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Books: The Idea of Progress

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




But although natural processes do not change from age to age, they
differ in their effects in different climates. "It is certain that
as a result of the reciprocal dependence which exists between all
parts of the material world, differences of climate, which so
clearly affect the life of plants, must also produce some effect on
human brains." May it not be said then that, in consequence of
climatic conditions, ancient Greece and Rome produced men of mental
qualities different from those which could be produced in France?
Oranges grow easily in Italy; it is more difficult to cultivate them
in France. Fontenelle replies that art and cultivation exert a much
greater influence on human brains than on the soil; ideas can be
transported more easily from one country to another than plants; and
as a consequence of commerce and mutual influence, peoples do not
retain the original mental peculiarities due to climate. This may
not be true of the extreme climates in the torrid and glacial zones,
but in the temperate zone we may discount entirely climatic
influence. The climates of Greece and Italy and that of France are
too similar to cause any sensible difference between the Greeks or
Latins and the French.

Saint Sorlin and Perrault had argued directly from the permanence of
vigour in lions or trees to the permanence of vigour in man. If
trees are the same as ever, brains must also be the same. But what
about the minor premiss? Who knows that trees are precisely the
same? It is an indemonstrable assumption that oaks and beeches in
the days of Socrates and Cicero were not slightly better trees than
the oaks and beeches of to-day. Fontenelle saw the weakness of this
reasoning. He saw that it was necessary to prove that the trees, no
less than human brains, have not degenerated. But his a priori proof
is simply a statement of the Cartesian principle of the stability of
natural processes, which he put in a thoroughly unscientific form.
The stability of the laws of nature is a necessary hypothesis,
without which science would be impossible. But here it was put to an
illegitimate use. For it means that, given precisely the same
conditions, the same physical phenomena will occur. Fontenelle
therefore was bound to show that conditions had not altered in such
a way as to cause changes in the quality of nature's organic
productions. He did not do this. He did not take into consideration,
for instance, that climatic conditions may vary from age to age as
well as from country to country.

4.

Having established the natural equality of the Ancients and Moderns,
Fontenelle inferred that whatever differences exist are due to
external conditions--(1) time; (2) political institutions and the
estate of affairs in general.

The ancients were prior in time to us, therefore they were the
authors of the first inventions. For that, they cannot be regarded
as our superiors. If we had been in their place we should have been
the inventors, like them; if they were in ours, they would add to
those inventions, like us. There is no great mystery in that. We
must impute equal merit to the early thinkers who showed the way and
to the later thinkers who pursued it. If the ancient attempts to
explain the universe have been recently replaced by the discovery of
a simple system (the Cartesian), we must consider that the truth
could only be reached by the elimination of false routes, and in
this way the numbers of the Pythagoreans, the ideas of Plato, the
qualities of Aristotle, all served indirectly to advance knowledge.
"We are under an obligation to the ancients for having exhausted
almost all the false theories that could be formed." Enlightened
both by their true views and by their errors, it is not surprising
that we should surpass them.

But all this applies only to scientific studies, like mathematics,
physics, and medicine, which depend partly on correct reasoning and
partly on experience. Methods of reasoning improve slowly, and the
most important advance which has been made in the present age is the
method inaugurated by Descartes. Before him reasoning was loose; he
introduced a more rigid and precise standard, and its influence is
not only manifest in our best works on physics and philosophy, but
is even discernible in books on ethics and religion.

We must expect posterity to excel us as we excel the Ancients,
through improvement of method, which is a science in itself--the
most difficult and least studied of all--and through increase of
experience. Evidently the process is endless (il est evident que
tout cela n'a point de fin), and the latest men of science must be
the most competent.

But this does not apply to poetry or eloquence, round which the
controversy has most violently raged. For poetry and eloquence do
not depend on correct reasoning. They depend principally on vivacity
of imagination, and "vivacity of imagination does not require a long
course of experiments, or a great multitude of rules, to attain all
the perfection of which it is capable." Such perfection might be
attained in a few centuries. If the ancients did achieve perfection
in imaginative literature, it follows that they cannot be surpassed;
but we have no right to say, as their admirers are fond of
pretending, that they cannot be equalled.

