii., 1919), p. 8.]

5.

Bacon illustrated his view of the social importance of science in
his sketch of an ideal state, the New Atlantis. He completed only a
part of the work, and the fragment was published after his death.
[Footnote: In 1627. It was composed about 1623. It seems almost
certain that he was acquainted with the Christianopolis of Johann
Valentin Andreae (1586-1654), which had appeared in Latin in 1614,
and contained a plan for a scientific college to reform the
civilised world. Andreae, who was acquainted both with More and with
Campanella, placed his ideal society in an island which he called
Caphar Salama (the name of a village in Palestine). Andreae's work
had also a direct influence on the Nova Solyma of Samuel Gott
(1648). See the Introduction of F. E. Held to his edition of
Christianopolis (1916). In Macaria, another imaginary state of the
seventeenth century (A description of the famous Kingdoms of
Macaria, 1641, by Hartlib), the pursuit of science is not a
feature.] It is evident that the predominating interest that moved
his imagination was different from that which guided Plato. While
Plato aimed at securing a permanent solid order founded on immutable
principles, the design of Bacon was to enable his imaginary
community to achieve dominion over nature by progressive
discoveries. The heads of Plato's city are metaphysicians, who
regulate the welfare of the people by abstract doctrines established
once for all; while the most important feature in the New Atlantis
is the college of scientific investigators, who are always
discovering new truths which may alter the conditions of life. Here,
though only in a restricted field, an idea of progressive
improvement, which is the note of the modern age, comes in to modify
the idea of a fixed order which exclusively prevailed in ancient
speculation.

On the other hand, we must not ignore the fact that Bacon's ideal
society is established by the same kind of agency as the ideal
societies of Plato and Aristotle. It has not developed; it was
framed by the wisdom of an original legislator Solamona. In this it
resembles the other imaginary commonwealths of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. The organisation of More's Utopia is fixed
initially once for all by the lawgiver Utopus. The origin of
Campanella's Civitas Solis is not expressly stated, but there can be
no doubt that he conceived its institutions as created by the fiat
of a single lawgiver. Harrington, in his Oceana, argues with
Machiavelli that a commonwealth, to be well turned, must be the work
of one man, like a book or a building. [Footnote: Harrington,
Oceana, pp. 77-8, 3rd ed. (1747).]

What measure of liberty Bacon would have granted to the people of
his perfect state we cannot say; his work breaks off before he comes
to describe their condition. But we receive the impression that the
government he conceived was strictly paternal, though perhaps less
rigorous than the theocratic despotism which Campanella, under
Plato's influence, set up in the City of the Sun. But even
Campanella has this in common with More--and we may be sure that
Bacon's conception would have agreed here--that there are no hard-
and-fast lines between the classes, and the welfare and happiness of
all the inhabitants is impartially considered, in contrast with
Plato's scheme in the Laws, where the artisans and manual labourers
were an inferior caste existing less for their own sake than for the
sake of the community as a whole. [Footnote: This however does not
apply to the Republic, as is so commonly asserted. See the just
criticisms of A. A. Trever, A History of Greek Economic Thought
(Chicago, 1916), 49 sqq.]

It may finally be pointed out that these three imaginary
commonwealths stand together as a group, marked by a humaner temper
than the ancient, and also by another common characteristic which
distinguishes them, on one hand, from the ideal states of Plato and,
on the other, from modern sketches of desirable societies. Plato and
Aristotle conceived their constructions within the geographical
limits of Hellas, either in the past or in the present. More, Bacon,
and Campanella placed theirs in distant seas, and this remoteness in
space helped to create a certain illusion, of reality. [Footnote:
Civitas Solis, p. 461 (ed. 1620). Expectancy of end of world: Ib. p.
455.] The modern plan is to project the perfect society into a
period of future time. The device of More and his successors was
suggested by the maritime explorations of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries; the later method was a result of the rise of
the idea of Progress. [Footnote: Similarly the ideal communistic
states imagined by Euemerus and Iambulus in the southern seas owed
their geographical positions to the popular interest in seafaring in
the Indian Ocean in the age after Alexander. One wonders whether
Campanella knew the account of the fictitious journey of Iambulus to
the Islands of the Sun, in Diodorus Siculus, ii. 55-60.]

