Post uarios casus et tot discrimina rerum uenimus in Latium,

but Latium was to be the scene of sanguinary struggles.

Another allied and fundamental fallacy, into which all the philosophers and Rousseau had more or less fallen, was reflected and exposed by the Revolution. They had considered man in vacuo. They had not seen that the whole development of a society is an enormous force which cannot be talked or legislated away; they had ignored the power of social memory and historical traditions, and misvalued the strength of the links which bind generations together. So the Revolutionaries imagined that they could break abruptly with the past, and that a new method of government, constructed on mathematical lines, a constitution (to use words of Burke) "ready made and ready armed, mature in its birth, a perfect goddess of wisdom and of war, hammered by our blacksmith midwives out of the brain of Jupiter himself," would create a condition of idyllic felicity in France, and that the arrival of the millennium depended only on the adoption of the same principles by other nations. The illusions created by the Declaration of the Rights of Man on the 4th of August died slowly under the shadow of the Terror; but though the hopes of those who believed in the speedy regeneration of the world were belied, some of the thoughtful did not lose heart. There was one at least who did not waver in his faith that the movement was a giant's step on the path of man towards ultimate felicity, however far he had still to travel. Condorcet, one of the younger Encyclopaedists, spent the last months of his life, under the menace of the guillotine, in projecting a history of human Progress.

3.

Condorcet was the friend and biographer of Turgot, and it was not unfitting that he should resume the design of a history of civilisation, in the light of the idea of Progress, for which Turgot had only left luminous suggestions. He did not execute the plan, but he completed an elaborate sketch in which the controlling ideas of the scheme are fully set forth. His principles are to be found almost entirely in Turgot. But they have a new significance for Condorcet. He has given them wings. He has emphasised, and made deductions. Turgot wrote in the calm spirit of an inquirer. Condorcet spoke with the verve of a prophet. He was prophesying under the shadow of death. It is amazing that the optimistic Sketch of a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind should have been composed when he was hiding from Robespierre in 1793. [Footnote: Published in 1795.]

Condorcet was penetrated with the spirit of the Encyclopaedists, of whom he had been one, and his attitude to Christianity was that of Voltaire and Diderot. Turgot had treated the received religion respectfully. He had acknowledged Providence, and, though the place which he assigned to Providence was that of a sort of honorary President of the development of civilisation who might disappear without affecting the proceedings, there was a real difference between his views and those of his friend as to the role of Christianity and the civilisation of the Middle Ages.

A more important difference between the two thinkers is connected with the different circumstances in which they wrote. Turgot did not believe in the necessity of violent changes; he thought that steady reforms under the existing regime would do wonders for France. Before the Revolution Condorcet had agreed, but he was swept away by its enthusiasm. The victory of liberty in America and the increasing volume of the movement against slavery—one of the causes which most deeply stirred his heart—had heightened his natural optimism and confirmed his faith in the dogma of Progress. He felt the exhilaration of the belief that he was living through "one of the greatest revolutions of the human race," and he deliberately designed his book to be opportune to a crisis of mankind, at which "a picture of revolutions of the past will be the best guide."

Feeling that he is personally doomed, he consoles himself with brooding on the time, however remote, when the sun will shine "on an earth of none but freemen, with no master save reason; for tyrants and slaves, priests and their stupid or hypocritical tools, will all have disappeared." He is not satisfied with affirming generally the certainty of an indefinite progress in enlightenment and social welfare. He sets himself to think out its nature, to forecast its direction, and determine its goal, and insists, as his predecessors had never done, on the prospects of the distant future.

4.

His ambitious design is, in his own words, to show "the successive changes in human society, the influence which each instant exerts on the succeeding instant, and thus, in its successive modifications, the advance of the human species towards truth or happiness." Taken literally, this is an impossible design, and to put it forward as a practical proposition is as if a man were to declare his intention of writing a minute diary of the life of Julius Caesar from his birth to his death. By stating his purpose in such terms, Condorcet reveals that he had no notion of the limitations which confine our knowledge of the past, and that even if he had conceived a more modest and practicable programme he would have been incapable of executing it. His formula, however, is worth remembering. For the unattainable ideal which it expresses reminds us how many periods and passages of human experience must always remain books with seven seals.

Condorcet distinguished ten periods of civilisation, of which the tenth lies in the future, but he has not justified his divisions and his epochs are not co-ordinate in importance. Yet his arrangement of the map of history is remarkable as an attempt to mark its sections not by great political changes but by important steps in knowledge. The first three periods—the formation of primitive societies, followed by the pastoral age, and the agricultural age—conclude with the invention of alphabetic writing in Greece. The fourth is the history of Greek thought, to the definite division of the sciences in the time of Aristotle. In the fifth knowledge progresses and suffers obscuration under Roman rule, and the sixth is the dark age which continues to the time of the Crusades. The significance of the seventh period is to prepare the human mind for the revolution which would be achieved by the invention of printing, with which the eighth period opens. Some of the best pages of the book develop the vast consequences of this invention. The scientific revolution effected by Descartes begins a new period, which is now closed by the creation of the French Republic.

The idea of the progress of knowledge had created the idea of social Progress and remained its foundation. It was therefore logical and inevitable that Condorcet should take advance in knowledge as the clew to the march of the human race. The history of civilisation is the history of enlightenment. Turgot had justified this axiom by formulating the cohesion of all modes of social activity. Condorcet insists on "the indissoluble union" between intellectual progress and that of liberty, virtue, and the respect for natural rights, and on the effect of science in the destruction of prejudice. All errors in politics and ethics have sprung, he asserts, from false ideas which are closely connected with errors in physics and ignorance of the laws of nature. And in the new doctrine of Progress he sees an instrument of enlightenment which is to give "the last blow to the tottering edifice of prejudices."

It would not be useful to analyse Condorcet's sketch or dwell on his obsolete errors and the defects of his historical knowledge. His slight picture of the Middle Ages reflects the familiar view of all the eighteenth century philosophers. The only contribution to social amelioration which he can discover in a period of nearly a millennium is the abolition of domestic slavery. And so this period appears as an interruption of the onward march. His inability to appreciate the historical role of the Roman Empire exhibits more surprising ignorance and prejudice. But these particular defects are largely due to a fundamental error which runs through his whole book and was inherent in the social speculations of the Encyclopaedists. Condorcet, like all his circle, ignored the preponderant part which institutions have played in social development. So far as he considered them at all, he saw in them obstacles to the free play of human reason; not the spontaneous expression of a society corresponding to its needs or embodying its ideals, but rather machinery deliberately contrived for oppressing the masses and keeping them in chains. He did not see that if the Progress in which he believed is a reality, its possibility depends on the institutions and traditions which give to societies their stability. In the following generation, it would be pointed out that he fell into a manifest contradiction when he praised the relative perfection reached in some European countries in the eighteenth century, and at the same time condemned as eminently retrograde all the doctrines and institutions which had been previously in control. [Footnote: Comte. Cours de philosophie positive, iv. 228.] This error is closely connected with the other error, previously noticed, of conceiving man abstracted from his social environment and exercising his reason in vacuo.

5.

The study of the history of civilisation has, in Condorcet's eyes, two uses. It enables us to establish the fact of Progress, and it should enable us to determine its direction in the future, and thereby to accelerate the rate of progression.

By the facts of history and the arguments they suggest, he undertakes to show that nature has set no term to the process of improving human faculties, and that the advance towards perfection is limited only by the duration of the globe. The movement may vary in velocity, but it will never be retrograde so long as the earth occupies its present place in the cosmic system and the general laws of this system do not produce some catastrophe or change which would deprive the human race of the faculties and resources which it has hitherto possessed. There will be no relapse into barbarism. The guarantees against this danger are the discovery of true methods in the physical sciences, their application to the needs of men, the lines of communication which have been established among them, the great number of those who study them, and finally the art of printing. And if we are sure of the continuous progress of enlightenment, we may be sure of the continuous improvement of social conditions.