5.

Besides the mere nature of time, we have to take into account
external circumstances in considering this question.

If the forces of nature are permanent, how are we to explain the
fact that in the barbarous centuries after the decline of Rome--the
term Middle Ages has not yet come into currency--ignorance was so
dense and deep? This breach of continuity is one of the plausible
arguments of the advocates of the Ancients. Those ages, they say,
were ignorant and barbarous because the Greek and Latin writers had
ceased to be read; as soon as the study of the classical models
revived there was a renaissance of reason and good taste. That is
true, but it proves nothing. Nature never forgot how to mould the
head of Cicero or Livy. She produces in every age men who might be
great men; but the age does not always allow them to exert their
talents. Inundations of barbarians, universal wars, governments
which discourage or do not favour science and art, prejudices which
assume all variety of shapes--like the Chinese prejudice against
dissecting corpses--may impose long periods of ignorance or bad
taste.

But observe that, though the return to the study of the ancients
revived, as at one stroke, the aesthetic ideals which they had
created and the learning which they had accumulated, yet even if
their works had not been preserved we should, though it would have
cost us many long years of labour, have discovered for ourselves
"ideas of the true and the beautiful." Where should we have found
them? Where the ancients themselves found them, after much groping.

6.

The comparison of the life of collective humanity to the life of a
single man, which had been drawn by Bacon and Pascal, Saint Sorlin
and Perrault, contains or illustrates an important truth which bears
on the whole question. Fontenelle puts it thus. An educated mind is,
as it were, composed of all the minds of preceding ages; we might
say that a single mind was being educated throughout all history.
Thus this secular man, who has lived since the beginning of the
world, has had his infancy in which he was absorbed by the most
urgent needs of life; his youth in which he succeeded pretty well in
things of imagination like poetry and eloquence, and even began to
reason, but with more courage than solidity. He is now in the age of
manhood, is more enlightened, and reasons better; but he would have
advanced further if the passion for war had not distracted him and
given him a distaste for the sciences to which he has at last
returned.

Figures, if they are pressed, are dangerous; they suggest
unwarrantable conclusions. It may be illuminative to liken the
development of humanity to the growth of an individual; but to infer
that the human race is now in its old age, merely on the strength of
the comparison, is obviously unjustifiable. That is what Bacon and
the others had done. The fallacy was pointed out by Fontenelle.

From his point of view, an "old age" of humanity, which if it meant
anything meant decay as well as the wisdom of experience, was
contrary to the principle of the permanence of natural forces. Man,
he asserts, will have no old age. He will be always equally capable,
of achieving the successes of his youth; and he will become more and
more expert in the things which become the age of virility. Or "to
drop metaphor, men will never degenerate." In ages to come we may be
regarded--say in America--with the same excess of admiration with
which we regard the ancients. We might push the prediction further.
In still later ages the interval of time which divides us from the
Greeks and Romans will appear so relatively small to posterity that
they will classify us and the ancients as virtually contemporary;
just in the same way as we group together the Greeks and Romans,
though the Romans in their own day were moderns in relation to the
Greeks. In that remote period men will be able to judge without
prejudice the comparative merits of Sophocles and Corneille.

Unreasonable admiration for the ancients is one of the chief
obstacles to progress (le progres des choses). Philosophy not only
did not advance, but even fell into an abyss of unintelligible
ideas, because, through devotion to the authority of Aristotle, men
sought truth in his enigmatic writings instead of seeking it in
nature. If the authority of Descartes were ever to have the same
fortune, the results would be no less disastrous.

7.

This memorable brochure exhibits, without pedantry, perspicuous
arrangement and the "geometrical" precision on which Fontenelle
remarked as one of the notes of the new epoch introduced by
Descartes. It displays too the author's open-mindedness, and his
readiness to follow where the argument leads. He is able already to
look beyond Cartesianism; he knows that it cannot be final. No man
of his time was more open-minded and free from prejudice than
Fontenelle. This quality of mind helped him to turn his eyes to the
future. Perrault and his predecessors were absorbed in the interest
of the present and the past. Descartes was too much engaged in his
own original discoveries to do more than throw a passing glance at
posterity.