6.

A word or two more may be said about the City of the Sun. Campanella
was as earnest a believer in the interrogation of nature as Bacon,
and the place which science and learning hold in his state (although
research is not so prominent as in the New Atlantis), and the
scientific training of all the citizens, are a capital feature. The
progress in inventions, to which science may look forward, is
suggested. The men of the City of the Sun "have already discovered
the one art which the world seemed to lack--the art of flying; and
they expect soon to invent ocular instruments which will enable them
to see the invisible stars and auricular instruments for hearing the
harmony of the spheres." Campanella's view of the present conditions
and prospects of knowledge is hardly less sanguine than that of
Bacon, and characteristically he confirms his optimism by
astrological data. "If you only knew what their astrologers say
about the coming age. Our times, they assert, have more history in a
hundred years than the whole world in four thousand. More books have
been published in this century than in five thousand years before.
They dwell on the wonderful inventions of printing, of artillery,
and of the use of the magnet,--clear signs of the times--and also
instruments for the assembling of the inhabitants of the world into
one fold," and show that these discoveries were conditioned by
stellar influences.

But Campanella is not very sure or clear about the future. Astrology
and theology cause him to hesitate. Like Bacon, he dreams of a great
Renovation and sees that the conditions are propitious, but his
faith is not secure. The astronomers of his imaginary state
scrutinise the stars to discover whether the world will perish or
not, and they believe in the oracular saying of Jesus that the end
will come like a thief in the night. Therefore they expect a new
age, and perhaps also the end of the world.

The new age of knowledge was about to begin. Campanella, Bruno, and
Bacon stand, as it were, on the brink of the dividing stream,
tenduntque manus ripae ulterioris amore.

CHAPTER III

CARTESIANISM

If we are to draw any useful lines of demarcation in the continuous
flux of history we must neglect anticipations and announcements, and
we need not scruple to say that, in the realm of knowledge and
thought, modern history begins in the seventeenth century.
Ubiquitous rebellion against tradition, a new standard of clear and
precise thought which affects even literary expression, a flow of
mathematical and physical discoveries so rapid that ten years added
more to the sum of knowledge than all that had been added since the
days of Archimedes, the introduction of organised co-operation to
increase knowledge by the institution of the Royal Society at
London, the Academy of Sciences at Paris, Observatories--realising
Bacon's Atlantic dream--characterise the opening of a new era.

For the ideas with which we are concerned, the seventeenth century
centres round Descartes, whom an English admirer described as "the
grand secretary of Nature." [Footnote: Joseph Glanvill, Vanity of
Dogmatising, p. 211, 64] Though his brilliant mathematical
discoveries were the sole permanent contribution he made to
knowledge, though his metaphysical and physical systems are only of
historical interest, his genius exercised a more extensive and
transforming influence on the future development of thought than any
other man of his century.

Cartesianism affirmed the two positive axioms of the supremacy of
reason, and the invariability of the laws of nature; and its
instrument was a new rigorous analytical method, which was
applicable to history as well as to physical knowledge. The axioms
had destructive corollaries. The immutability of the processes of
nature collided with the theory of an active Providence. The
supremacy of reason shook the thrones from which authority and
tradition had tyrannised over the brains of men. Cartesianism was
equivalent to a declaration of the Independence of Man.

It was in the atmosphere of the Cartesian spirit that a theory of
Progress was to take shape.

1.

Let us look back. We saw that all the remarks of philosophers prior
to the seventeenth century, which have been claimed as enunciations
of the idea of Progress, amount merely to recognitions of the
obvious fact that in the course of the past history of men there
have been advances and improvements in knowledge and arts, or that
we may look for some improvements in the future. There is not one of
them that adumbrates a theory that can be called a theory of
Progress. We have seen several reasons why the idea could not emerge
in the ancient or in the Middle Ages. Nor could it have easily
appeared in the period of the Renaissance. Certain preliminary
conditions were required, and these were not fulfilled till the
seventeenth century. So long as men believed that the Greeks and
Romans had attained, in the best days of their civilisation, to an
intellectual plane which posterity could never hope to reach, so
long as the authority of their thinkers was set up as unimpeachable,
a theory of degeneration held the field, which excluded a theory of
Progress. It was the work of Bacon and Descartes to liberate science
and philosophy from the yoke of that authority; and at the same
time, as we shall see, the rebellion began to spread to other
fields.