It is possible to foresee events, if the general laws of social phenomena are known, and these laws can be inferred from the history of the past. By this statement Condorcet justifies his bold attempt to sketch his tenth period of human history which lies in the future; and announces the idea which was in the next generation to be worked out by Comte. But he cannot be said to have deduced himself any law of social development. His forecast of the future is based on the ideas and tendencies of his own age. [Footnote: It is interesting to notice that the ablest of medieval Arabic historians, Ibn Khaldun (fourteenth century), had claimed that if history is scientifically studied future events may be predicted.]

Apart from scientific discoveries and the general diffusion of a knowledge of the laws of nature on which moral improvement depends, he includes in his prophetic vision the cessation of war and the realisation of the less familiar idea of the equality of the sexes. If he were alive to-day, he could point with triumph to the fact that of these far-reaching projects one is being accomplished in some of the most progressive countries and the other is looked upon as an attainable aim by statesmen who are not visionaries. The equality of the sexes was only a logical inference from the general doctrine of equality to which Condorcet's social theory is reducible. For him the goal of political progress is equality; equality is to be the aim of social effort—the ideal of the Revolution.

For it is the multitude of men that must be considered—the mass of workers, not the minority who live on their labours. Hitherto they have been neglected by the historian as well as by the statesman. The true history of humanity is not the history of some men. The human race is formed by the mass of families who subsist almost entirely on the fruits of their own work, and this mass is the proper subject of history, not great men.

You may establish social equality by means of laws and institutions, yet the equality actually enjoyed may be very incomplete. Condorcet recognises this and attributes it to three principal causes: inequality in wealth; inequality in position between the man whose means of subsistence are assured and can be transmitted to his family and the man whose means depend on his work and are limited by the term of his own life [Footnote: He looked forward to the mitigation of this inequality by the development of life insurance which was then coming to the front.]; and inequality in education. He did not propose any radical methods for dealing with these difficulties, which he thought would diminish in time, without, however, entirely disappearing. He was too deeply imbued with the views of the Economists to be seduced by the theories of Rousseau, Mably, Babeuf, and others, into advocating communism or the abolition of private property.

Besides equality among the individuals composing a civilised society, Condorcet contemplated equality among all the peoples of the earth,—a uniform civilisation throughout the world, and the obliteration of the distinction between advanced and retrograde races. The backward peoples, he prophesied, will climb up to the condition of France and the United States of America, for no people is condemned never to exercise its reason. If the dogma of the perfectibility of human nature, unguarded by any restrictions, is granted, this is a logical inference, and we have already seen that it was one of the ideas current among the philosophers.

Condorcet does not hesitate to add to his picture adventurous conjectures on the improvement of man's physical organisation, and a considerable prolongation of his life by the advance of medical science. We need only note this. More interesting is the prediction that, even if the compass of the human being's cerebral powers is inalterable, the range, precision, and rapidity of his mental operations will be augmented by the invention of new instruments and methods.

The design of writing a history of human civilisation was premature, and to have produced a survey of any durable value would have required the equipment of a Gibbon. Condorcet was not even as well equipped as Voltaire. [Footnote: But as he wrote without books the Sketch was a marvellous tour de force.] The significance of his Sketch lies in this, that towards the close of an intellectual movement it concentrated attention on the most important, though hitherto not the most prominent, idea which that movement had disseminated, and as it were officially announced human Progress as the leading problem that claimed the interest of mankind. With him Progress was associated intimately with particular eighteenth century doctrines, but these were not essential to it. It was a living idea; it survived the compromising theories which began to fall into discredit after the Revolution, and was explored from new points of view. Condorcet, however, wedded though his mind was to the untenable views of human nature current in his epoch and his circle, did not share the tendency of leading philosophers to regard history as an unprofitable record of folly and crime which it would be well to obliterate or forget. He recognised the interpretation of history as the key to human development, and this principle controlled subsequent speculations on Progress in France.

6.

Cabanis, the physician, was Condorcet's literary executor, and a no less ardent believer in human perfectibility. Looking at life and man from his own special point of view, he saw in the study of the physical organism the key to the intellectual and moral improvement of the race. It is by knowledge of the relations between his physical states and moral states that man can attain happiness, through the enlargement of his faculties and the multiplication of enjoyments, and that he will be able to grasp, as it were, the infinite in his brief existence by realising the certainty of indefinite progress. His doctrine was a logical extension of the theories of Locke and Condillac. If our knowledge is wholly derived from sensations, our sensations depend on our sensory organs, and mind becomes a function of the nervous system.

The events of the Revolution quenched in him as little as in Condorcet the sanguine confidence that it was the opening of a new era for science and art, and thereby for the general Progress of man. "The present is one of those great periods of history to which posterity will often look back" with gratitude. [Footnote: Picavet, Les Ideologues, p. 203. Cabanis was born in 1757 and died in 1808.] He took an active part in the coup d'etat of the 18th of Brumaire (1799) which was to lead to the despotism of Napoleon. He imagined that it would terminate oppression, and was as enthusiastic for it as he and Condorcet had been for the Revolution ten years before. "You philosophers," he wrote, [Footnote: Ib. p. 224.] "whose studies are directed to the improvement and happiness of the race, you no longer embrace vain shadows. Having watched, in alternating moods of hope and sadness, the great spectacle of our Revolution, you now see with joy the termination of its last act; you will see with rapture this new era, so long promised to the French people, at last open, in which all the benefits of nature, all the creations of genius, all the fruits of time, labour, and experience will be utilised, an era of glory and prosperity in which the dreams of your philanthropic enthusiasm should end by being realised."

It was an over-sanguine and characteristic greeting of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. Cabanis was one of the most important of those thinkers who, living into the new period, took care that the ideas of their own generation should not be overwhelmed in the rising flood of reaction.



CHAPTER XII. THE THEORY OF PROGRESS IN ENGLAND

1.

The idea of Progress could not help crossing the Channel. France and England had been at war in the first year of the eighteenth century, they were at war in the last, and their conflict for supremacy was the leading feature of the international history of the whole century. But at no period was there more constant intellectual intimacy or more marked reciprocal influence between the two countries. It was a commonplace that Paris and London were the two great foci of civilisation, and they never lost touch of each other in the intellectual sphere. Many of the principal works of literature that appeared in either country were promptly translated, and some of the French books, which the censorship rendered it dangerous to publish in Paris, were printed in London.

It was not indeed to be expected that the theory should have the same kind of success, or exert the same kind of effect in England as in France. England had her revolution behind her, France had hers before her. England enjoyed what were then considered large political liberties, the envy of other lands; France groaned under the tyranny of worthless rulers. The English constitution satisfied the nation, and the serious abuses which would now appear to us intolerable were not sufficient to awaken a passionate desire for reforms. The general tendency of British thought was to see salvation in the stability of existing institutions, and to regard change with suspicion. Now passionate desire for reform was the animating force which propagated the idea of Progress in France. And when this idea is translated from the atmosphere of combat, in which it was developed by French men of letters, into the calm climate of England, it appears like a cold reflection.

Again, English thinkers were generally inclined to hold, with Locke, that the proper function of government is principally negative, to preserve order and defend life and property, not to aim directly at the improvement of society, but to secure the conditions in which men may pursue their own legitimate aims. Most of the French theorists believed in the possibility of moulding society indefinitely by political action, and rested their hopes for the future not only on the achievements of science, but on the enlightened activity of governments. This difference of view tended to give to the doctrine of Progress in France more practical significance than in England.