Now the prospect of the future was one of the two elements which
were still needed to fashion the theory of the progress of
knowledge. All the conditions for such a theory were present. Bodin
and Bacon, Descartes and the champions of the Moderns--the reaction
against the Renaissance, and the startling discoveries of science--
had prepared the way; progress was established for the past and
present. But the theory of the progress of knowledge includes and
acquires its value by including the indefinite future. This step was
taken by Fontenelle. The idea had been almost excluded by Bacon's
misleading metaphor of old age, which Fontenelle expressly rejects.
Man will have no old age; his intellect will never degenerate; and
"the sound views of intellectual men in successive generations will
continually add up."

But progress must not only be conceived as extending indefinitely
into the future; it must also be conceived as necessary and certain.
This is the second essential feature of the theory. The theory would
have little value or significance, if the prospect of progress in
the future depended on chance or the unpredictable discretion of an
external will. Fontenelle asserts implicitly the certainty of
progress when he declares that the discoveries and improvements of
the modern age would have been made by the ancients if they
exchanged places with the moderns; for this amounts to saying that
science will progress and knowledge increase independently of
particular individuals. If Descartes had not been born, some one
else would have done his work; and there could have been no
Descartes before the seventeenth century. For, as he says in a later
work, [Footnote: Preface des elemens de la geometrie de l'infini
(OEuvres, x. p. 40, ed. 1790).] "there is an order which regulates
our progress. Every science develops after a certain number of
preceding sciences have developed, and only then; it has to await
its turn to burst its shell."

Fontenelle, then, was the first to formulate the idea of the
progress, of knowledge, as a complete doctrine. At the moment the
import and far-reaching effects of the idea were not realised,
either by himself or by others, and his pamphlet, which appeared in
the company of a perverse theory of pastoral poetry, was acclaimed
merely as an able defence of the Moderns.

8.

If the theory of the indefinite progress of knowledge is true, it is
one of those truths which were originally established by false
reasoning. It was established on a principle which excluded
degeneration, but equally excluded evolution; and the whole
conception of nature which Fontenelle had learned from Descartes is
long since dead and buried.

But it is more important to observe that this principle, which
seemed to secure the indefinite progress of knowledge, disabled
Fontenelle from suggesting a theory of the progress of society. The
invariability of nature, as he conceived it, was true of the
emotions and the will, as well as of the intellect. It implied that
man himself would be psychically always the same--unalterable,
incurable. L'ordre general de la Nature a Fair bien constant. His
opinion of the human race was expressed in the Dialogues of the
Dead, [Footnote: It may be seen too in the Plurality of Worlds.] and
it never seems to have varied. The world consists of a multitude of
fools, and a mere handful of reasonable men. Men's passions will
always be the same and will produce wars in the future as in the
past. Civilisation makes no difference; it is little more than a
veneer.

Even if theory had not stood in his way, Fontenelle was the last man
who was likely to dream dreams of social improvement. He was
temperamentally an Epicurean, of the same refined stamp as Epicurus
himself, and he enjoyed throughout his long life--he lived to the
age of a hundred--the tranquillity which was the true Epicurean
ideal. He was never troubled by domestic cares, and his own modest
ambition was satisfied when, at the age of forty, he was appointed
permanent Secretary of the Academy of Sciences. He was not the man
to let his mind dwell on the woes and evils of the world; and the
follies and perversities which cause them interested him only so far
as they provided material for his wit.

It remains, however, noteworthy that the author of the theory of the
progress of knowledge, which was afterwards to expand into a general
theory of human Progress, would not have allowed that this extension
was legitimate; though it was through this extension that
Fontenelle's idea acquired human value and interest and became a
force in the world.

9.

Fontenelle did a good deal more than formulate the idea. He
reinforced it by showing that the prospect of a steady and rapid
increase of knowledge in the future was certified.