Another condition for the organisation of a theory of Progress was a
frank recognition of the value of mundane life and the subservience
of knowledge to human needs. The secular spirit of the Renaissance
prepared the world for this new valuation, which was formulated by
Bacon, and has developed into modern utilitarianism.

There was yet a third preliminary condition. There can be no
certainty that knowledge will continually progress until science has
been placed on sure foundations. And science does not rest for us on
sure foundations unless the invariability of the laws of nature is
admitted. If we do not accept this hypothesis, if we consider it
possible that the uniformities of the natural world may be changed
from time to time, we have no guarantee that science can progress
indefinitely. The philosophy of Descartes established this
principle, which is the palladium of science; and thus the third
preliminary condition was fulfilled.

2.

During the Renaissance period the authority of the Greeks and Romans
had been supreme in the realm of thought, and in the interest of
further free development it was necessary that this authority should
be weakened. Bacon and others had begun the movement to break down
this tyranny, but the influence of Descartes was weightier and more
decisive, and his attitude was more uncompromising. He had none of
Bacon's reverence for classical literature; he was proud of having
forgotten the Greek which he had learned as a boy. The inspiration
of his work was the idea of breaking sharply and completely with the
past, and constructing a system which borrows nothing from the dead.
He looked forward to an advancement of knowledge in the future, on
the basis of his own method and his own discoveries, [Footnote: Cf.
for instance his remarks on medicine, at the end of the Discours de
la methode.] and he conceived that this intellectual advance would
have far-reaching effects on the condition of mankind. The first
title he had proposed to give to his Discourse on Method was "The
Project of a Universal Science which can elevate our Nature to its
highest degree of Perfection." He regarded moral and material
improvement as depending on philosophy and science.

The justification of an independent attitude towards antiquity, on
the ground that the world is now older and more mature, was becoming
a current view. [Footnote: Descartes wrote: Non est quod antiquis
multum tribuamus propter antiquitatem, sed nos potius iis seniores
dicendi. Jam enim senior est mundus quam tune majoremque habemus
rerum experientiam. (A fragment quoted by Baillet, Vie de Descartes,
viii. 10.) Passages to the same effect occur in Malebranche,
Arnauld, and Nicole. (See Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie
cartesienne, i. 482-3.)

A passage in La Mothe Le Vayer's essay Sur l'opiniatrete in Orasius
Tubero (ii. 218) is in point, if, as seems probable, the date of
that work is 1632-33. "Some defer to the ancients and allow
themselves to be led by them like children; others hold that the
ancients lived in the youth of the world, and it is those who live
to-day who are really the ancients, and consequently ought to carry
most weight." See Rigault, Histoire de la querelle des Anciens et
des Modernes, p. 52.

The passage of Pascal occurs in the Fragment d'un traite du vide,
not published till 1779 (now included in the Pensees, Premiere
Partie, Art. I), and therefore without influence on the origination
of the theory of progress. It has been pointed out that Guillaume
Colletet had in 1636 expressed a similar view (Brunetiere, Etudes
critiques, v. 185-6).]

Descartes expressed it like Bacon, and it was taken up and repeated
by many whom Descartes influenced. Pascal, who till 1654 was a man
of science and a convert to Cartesian ideas, put it in a striking
way. The whole sequence of men (he says) during so many centuries
should be considered as a single man, continually existing and
continually learning. At each stage of his life this universal man
profited by the knowledge he had acquired in the preceding stages,
and he is now in his old age. This is a fuller, and probably an
independent, development of the comparison of the race to an
individual which we found in Bacon. It occurs in a fragment which
remained unpublished for more than a hundred years, and is often
quoted as a recognition, not of a general progress of man, but of a
progress in human knowledge.