But otherwise British soil was ready to receive the idea. There was the same optimistic temper among the comfortable classes in both countries. Shaftesbury, the Deist, had struck this note at the beginning of the century by his sanguine theory, which was expressed in Pope's banal phrase: "Whatever is, is right," and was worked into a system by Hutcheson. This optimism penetrated into orthodox circles. Progress, far from appearing as a rival of Providence, was discussed in the interests of Christianity by the Scotch theologian, Turnbull. [Footnote: The Principles of Modern Philosophy, 1740.]

2.

The theory of the indefinite progress of civilisation left Hume cold. There is little ground, he argued, to suppose that "the world" is eternal or incorruptible. It is probably mortal, and must therefore, with all things in it, have its infancy, youth, manhood, and old age; and man will share in these changes of state. We must then expect that the human species should, when the world is in the age of manhood, possess greater bodily and mental vigour, longer life, and a stronger inclination and power of generation. But it is impossible to determine when this stage is reached. For the gradual revolutions are too slow to be discernible in the short period known to us by history and tradition. Physically and in mental powers men have been pretty much the same in all known ages. The sciences and arts have flourished now and have again decayed, but when they reached the highest perfection among one people, the neighbouring peoples were perhaps wholly unacquainted with them. We are therefore uncertain whether at present man is advancing to his point of perfection or declining from it. [Footnote: Essay on the Populousness of Ancient Nations, ad init. ]

The argument is somewhat surprising in an eighteenth century thinker like Hume, but it did not prevent him from recognising the superiority of modern to ancient civilisation. This superiority forms indeed the minor premiss in the general argument by which he confuted the commonly received opinion as to the populousness of ancient nations. He insisted on the improvements in art and industry, on the greater liberty and security enjoyed by modern men. "To one who considers coolly on the subject," he remarked, "it will appear that human nature in general really enjoys more liberty at present in the most arbitrary government of Europe than it ever did during the most flourishing period of ancient times." [Footnote: The justification of this statement was the abolition of slavery in Europe.]

He discussed many of the problems of civilisation, especially the conditions in which the arts and sciences flourish, [Footnote: Essay on the Rise of Arts and Sciences.] and drew some general conclusions, but he was too sceptical to suppose that any general synthesis of history is possible, or that any considerable change for the better in the manners of mankind is likely to occur. [Footnote: Cf. Essay on the Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth, ad init.]

The greatest work dealing with social problems, that Britain produced in the eighteenth century, was Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, and his luminous exposition of the effects of the division of labour was the most considerable contribution made by British thinkers of the age to the study of human development. It is much more than a treatise on economic principles; it contains a history of the gradual economic progress of human society, and it suggests the expectation of an indefinite augmentation of wealth and well-being. Smith was entirely at one with the French Economists on the value of opulence for the civilisation and happiness of mankind. But it was indirectly perhaps that his work contributed most effectively to the doctrine of the Progress of collective mankind. [Footnote: It has been observed by Mr. Leslie Stephen that the doctrine of the rights of man lies in the background of Adam Smith's speculations.] His teaching that the free commercial intercourse of all the peoples of the world, unfettered by government policies, was to the greatest advantage of each, presented an ideal of the economic "solidarity" of the race, which was one element in the ideal of Progress. And this principle soon began to affect practice. Pitt assimilated it when he was a young man, and it is one of the distinctions of his statesmanship that he endeavoured to apply the doctrines of his master so far as the prevailing prejudices would allow him.

3.

A few writers of less weight and fame than Hume or Smith expressly studied history in the light of Progress. It would not help us, in following the growth of the idea, to analyse the works of Ferguson, Dunbar, or Priestley. [Footnote: In his Essay on the History of Civil Society Adam Ferguson treated the growth of civilisation as due to the progressive nature of man, which insists on carrying him forward to limits impossible to ascertain. He formulated the process as a movement from simplicity to complexity, but contributed little to its explanation.] But I will quote one passage from Priestley, the most eminent of the three, and the most enthusiastic for the Progress of man. As the division of labour—the chief principle of organised society—is carried further he anticipates that

... nature, including both its materials and its laws, will be more at our command; men will make their situation in this world abundantly more easy and comfortable; they will probably prolong their existence in it and will grow daily more happy.... Thus, whatever was the beginning of this world, the end will be glorious and paradisiacal beyond what our imaginations can now conceive. Extravagant as some people may suppose these views to be, I think I could show them to be fairly suggested by the true theory of human nature and to arise from the natural course of human affairs.

[Footnote: This passage of Priestley occurs in his Essay on the First Principles of Government and on the Nature of Political, Civil, and Religious Liberty (1768, 2nd ed. 1771), pp. 2-4. His Lectures on History and General Policy appeared in 1788.

Priestley was a strict utilitarian, who held that there is nothing intrinsically excellent in justice and veracity apart from their relation to happiness. The degree of public happiness is measured by the excellence of religion, science, government, laws, arts, commerce, conveniences of life, and especially by the degrees of personal security and personal liberty. In all these the ancients were inferior, and therefore they enjoyed less happiness. The present state of Europe is vastly preferable to what it was in any former period. And "the plan of this divine drama is opening more and more." In the future, Knowledge will increase and accumulate and diffuse itself to the lower ranks of society, who, by degrees, will find leisure for speculation; and looking beyond their immediate employment, they will consider the complex machine of society, and in time understand it better than those who now write about it.

See his Lectures, pp. 371, 388 sqq., 528-53.

The English thinker did not share all the views of his French masters. As a Unitarian, he regarded Christianity as a "great remedy of vice and ignorance," part of the divine plan; and he ascribed to government a lesser role than they in the improvement of humanity. He held, for instance, that the state should not interfere in education, arguing that this art was still in the experimental stage, and that the intervention of the civil power might stereotype a bad system.

Not less significant, though less influential, than the writings of Priestley and Ferguson was the work of James Dunbar, Professor of Philosophy at Aberdeen, entitled Essays on the History of Mankind in Rude and Cultivated Ages (2nd ed., 1781). He conceived history as progressive, and inquired into the general causes which determine the gradual improvements of civilisation. He dealt at length with the effects of climate and local circumstances, but unlike the French philosophers did not ignore heredity. While he did not enter upon any discussion of future developments, he threw out incidentally the idea that the world may be united in a league of nations.

Posterity, he wrote, "may contemplate, from a concurrence of various causes and events, some of which are hastening into light, the greater part, or even the whole habitable globe, divided among nations free and independent in all the interior functions of government, forming one political and commercial system" (p. 287).

Dunbar's was an optimistic book, but his optimism was more cautious than Priestley's. These are his final words:

If human nature is liable to degenerate, it is capable of proportionable improvement from the collected wisdom of ages. It is pleasant to infer from the actual progress of society, the glorious possibilities of human excellence. And, if the principles can be assembled into view, which most directly tend to diversify the genius and character of nations, some theory may be raised on these foundations that shall account more systematically for past occurrences and afford some openings and anticipations into the eventual history of the world.]

The problem of dark ages, which an advocate of Progress must explain, was waved away by Priestley in his Lectures on History with the observation that they help the subsequent advance of knowledge by "breaking the progress of authority." [Footnote: This was doubtless suggested to him by some remarks of Hume in The Rise of Arts and Sciences.] This is not much of a plea for such periods viewed as machinery in a Providential plan. The great history of the Middle Ages, which in the words of its author describes "the triumph of barbarism and religion," had been completed before Priestley's Lectures appeared, and it is remarkable that he takes no account of it, though it might seem to be a work with which a theory of Progress must come to terms.

Yet the sceptical historian of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, who was more at home in French literature than any of his fellow-countrymen, was not opposed to the theory of Progress, and he even states it in a moderate form. Having given reasons for believing that civilised society will never again be threatened by such an irruption of barbarians as that which oppressed the arms and institutions of Rome, he allows us to "acquiesce in the pleasing conclusion that every age of the world has increased, and still increases, the real wealth, the happiness, the knowledge and perhaps the virtue of the human race."