The postulate of the immutability of the laws of nature, which has
been the indispensable basis for the advance of modern science, is
fundamental with Descartes. But Descartes did not explicitly insist
on it, and it was Fontenelle, perhaps more than any one else, who
made it current coin. That was a service performed by the disciple;
but he seems to have been original in introducing the fruitful idea
of the sciences as confederate and intimately interconnected
[Footnote: Roger Bacon, as we saw, had a glimpse of this
principle.]; not forming a number of isolated domains, as hitherto,
but constituting a system in which the advance of one will
contribute to the advance of the others. He exposed with masterly
ability the reciprocal relations of physics and mathematics. No man
of his day had a more comprehensive view of all the sciences, though
he made no original contributions to any. His curiosity was
universal, and as Secretary of the Academy he was obliged, according
to his own high standard of his duty, to keep abreast of all that
was being done in every branch of knowledge. That was possible then;
it would be impossible now.

In the famous series of obituary discourses which he delivered on
savants who were members of the Academy, Fontenelle probably thought
that he was contributing to the realisation of this ideal of
"solidarity," for they amounted to a chronicle of scientific
progress in every department. They are free from technicalities and
extraordinarily lucid, and they appealed not only to men of science,
but to those of the educated public who possessed some scientific
curiosity. This brings us to another important role of Fontenelle--
the role of interpreter of the world of science to the world
outside. It is closely related to our subject.

For the popularisation of science, which was to be one of the
features of the nineteenth century, was in fact a condition of the
success of the idea of Progress. That idea could not insinuate
itself into the public mind and become a living force in civilised
societies until the meaning and value of science had been generally
grasped, and the results of scientific discovery had been more or
less diffused. The achievements of physical science did more than
anything else to convert the imaginations of men to the general
doctrine of Progress.

Before the later part of the seventeenth century, the remarkable
physical discoveries of recent date had hardly escaped beyond
academic circles. But an interest in these subjects began to become
the fashion in the later years of Louis XIV. Science was talked in
the salons; ladies studied mechanics and anatomy. Moliere's play,
Les Femmes savantes, which appeared in 1672, is one of the first
indications. In 1686 Fontenelle published his Conversations on the
Plurality of Worlds, in which a savant explains the new astronomy to
a lady in the park of a country house. [Footnote: The Marquise of
the Plurality of Worlds is supposed to be Madame de la Mesangere,
who lived near Rouen, Fontenelle's birthplace. He was a friend and a
frequent visitor at her chateau. See Maigron, Fontenelle, p. 42. The
English translation of 1688 was by Glanvill. A new translation was
published at Dublin as late as 1761.] It is the first book--at least
the first that has any claim to be remembered--in the literature of
popular science, and it is one of the most striking. It met with the
success which it deserved. It was reprinted again and again, and it
was almost immediately translated into English.

The significance of the Plurality of Worlds is indeed much greater
than that of a pioneer work in popularisation and a model in the art
of making technical subjects interesting. We must remember that at
this time the belief that the sun revolves round the earth still
prevailed. Only the few knew better. The cosmic revolution which is
associated with the names of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo was
slow in producing its effects. It was rejected by Bacon; and the
condemnation of Galileo by the Church made Descartes, who dreaded
nothing so much as a collision with the ecclesiastical authorities
unwilling to insist on it. [Footnote: Cp. Bouillier, Histoire de la
philosophie cartesienne, i. p. 42-3.] Milton's Raphael, in the
Eighth Book of Paradise Lost (published 1667), does not venture to
affirm the Copernican system; he explains it sympathetically, but
leaves the question open. [Footnote: Masson (Milton's Poetical
Works, vol. 2) observes that Milton's life (1608-74) "coincides with
the period of the struggle between the two systems" (p. 90).
Milton's friends, the Smectymnians, in answer to Bishop Hall's
Humble Remonstrance (1641), "had cited the Copernican doctrine as an
unquestionable instance of a supreme absurdity." Masson has some
apposite remarks on the influence of the Ptolemaic system "upon the
thinkings and imaginations of mankind everywhere on all subjects
whatsoever till about two hundred years ago."] Fontenelle's book was
an event. It disclosed to the general public a new picture of the
universe, to which men would have to accustom their imaginations.