To those who reproached Descartes with disrespect towards ancient
thinkers he might have replied that, in repudiating their authority,
he was really paying them the compliment of imitation and acting far
more in their own spirit than those who slavishly followed them.
Pascal saw this point. "What can be more unjust," he wrote, "than to
treat our ancients with greater consideration than they showed
towards their own predecessors, and to have for them this incredible
respect which they deserve from us only because they entertained no
such regard for those who had the same advantage (of antiquity) over
them?" [Footnote: Pensees, ib.]

At the same time Pascal recognised that we are indebted to the
ancients for our very superiority to them in the extent of our
knowledge. "They reached a certain point, and the slightest effort
enables us to mount higher; so that we find ourselves on a loftier
plane with less trouble and less glory." The attitude of Descartes
was very different. Aspiring to begin ab integro and reform the
foundations of knowledge, he ignored or made little of what had been
achieved in the past. He attempted to cut the threads of continuity
as with the shears of Atropos. This illusion [Footnote: He may be
reproached himself with scholasticism in his metaphysical
reasoning.] hindered him from stating a doctrine of the progress of
knowledge as otherwise he might have done. For any such doctrine
must take account of the past as well as of the future.

But a theory of progress was to grow out of his philosophy, though
he did not construct it. It was to be developed by men who were
imbued with the Cartesian spirit.

3.

The theological world in France was at first divided on the question
whether the system of Descartes could be reconciled with orthodoxy
or not. The Jesuits said no, the Fathers of the Oratory said yes.
The Jansenists of Port Royal were enthusiastic Cartesians. Yet it
was probably the influence of the great spiritual force of Jansenism
that did most to check the immediate spread of Cartesian ideas. It
was preponderant in France for fifty years. The date of the
Discourse of Method is 1637. The Augustinus of Jansenius was
published in 1640, and in 1643 Arnauld's Frequent Communion made
Jansenism a popular power. The Jansenist movement was in France in
some measure what the Puritan movement was in England, and it caught
hold of serious minds in much the same way. The Jesuits had
undertaken the task of making Christianity easy, of finding a
compromise between worldliness and religion, and they flooded the
world with a casuistic literature designed for this purpose. Ex
opinionum varietate jugum Christi suavius deportatur. The doctrine
of Jansenius was directed against this corruption of faith and
morals. He maintained that there can be no compromise with the
world; that casuistry is incompatible with morality; that man is
naturally corrupt; and that in his most virtuous acts some
corruption is present.

Now the significance of these two forces--the stern ideal of the
Jansenists and the casuistry of the Jesuit teachers--is that they
both attempted to meet, by opposed methods, the wave of libertine
thought and conduct which is a noticeable feature in the history of
French society from the reign of Henry IV. to that of Louis XV.
[Footnote: For the prevalence of "libertine" thought in France at
the beginning of the seventeenth century see the work of the Pere
Garasse, La Doctrine curieuse des beaux esprits de ce temps ou
pretendus tels, etc. (1623). Cp. also Brunetiere's illuminating
study, "Jansenistes et Cartesiens" in Etudes critiques, 4me serie.]
This libertinism had its philosophy, a sort of philosophy of nature,
of which the most brilliant exponents were Rabelais and Moliere. The
maxim, "Be true to nature," was evidently opposed sharply to the
principles of the Christian religion, and it was associated with
sceptical views which prevailed widely in France from the early
years of the seventeenth century. The Jesuits sought to make terms
by saying virtually: "Our religious principles and your philosophy
of nature are not after all so incompatible in practice. When it
comes to the application of principles, opinions differ. Theology is
as elastic as you like. Do not abandon your religion on the ground
that her yoke is hard." Jansenius and his followers, on the other
hand, fought uncompromisingly with the licentious spirit of the
time, maintaining the austerest dogmas and denouncing any compromise
or condescension. And their doctrine had a wonderful success, and
penetrated everywhere. Few of the great literary men of the reign of
Louis XIV. escaped it. Its influence can be traced in the Maximes of
La Rochefoucauld and the Caracteres of La Bruyere. It was through
its influence that Moliere found it difficult to get some of his
plays staged. It explains the fact that the court of Louis XIV.,
however corrupt, was decorous compared with the courts of Henry IV.
and Louis XV.; a severe standard was set up, if it was not observed.