"The discoveries of ancient and modern navigators, and the domestic history or tradition of the most enlightened nations, represent the HUMAN SAVAGE, naked both in mind and body, and destitute of laws, of arts, of ideas, and almost of language. From this abject condition, perhaps the primitive and universal state of man, he has gradually arisen to command the animals, to fertilise the earth, to traverse the ocean, and to measure the heavens. His progress in the improvement and exercise of his mental and corporeal faculties has been irregular and various, infinitely slow in the beginning, and increasing by degrees with redoubled velocity; ages of laborious ascent have been followed by a moment of rapid downfall; and the several climates of the globe have felt the vicissitudes of light and darkness. Yet the experience of four thousand years should enlarge our hopes and diminish our apprehensions; we cannot determine to what height the human species may aspire in their advances towards perfection; but it may safely be presumed that no people, unless the face of nature is changed, will relapse into their original barbarism." [Footnote: Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. xxxviii. ad fin.]

But Gibbon treats the whole subject as a speculation, and he treats it without reference to any of the general principles on which French thinkers had based their theory. He admits that his reasons for holding that civilisation is secure against a barbarous cataclysm may be considered fallacious; and he also contemplates the eventuality that the fabric of sciences and arts, trade and manufacture, law and policy, might be "decayed by time." If so, the growth of civilisation would have to begin again, but not ab initio. For "the more useful or at least more necessary arts," which do not require superior talents or national subordination for their exercise, and which war, commerce, and religious zeal have spread among the savages of the world, would certainly survive.

These remarks are no more than obiter dicta but they show how the doctrine of Progress was influencing those who were temperamentally the least likely to subscribe to extravagant theories.

4.

The outbreak of the French Revolution evoked a sympathetic movement among English progressive thinkers which occasioned the Government no little alarm. The dissenting minister Dr. Richard Price, whose Observations on Civil Liberty (1776), defending the action of the American colonies, had enjoyed an immense success, preached the sermon which provoked Burke to write his Reflections; and Priestley, no less enthusiastic in welcoming the Revolution, replied to Burke. The Government resorted to tyrannous measures; young men who sympathised with the French movement and agitated for reforms at home were sent to Botany Bay. Paine was prosecuted for his Rights of Man, which directly preached revolution. But the most important speculative work of the time, William Godwin's Political Justice, escaped the censorship because it was not published at a popular price. [Footnote: Godwin had helped to get Paine's book published in 1791, and he was intimate with the group of revolutionary spirits who were persecuted by the Government. A good account of the episode will be found in Brailsford's Shelley, Godwin, and their Circle.]

The Enquiry concerning Political Justice, begun in 1791, appeared in 1793. The second edition, three years later, shows the influence of Condorcet's Sketch, which had appeared in the meantime. Godwin says that his original idea was to produce a work on political science to supersede Montesquieu. The note of Montesquieu's political philosophy was respect for social institutions. Godwin's principle was that social institutions are entirely pernicious, that they perpetuate harmful prejudices, and are an almost insuperable obstacle to improvement. If he particularly denounced monarchical government, he regarded all government as evil, and held that social progress would consist, not in the reformation of government, but in its abolition. While he recognised that man had progressed in the past, he considered history mainly a sequence of horrors, and he was incapable of a calm survey of the course of civilisation. In English institutions he saw nothing that did not outrage the principles of justice and benevolence. The present state of humanity is about as bad as it could be.

It is easy to see the deep influence which the teaching of Rousseau exercised on Godwin. Without accepting the theory of Arcadia Godwin followed him in unsparing condemnation of existing conditions. Rousseau and Godwin are the two great champions in the eighteenth century of the toiling and suffering masses. But Godwin drew the logical conclusion from Rousseau's premisses which Rousseau hesitated to draw himself. The French thinker, while he extolled the anarchical state of uncivilised society, and denounced government as one of the sources of its corruption, nevertheless sought the remedy in new social and political institutions. Godwin said boldly, government is the evil; government must go. Humanity can never be happy until all political authority and social institutions disappear.

Now the peculiarity of Godwin's position as a doctrinaire of Progress lies in the fact that he entertained the same pessimistic view of some important sides of civilisation as Rousseau, and at the same time adopted the theories of Rousseau's opponents, especially Helvetius. His survey of human conditions seems to lead inevitably to pessimism; then he turns round and proclaims the doctrine of perfectibility.

The explanation of this argument was the psychological theory of Helvetius. He taught, as we saw, and Godwin developed the view in his own way, that the natures and characters of men are moulded entirely by their environment—not physical, but intellectual and moral environment, and therefore can be indefinitely modified. A man is born into the world without innate tendencies. His conduct depends on his opinions. Alter men's opinions and they will act differently. Make their opinions conformable to justice and benevolence, and you will have a just and benevolent society. Virtue, as Socrates taught, is simply a question of knowledge. The situation, therefore, is not hopeless. For it is not due to the radical nature of man; it is caused by ignorance and prejudice, by governments and institutions, by kings and priests. Transform the ideas of men, and society will be transformed. The French philosopher considered that a reformed system of educating children would be one of the most powerful means for promoting progress and bringing about the reign of reason; and Condorcet worked out a scheme of universal state education. This was entirely opposed to Godwin's principles. State schools would only be another instrument of power in the hands of a government, worse even than a state Church. They would strengthen the poisonous influence of kings and statesmen, and establish instead of abolishing prejudices. He seems to have relied entirely on the private efforts of enlightened thinkers to effect a gradual conversion of public opinion.

In his study of the perfectibility of man and the prospect of a future reign of general justice and benevolence, Godwin was even more visionary than Condorcet, as in his political views he was more radical than the Revolutionists. Condorcet had at least sought to connect his picture of the future with a reasoned survey of the past, and to find a chain of connection, but the perfectibility of Godwin hung in the air, supported only by an abstract theory of the nature of man.

It can hardly be said that he contributed anything to the theoretical problem of civilisation. His significance is that he proclaimed in England at an opportune moment, and in a more impressive and startling way than a sober apostle like Priestley, the creed of progress taught by French philosophers, though considerably modified by his own anarchical opinions.

5.

Perfectibility, as expounded by Condorcet and Godwin, encountered a drastic criticism from Malthus, whose Essay on the Principle of Population appeared in its first form anonymously in 1798. Condorcet had foreseen an objection which might be raised as fatal to the realisation of his future state. Will not the progress of industry and happiness cause a steady increase in population, and must not the time come when the number of the inhabitants of the globe will surpass their means of subsistence? Condorcet did not grapple with this question. He contented himself with saying that such a period must be very far away, and that by then "the human race will have achieved improvements of which we can now scarcely form an idea." Similarly Godwin, in his fancy picture of the future happiness of mankind, notices the difficulty and shirks it. "Three-fourths of the habitable globe are now uncultivated. The parts already cultivated are capable of immeasurable improvement. Myriads of centuries of still increasing population may pass away and the earth be still found sufficient for the subsistence of its inhabitants."

Malthus argued that these writers laboured under an illusion as to the actual relations between population and the means of subsistence. In present conditions the numbers of the race are only kept from increasing far beyond the means of subsistence by vice, misery, and the fear of misery. [Footnote: This observation had been made (as Hazlitt pointed out) before Malthus by Robert Wallace (see A Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind, p. 13, 1753). It was another book of Wallace that suggested the difficulty to Godwin.] In the conditions imagined by Condorcet and Godwin these checks are removed, and consequently the population would increase with great rapidity, doubling itself at least in twenty-five years. But the products of the earth increase only in an arithmetical progression, and in fifty years the food supply would be too small for the demand. Thus the oscillation between numbers and food supply would recur, and the happiness of the species would come to an end.