We may perhaps best conceive all that this change meant by supposing
what a difference it would make to us if it were suddenly discovered
that the old system which Copernicus upset was true after all, and
that we had to think ourselves back into a strictly limited universe
of which the earth is the centre. The loss of its privileged
position by our own planet; its degradation, from a cosmic point of
view, to insignificance; the necessity of admitting the probability
that there may be many other inhabited worlds--all this had
consequences ranging beyond the field of astronomy. It was as if a
man who dreamed that he was living in Paris or London should awake
to discover that he was really in an obscure island in the Pacific
Ocean, and that the Pacific Ocean was immeasurably vaster than he
had imagined. The Marquise, in the Plurality of Worlds, reacts to
the startling illumination: "Voila l'univers si grand que je m'y
perds, je ne sais plus ou je suis; je ne suis plus rien.--La terre
est si effroyablement petite!"

Such a revolution in cosmic values could not fail to exert a
penetrating influence on human thought. The privileged position of
the earth had been a capital feature of the whole doctrine, as to
the universe and man's destinies, which had been taught by the
Church, and it had made that doctrine more specious than it might
otherwise have seemed. Though the Churches could reform their
teaching to meet the new situation, the fact remained that the
Christian scheme sounded less plausible when the central importance
of the human race was shown to be an illusion. Would man, stripped
of his cosmic pretensions, and finding himself lost in the
immensities of space, invent a more modest theory of his destinies
confined to his own little earth--si effroyablement petite? The
eighteenth century answered this question by the theory of Progress.

10.

Fontenelle is one of the most representative thinkers of that
period--we have no distinguishing name for it--which lies between
the characteristic thinkers of the seventeenth century and the
characteristic thinkers of the eighteenth. It is a period of over
sixty years, beginning about 1680, for though Montesquieu and
Voltaire were writing long before 1740, the great influential works
of the "age of illumination" begin with the Esprit des lois in 1748.
The intellectual task of this intervening period was to turn to
account the ideas provided by the philosophy of Descartes, and use
them as solvents of the ideas handed down from the Middle Ages. We
might almost call it the Cartesian period for, though Descartes was
dead, it was in these years that Cartesianism performed its task and
transformed human thought.

When we speak of Cartesianism we do not mean the metaphysical system
of the master, or any of his particular views such as that of innate
ideas. We mean the general principles, which were to leave an
abiding impression on the texture of thought: the supremacy of
reason over authority, the stability of the laws of Nature, rigorous
standards of proof. Fontenelle was far from accepting all the views
of Descartes, whom he does not scruple to criticise; but he was a
true Cartesian in the sense that he was deeply imbued with these
principles, which generated, to use an expression of his own, "des
especes de rebelles, qui conspiraient contre l'ignorance et les
prejuges dominants." [Footnote: Eloge de M. Lemery.] And of all
these rebels against ruling prejudices he probably did more than any
single man to exhibit the consequences of the Cartesian ideas and
drive them home.

The Plurality of Worlds was a contribution to the task of
transforming thought and abolishing ancient error; but the History
of Oracles which appeared in the following year was more
characteristic. It was a free adaptation of an unreadable Latin
treatise by a Dutchman, which in Fontenelle's skilful hands becomes
a vehicle for applying Cartesian solvents to theological authority.
The thesis is that the Greek oracles were a sacerdotal imposture,
and not, as ecclesiastical tradition said, the work of evil spirits,
who were stricken silent at the death of Jesus Christ. The effect
was to discredit the authority of the early Fathers of the Church,
though the writer has the discretion to repudiate such an intention.
For the publication was risky; and twenty years later a Jesuit
Father wrote a treatise to confute it, and exposed the secret
poison, with consequences which might have been disastrous for
Fontenelle if he had not had powerful friends among the Jesuits
themselves. Fontenelle had none of the impetuosity of Voltaire, and
after the publication of the History of Oracles he confined his
criticism of tradition to the field of science. He was convinced
that "les choses fort etablies ne peuvent etre attaquees que par
degrez." [Footnote: Eloge de M. Lemery.]