Godwin and his adherents could reply that one of the checks on over-population is prudential restraint, which Malthus himself recognised, and that this would come more extensively into operation with that progress of enlightenment which their theory assumed. [Footnote: This is urged by Hazlitt in his criticism of Malthus in the Spirit of the Age.] But the criticisms of Malthus dealt a trenchant blow to the doctrine that human reason, acting through legislation and government, has a virtually indefinite power of modifying the condition of society. The difficulty, which he stated so vividly and definitely, was well calculated to discredit the doctrine, and to suggest that the development of society could be modified by the conscious efforts of man only within restricted limits. [Footnote: The recent conclusions of Mr. Knibbs, statistician to the Commonwealth of Australia, in vol. i. of his Appendix to the Census of the Commonwealth, have an interest in this connection. I quote from an article in the Times of August 5, 1918: "An eminent geographer, the late Mr. E. G. Ravenstein, some years ago, when the population of the earth was estimated at 1400 million, foretold that about the middle of this century population would have reached a limit beyond which increase would be disastrous. Mr. Knibbs is not so pessimistic and is much more precise; though he defers the disastrous culmination, he has no doubt as to its inevitability. The limits of human expansion, he assures us, are much nearer than popular opinion imagines; the difficulty of food supplies will soon be most grave; the exhaustion of sources of energy necessary for any notable increase of population, or advance in the standards of living, or both combined, is perilously near. The present rate of increase in the world's population cannot continue for four centuries."]

6.

The Essay of Malthus afterwards became one of the sacred books of the Utilitarian sect, and it is interesting to notice what Bentham himself thought of perfectibility. Referring to the optimistic views of Chastellux and Priestley on progressive amelioration he observed that "these glorious expectations remind us of the golden age of poetry." For perfect happiness "belongs to the imaginary region of philosophy and must be classed with the universal elixir and the philosopher's stone." There will always be jealousies through the unequal gifts of nature and of fortune; interests will never cease to clash and hatred to ensue; "painful labour, daily subjection, a condition nearly allied to indigence, will always be the lot of numbers"; in art and poetry the sources of novelty will probably be exhausted. But Bentham was far from being a pessimist. Though he believes that "we shall never make this world the abode of happiness," he asserts that it may be made a most delightful garden "compared with the savage forest in which men so long have wandered." [Footnote: Works, vol. i. p. 193 seq.]

7.

The book of Malthus was welcomed at the moment by all those who had been thoroughly frightened by the French Revolution and saw in the "modern philosophy," as it was called, a serious danger to society. [Footnote: Both Hazlitt and Shelley thought that Malthus was playing to the boxes, by sophisms "calculated to lull the oppressors of mankind into a security of everlasting triumph" (Revolt of Islam, Preface). Bentham refers in his Book of Fallacies (Works, ii. p. 462) to the unpopularity of the views of Priestley, Godwin, and Condorcet: "to aim at perfection has been pronounced to be utter folly or wickedness."] Vice and misery and the inexorable laws of population were a godsend to rescue the state from "the precipice of perfectibility." We can understand the alarm occasioned to believers in the established constitution of things, for Godwin's work—now virtually forgotten, while Malthus is still appealed to as a discoverer in social science—produced an immense effect on impressionable minds at the time. All who prized liberty, sympathised with the downtrodden, and were capable of falling in love with social ideals, hailed Godwin as an evangelist. "No one," said a contemporary, "was more talked of, more looked up to, more sought after; and wherever liberty, truth, justice was the theme, his name was not far off." Young graduates left the Universities to throw themselves at the feet of the new Gamaliel; students of law and medicine neglected their professional studies to dream of "the renovation of society and the march of mind." Godwin carried with him "all the most sanguine and fearless understandings of the time." [Footnote: Hazlitt, Spirit of the Age: article on Godwin (written in 1814).]

The most famous of his disciples were the poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and afterwards Shelley. Wordsworth had been an ardent sympathiser with the French Revolution. In its early days he had visited Paris:

An emporium then Of golden expectations and receiving Freights every day from a new world of hope.

He became a Godwinian in 1795, when the Terror had destroyed his faith in Revolutionary France. Southey, who had come under the influence of Rousseau, was initiated by Coleridge into Godwin's theories, and in their utopian enthusiasm they formed the design of founding a "pantisocratic" settlement in America, to show how happiness could be realised in a social environment in which duty and interest coincide and consequently all are virtuous. The plan anticipated the experiments of Owen and Cabet; but the pantisocrats did not experience the disappointments of the socialists, for it was never carried out. Coleridge and Southey as well as Wordsworth soon abandoned their Godwinian doctrines. [Footnote: In letters of 1797 and 1798 Coleridge repudiated the French doctrines and Godwin's philosophy. See Cestre, La Revolution francaise et les poetes anglais (1789-1809), pp. 389, 414.] They had, to use a phrase of Hazlitt, lost their way in Utopia, and they gave up the abstract and mechanical view of society which the French philosophy of the eighteenth century taught, for an organic conception in which historic sentiment and the wisdom of our ancestors had their due place. Wordsworth could presently look back and criticise his Godwinian phase as that of

A proud and most presumptuous confidence In the transcendent wisdom of the age And its discernment. [Footnote: Excursion, Book ii.]

He and Southey became conservative pillars of the state. Yet Southey, reactionary as he was in politics, never ceased to believe in social Progress. [Footnote: See his Colloquies; and Shelley, writing in 1811, says that Southey "looks forward to a state when all shall be perfected and matter become subjected to the omnipotence of mind" (Dowden, Life of Shelley, i. p. 212). Compare below, p. 325.] Amelioration was indeed to be effected by slow and cautious reforms, with the aid of the Church, but the intellectual aberrations of his youth had left an abiding impression.

While these poets were sitting at Godwin's feet, Shelley was still a child. But he came across Political Justice at Eton; in his later life he reread it almost every year; and when he married Godwin's daughter he was more Godwinian than Godwin himself. Hazlitt, writing in 1814, says that Godwin's reputation had "sunk below the horizon," but Shelley never ceased to believe in his theory, though he came to see that the regeneration of man would be a much slower process than he had at first imagined. In the immature poem Queen Mab the philosophy of Godwin was behind his description of the future, and it was behind the longer and more ambitious poems of his maturer years. The city of gold, of the Revolt of Islam, is Godwin's future society, and he describes that poem as "an experiment on the temper of the public mind as to how far a thirst for a happier condition of moral and political society survives, among the enlightened and refined, the tempests which have shaken the age in which we live." As to Prometheus Unbound his biographer observes: [Footnote: Dowden, ib. ii. p. 264. Elsewhere Dowden remarks on the singular insensibility of Shelley's mind "to the wisdom or sentiment of history" (i. p. 55).]

All the glittering fallacies of "Political Justice"—now sufficiently tarnished—together with all its encouraging and stimulating truths, may be found in the caput mortuum left when the critic has reduced the poetry of the "Prometheus" to a series of doctrinaire statements.

The same dream inspired the final chorus of Hellas. Shelley was the poet of perfectibility.

8.

The attraction of perfectibility reached beyond the ranks of men of letters, and in Robert Owen, the benevolent millowner of Lanark, it had an apostle who based upon it a very different theory from that of Political Justice and became one of the founders of modern socialism.

The success of the idea of Progress has been promoted by its association with socialism. [Footnote: The word was independently invented in England and France. An article in the Poor Man's Guardian (a periodical edited by H. Hetherington, afterwards by Bronterre O'Brien), Aug. 24, 1833, is signed "A Socialist"; and in 1834 socialisme is opposed to individualism by P. Leroux in an article in the Revue Encyclopedique. The word is used in the New Moral World, and from 1836 was applied to the Owenites. See Dolleans, Robert Owen (1907), p. 305.] The first phase of socialism, what has been called its sentimental phase, was originated by Saint-Simon in France and Owen in England at about the same time; Marx was to bring it down from the clouds and make it a force in practical politics. But both in its earlier and in its later forms the economical doctrines rest upon a theory of society depending on the assumption, however disguised, that social institutions have been solely responsible for the vice and misery which exist, and that institutions and laws can be so changed as to abolish misery and vice. That is pure eighteenth century doctrine; and it passed from the revolutionary doctrinaires of that period to the constructive socialists of the nineteenth century.

Owen learned it probably from Godwin, and he did not disguise it. His numerous works enforce it ad nauseam. He began the propagation of his gospel by his "New View of Society, or Essays on the formation of the human character, preparatory to the development of a plan for gradually ameliorating the condition of mankind," which he dedicated to the Prince Regent. [Footnote: 3rd ed. 1817. The Essays had appeared separately in 1813-14.] Here he lays down that "any general character, from the best to the worst, may be given to any community, even to the world at large, by the application of proper means; which means are to a great extent at the command and under the control of those who have influence in the affairs of men." [Footnote: P. 19.] The string on which he continually harps is that it is the cardinal error in government to suppose that men are responsible for their vices and virtues, and therefore for their actions and characters. These result from education and institutions, and can be transformed automatically by transforming those agencies. Owen founded several short-lived journals to diffuse his theories. The first number of the New Moral World (1834-36) [Footnote: This was not a journal, but a series of pamphlets which appeared in 1836-1844. Other publications of Owen were: Outline of the Rational System of Society (6th ed., Leeds, 1840); The Revolution in the Mind and Practice of the Human Race, or the coming change from Irrationality to Rationality (1849); The Future of the Human Race, or a great, glorious and peaceful Revolution, near at hand, to be effected through the agency of departed spirits of good and superior men and women (1853); The New Existence of Man upon Earth, Parts i.-viii., 1854-55.] proclaimed the approach of an ideal society in which there will be no ignorance, no poverty, and no charity—a system "which will ensure the happiness of the human race throughout all future ages," to replace one "which, so long as it shall be maintained, must produce misery to all." His own experimental attempt to found such a society on a miniature scale in America proved a ludicrous failure.

It is to be observed that in these socialist theories the conception of Progress as indefinite tends to vanish or to lose its significance. If the millennium can be brought about at a stroke by a certain arrangement of society, the goal of development is achieved; we shall have reached the term, and shall have only to live in and enjoy the ideal state—a menagerie of happy men. There will be room for further, perhaps indefinite, advance in knowledge, but civilisation in its social character becomes stable and rigid. Once man's needs are perfectly satisfied in a harmonious environment there is no stimulus to cause further changes, and the dynamic character of history disappears.

Theories of Progress are thus differentiating into two distinct types, corresponding to two radically opposed political theories and appealing to two antagonistic temperaments. The one type is that of constructive idealists and socialists, who can name all the streets and towers of "the city of gold," which they imagine as situated just round a promontory. The development of man is a closed system; its term is known and is within reach. The other type is that of those who, surveying the gradual ascent of man, believe that by the same interplay of forces which have conducted him so far and by a further development of the liberty which he has fought to win, he will move slowly towards conditions of increasing harmony and happiness. Here the development is indefinite; its term is unknown, and lies in the remote future. Individual liberty is the motive force, and the corresponding political theory is liberalism; whereas the first doctrine naturally leads to a symmetrical system in which the authority of the state is preponderant, and the individual has little more value than a cog in a well-oiled wheel: his place is assigned; it is not his right to go his own way. Of this type the principal example that is not socialistic is, as we shall see, the philosophy of Comte.



CHAPTER XIII. GERMAN SPECULATIONS ON PROGRESS

1.

The philosophical views current in Germany during the period in which the psychology of Locke was in fashion in France and before the genius of Kant opened a new path, were based on the system of Leibnitz. We might therefore expect to find a theory of Progress developed there, parallel to the development in France though resting on different principles. For Leibnitz, as we saw, provided in his cosmic optimism a basis for the doctrine of human Progress, and he had himself incidentally pointed to it. This development, however, was delayed. It was only towards the close of the period—which is commonly known as the age of "Illumination"—that Progress came to the front, and it is interesting to observe the reason.

Wolf was the leading successor and interpreter of Leibnitz. He constrained that thinker's ideas into a compact logical system which swayed Germany till Kant swept it away. In such cases it usually happens that some striking doctrines and tendencies of the master are accentuated and enforced, while others are suffered to drop out of sight.

So it was here. In the Wolfian system, Leibnitz's conception of development was suffered to drop out of sight, and the dynamic element which animated his speculation disappeared. In particular, he had laid down that the sum of motive forces in the physical world is constant. His disciples proceeded to the inference that the sum of morality in the ethical world is constant. This dogma obviously eliminates the possibility of ethical improvement for collective humanity. And so we find Mendelssohn, who was the popular exponent of Wolf's philosophy, declaring that "progress is only for the individual; but that the whole of humanity here below in the course of time shall always progress and perfect itself seems to me not to have been the purpose of Providence." [Footnote: See Bock, Jakob Wegelin als Geschichtstheoretiker, in Leipsiger Studien, ix. 4, pp. 23-7 (1902).]

The publication of the Nouveaux Essais in 1765 induced some thinkers to turn from the dry bones of Wolf to the spirit of Leibnitz himself. And at the same time French thought was penetrating. In consequence of these influences the final phase of the German "Illumination" is marked by the appearance of two or three works in which Progress is a predominating idea.

We see this reaction against Wolf and his static school in a little work published by Herder in 1774—"a philosophy of history for the cultivation of mankind." There is continuous development, he declares, and one people builds upon the work of another. We must judge past ages, not by the present, but relatively to their own particular conditions. What exists now was never possible before, for everything that man accomplishes is conditioned by time, climate, and circumstances.

Six years later Lessing's pamphlet on the Education of the Human Race appeared, couched in the form of aphoristic statements, and to a modern reader, one may venture to say, singularly wanting in argumentative force. The thesis is that the drama of history is to be explained as the education of man by a progressive series of religions, a series not yet complete, for the future will produce another revelation to lift him to a higher plane than that to which Christ has drawn him up. This interpretation of history proclaimed Progress, but assumed an ideal and applied a measure very different from those of the French philosophers. The goal is not social happiness, but a full comprehension of God. Philosophy of religion is made the key to the philosophy of history. The work does not amount to more than a suggestion for a new synthesis, but it was opportune and arresting.

Herder meanwhile had been thinking, and in 1784 he gave the German world his survey of man's career—Ideas of the Philosophy of the History of Humanity. In this famous work, in which we can mark the influence of French thinkers, especially Montesquieu, as well as of Leibnitz, he attempted, though on very different lines, the same task which Turgot and Condorcet planned, a universal history of civilisation.

The Deity designed the world but never interferes in its process, either in the physical cosmos or in human history. Human history itself, civilisation, is a purely natural phenomenon. Events are strictly enchained; continuity is unbroken; what happened at any given time could have happened only then, and nothing else could have happened. Herder's rigid determinism not only excludes Voltaire's chance but also suppresses the free play of man's intelligent will. Man cannot guide his own destinies; his actions and fortunes are determined by the nature of things, his physical organisation and physical environment. The fact that God exists in inactive ease hardly affects the fatalistic complexion of this philosophy; but it is perhaps a mitigation that the world was made for man; humanity is its final cause.

The variety of the phases of civilisation that have appeared on earth is due to the fact that the possible manifestations of human nature are very numerous and that they must all be realised. The lower forms are those in which the best, which means the most human, faculties of our nature are undeveloped. The highest has not yet been realised. "The flower of humanity, captive still in its germ, will blossom out one day into the true form of man like unto God, in a state of which no terrestrial man can imagine the greatness and the majesty." [Footnote: Ideen, v. 5.]

Herder is not a systematic thinker—indeed his work abounds in contradictions—and he has not made it clear how far this full epiphany results from the experiences of mankind in preceding phases. He believes that life is an education for humanity (he has taken the phrase of Lessing), that good progressively develops, that reason and justice become more powerful. This is a doctrine of Progress, but he distinctly opposes the hypothesis of a final and unique state of perfection as the goal of history, which would imply that earlier generations exist for the sake of the later and suffer in order to ensure the felicity of remote posterity—a theory which offends his sense of justice and fitness. On the contrary, man can realise happiness equally in every stage of civilisation. All forms of society are equally legitimate, the imperfect as well as the perfect; all are ends in themselves, not mere stages on the way to something better. And a people which is happy in one of these inferior states has a perfect right to remain in it.

Thus the Progress which Herder sees is, to use his own geometrical illustration, a sequence of unequal and broken curves, corresponding to different maxima and minima. Each curve has its own equation, the history of each people is subject to the laws of its own environment; but there is no general law controlling the whole career of humanity. [Footnote: Ib. xv. 3. The power of ideas in history, which Herder failed to appreciate, was recognised by a contemporary savant from whom he might have learned. Jakob Wegelin, a Swiss, had, at the invitation of Frederick the Great, settled in Berlin, where he spent the last years of his life and devoted his study to the theory of history. His merit was to have perceived that "external facts are penetrated and governed by spiritual forces and guiding ideas, and that the essential and permanent in history is conditioned by the nature and development of ideas." (Dierauer, quoted by Bock, op. cit. p. 13.) He believed in the progressive development of mankind as a whole, but as his learned brochures seem to have exerted no influence, it would be useless here to examine more closely his views, which are buried in the transactions of the Prussian Academy of Science. In Switzerland he came under the influence of Rousseau and d'Alembert. After he moved to Berlin (1765) he fell under that of Leibnitz. It may be noted (1) that he deprecated attempts at writing a universal history as premature until an adequate knowledge of facts had been gained, and this would demand long preliminary labours; (2) that he discussed the question whether history is an indefinite progression or a series of constant cycles, and decided for the former view. (Memoire sur le cours periodique, 1785). Bock's monograph is the best study of Wegelin; but see also Flint's observations in Philosophy of History, vol. i. (1874).]

Herder brought down his historical survey only as far as the sixteenth century. It has been suggested [Footnote: Javary, De l'idee de progres, p. 69.] that if he had come down further he might have comprehended the possibility of a deliberate transformation of societies by the intelligent action of the human will—an historical force to which he does not do justice, apparently because he fancied it incompatible with strict causal sequence. The value of his work does not lie in the philosophical principles which he applied. Nor was it a useful contribution to history; of him it has been said, as of Bossuet, that facts bent like grass under his feet. [Footnote: Jouffroy, Melanges, p. 81.] But it was a notable attempt to do for human phenomena what Leibnitz in his Theodicy sought to do for the cosmos, and it pointed the way to the rationalistic philosophies of history which were to be a feature of the speculations of the following century.

2.

The short essay of Kant, which he clumsily called the Idea of a Universal History on a Cosmopolitical Plan, [Footnote: 1784. This work of Kant was translated by De Quincey (Works, vol. ix. 428 sqq., ed. Masson), who is responsible for cosmopolitical as the rendering of weltburgerlich.] approaches the problems raised by the history of civilisation from a new point of view.

He starts with the principle of invariable law. On any theory of free will, he says, human actions are as completely under the control of universal-laws of nature as any other physical phenomena. This is illustrated by statistics. Registers of births, deaths, and marriages show that these events occur with as much conformity to laws of nature as the oscillations of the weather.

It is the same with the great sequence of historical events. Taken alone and individually, they seem incoherent and lawless; but viewed in their connection, as due to the action not of individuals but of the human species, they do not fail to reveal "a regular stream of tendency." Pursuing their own often contradictory purposes, individual nations and individual men are unconsciously promoting a process to which if they perceived it they would pay little regard.

Individual men do not obey a law. They do not obey the laws of instinct like animals, nor do they obey, as rational citizens of the world would do, the laws of a preconcerted plan. If we look at the stage of history we see scattered and occasional indications of wisdom, but the general sum of men's actions is "a web of folly, childish vanity, and often even of the idlest wickedness and spirit of destruction."

The problem for the philosopher is to discover a meaning in this senseless current of human actions, so that the history of creatures who pursue no plan of their own may yet admit of a systematic form. The clew to this form is supplied by the predispositions of human nature.

I have stated this problem almost in Kant's words, and as he might have stated it if he had not introduced the conception of final causes. His use of the postulate of final causes without justifying it is a defect in his essay. He identifies what he well calls a stream of tendency with "a natural purpose." He makes no attempt to show that the succession of events is such that it cannot be explained without the postulate of a purpose. His solution of the problem is governed by this conception of finality, and by the unwarranted assumption that nature does nothing in vain.

He lays down that all the tendencies to which any creature is predisposed by its nature must in the end be developed perfectly and agreeably to their final purpose. Those predispositions in man which serve the use of his reason are therefore destined to be fully developed. This destiny, however, cannot be realised in the individual; it can only be realised in the species. For reason works tentatively, by progress and regress. Each man would require an inordinate length of time to make a perfect use of his natural tendencies. Therefore, as life is short, an incalculable series of generations is needed.

The means which nature employs to develop these tendencies is the antagonism which in man's social state exists between his gregarious and his antigregarious tendencies. His antigregarious nature expresses itself in the desire to force all things to comply to his own humour. Hence ambition, love of honour, avarice. These were necessary to raise mankind from the savage to the civilised state. But for these antisocial propensities men would be gentle as sheep, and "an Arcadian life would arise, of perfect harmony and mutual love, such as must suffocate and stifle all talents in their very germs." Nature, knowing better than man what is good for the species, ordains discord. She is to be thanked for competition and enmity, and for the thirst of power and wealth. For without these the final purpose of realising man's rational nature would remain unfulfilled. This is Kant's answer to Rousseau.

The full realisation of man's rational nature is possible only in a "universal civil society" founded on political justice. The establishment of such a society is the highest problem for the human species. Kant contemplates, as the political goal, a confederation of states in which the utmost possible freedom shall be united with the most rigorous determination of the boundaries of freedom.

Is it reasonable to suppose that a universal or cosmopolitical society of this kind will come into being; and if so, how will it be brought about? Political changes in the relations of states are generally produced by war. Wars are tentative endeavours to bring about new relations and to form new political bodies. Are combinations and recombinations to continue until by pure chance some rational self-supporting system emerges? Or is it possible that no such condition of society may ever arrive, and that ultimately all progress may be overwhelmed by a hell of evils? Or, finally, is Nature pursuing her regular course of raising the species by its own spontaneous efforts and developing, in the apparently wild succession of events, man's originally implanted tendencies?

Kant accepts the last alternative on the ground that it is not reasonable to assume a final purpose in particular natural processes and at the same time to assume that there is no final purpose in the whole. Thus his theory of Progress depends on the hypothesis of final causes.

It follows that to trace the history of mankind is equivalent to unravelling a hidden plan of Nature for accomplishing a perfect civil constitution for a universal society; since a universal society is the sole state in which the tendencies of human nature can be fully developed. We cannot determine the orbit of the development, because the whole period is so vast and only a small fraction is known to us, but this is enough to show that there is a definite course.

Kant thinks that such a "cosmopolitical" history, as he calls it, is possible, and that if it were written it would give us a clew opening up "a consolatory prospect into futurity, in which at a remote distance we shall discover the human species seated upon an eminence won by infinite toil, where all the germs are unfolded which nature has implanted and its own destination upon this earth accomplished."

3.

But to see the full bearing of Kant's discussion we must understand its connection with his ethics. For his ethical theory is the foundation and the motive of his speculation on Progress. The progress on which he lays stress is moral amelioration; he refers little to scientific or material progress. For him morality was an absolute obligation founded in the nature of reason. Such an obligation presupposes an end to be attained, and this end is a reign of reason under which all men obeying the moral law mutually treat each other as ends in themselves. Such an ideal state must be regarded as possible, because it is a necessary postulate of reason. From this point of view it may be seen that Kant's speculation on universal history is really a discussion whether the ideal state, which is required as a subjective postulate in the interest of ethics, is likely to be realised objectively.

Now, Kant does not assert that because our moral reason must assume the possibility of this hypothetical goal civilisation is therefore moving towards it. That would be a fallacy into which he was incapable of falling. Civilisation is a phenomenon, and anything we know about it can only be inferred from experience. His argument is that there are actual indications of progress in this desirable direction. He pointed to the contemporary growth of civil liberty and religious liberty, and these are conditions of moral improvement. So far his argument coincides in principle with that of French theorists of Progress. But Kant goes on to apply to these data the debatable conception of final causes, and to infer a purpose in the development of humanity. Only this inference is put forward as a hypothesis, not as a dogma.

It is probable that what hindered Kant from broaching his theory of Progress with as much confidence as Condorcet was his perception that nothing could be decisively affirmed about the course of civilisation until the laws of its movement had been discovered. He saw that this was a matter for scientific investigation. He says expressly that the laws are not yet known, and suggests that some future genius may do for social phenomena what Kepler and Newton did for the heavenly bodies. As we shall see, this is precisely what some of the leading French thinkers of the next generation will attempt to do.

But cautiously though he framed the hypothesis Kant evidently considered Progress probable. He recognised that the most difficult obstacle to the moral advance of man lies in war and the burdens which the possibility of war imposes. And he spent much thought on the means by which war might be abolished. He published a philosophical essay on Perpetual Peace, in which he formulated the articles of an international treaty to secure the disappearance of war. He considered that, while a universal republic would be the positive ideal, we shall probably have to be contented with what he calls a negative substitute, consisting in a federation of peoples bound by a peace-alliance guaranteeing the independence of each member. But to assure the permanence of this system it is essential that each state should have a democratic constitution. For such a constitution is based on individual liberty and civil equality. All these changes should be brought about by legal reforms; revolutions—he was writing in 1795—-cannot be justified.

We see the influence of Rousseau's Social Contract and that of the Abbe de Saint-Pierre, with whose works Kant was acquainted. There can be little doubt that it was the influence of French thought, so powerful in Germany at this period, that turned Kant's mind towards these speculations, which belong to the latest period of his life and form a sort of appendix to his philosophical system. The theory of Progress, the idea of universal reform, the doctrine of political equality—Kant examined all these conceptions and appropriated them to the service of his own highly metaphysical theory of ethics. In this new association their spirit was changed.

In France, as we saw, the theory of Progress was generally associated with ethical views which could find a metaphysical basis in the sensationalism of Locke. A moral system which might be built on sensation, as the primary mental fact, was worked out by Helvetius. But the principle that the supreme law of conduct is to obey nature had come down as a practical philosophy from Rabelais and Montaigne through Moliere to the eighteenth century. It was reinforced by the theory of the natural goodness of man. Jansenism had struggled against it and was defeated. After theology it was the turn of metaphysics. Kant's moral imperative marked the next stage in the conflict of the two opposite tendencies which seek natural and ultra-natural sanctions for morality.

Hence the idea of progress had a different significance for Kant and for its French exponents, though his particular view of the future possibly in store for the human species coincided in some essential points with theirs. But his theory of life gives a different atmosphere to the idea. In France the atmosphere is emphatically eudaemonic; happiness is the goal. Kant is an uncompromising opponent of eudaemonism. "If we take enjoyment or happiness as the measure, it is easy," he says, "to evaluate life. Its value is less than nothing. For who would begin one's life again in the same conditions, or even in new natural conditions, if one could choose them oneself, but of which enjoyment would be the sole end?"

There was, in fact, a strongly-marked vein of pessimism in Kant. One of the ablest men of the younger generation who were brought up on his system founded the philosophical pessimism—very different in range and depth from the sentimental pessimism of Rousseau—which was to play a remarkable part in German thought in the nineteenth century. [Footnote: Kant's pessimism has been studied at length by von Hartmann, in Zur Geschichte und Begrundung des Pessimismus (1880).] Schopenhauer's unpleasant conclusion that of all conceivable worlds this is the worst, is one of the speculations for which Kant may be held ultimately responsible. [Footnote: Schopenhauer recognised progress social, economic, and political, but as a fact that contains no guarantee of happiness; on the contrary, the development of the intelligence increases suffering. He ridiculed the optimistic ideals of comfortable, well-regulated states. His views on historical development have been collected by G. Sparlinsky, Schopenhauers Verhaltnis zur Geschichte, in Berner Studien s. Philosophie, Bd. lxxii. (1910).]

4.

Kant's considerations on historical development are an appendix to his philosophy; they are not a necessary part, wrought into the woof of his system. It was otherwise with his successors the Idealists, for whom his system was the point of departure, though they rejected its essential feature, the limitation of human thought. With Fichte and Hegel progressive development was directly deduced from their principles. If their particular interpretations of history have no permanent value, it is significant that, in their ambitious attempts to explain the universe a priori, history was conceived as progressive, and their philosophies did much to reinforce a conception which on very different principles was making its way in the world. But the progress which their systems involved was not bound up with the interest of human happiness, but stood out as a fact which, whether agreeable or not, is a consequence of the nature of thought.

The process of the universe, as it appeared to Fichte, [Footnote: Fichte's philosophy of history will be found in Die Grundzuge des gegenwartigen Zeitalters (1806), lectures which he delivered at Berlin in 1804-5.] tends to a full realisation of "freedom"; that is its end and goal, but a goal that always recedes. It can never be reached; for its full attainment would mean the complete suppression of Nature. The process of the world, therefore, consists in an indefinite approximation to an unattainable ideal: freedom is being perpetually realised more and more; and the world, as it ascends in this direction, becomes more and more a realm of reason.

What Fichte means by freedom may be best explained by its opposition to instinct. A man acting instinctively may be acting quite reasonably, in a way which any one fully conscious of all the implications and consequences of the action would judge to be reasonable. But in order that his actions should be free he must himself be fully conscious of all those implications and consequences.

It follows that the end of mankind upon earth is to reach a state in which all the relations of life shall be ordered according to reason, not instinctively but with full consciousness and deliberate purpose. This end should govern the ethical rules of conduct, and it determines the necessary stages of history.

It gives us at once two main periods, the earliest and the latest: the earliest, in which men act reasonably by instinct, and the latest, in which they are conscious of reason and try to realise it fully. But before reaching this final stage they must pass through an epoch in which reason is conscious of itself, but not regnant. And to reach this they must have emancipated themselves from instinct, and this process of emancipation means a fourth epoch. But they could not have wanted to emancipate themselves unless they had felt instinct as a servitude imposed by an external authority, and therefore we have to distinguish yet another epoch wherein reason is expressed in authoritarian institutions to which men blindly submit. In this way Fichte deduces five historical epochs: two in which progress is blind, two in which it is free, and an intermediate in which it is struggling to consciousness. [Footnote: First Epoch: that of instinctive reason; the age of innocence. Second: that of authoritarian reason. Third: that of enfranchisement; the age of scepticism and unregulated liberty. Fourth: that of conscious reason, as science. Fifth: that of regnant reason, as art.] But there are no locked gates between these periods; they overlap and mingle; each may have some of the characteristics of another; and in each there is a vanguard leading the way and a rearguard lagging behind.

At present (1804) we are in the third age; we have broken with authority, but do not yet possess a clear and disciplined knowledge of reason. [Footnote: Three years later, however, Fichte maintained in his patriotic Discourses to the German Nation (1807) that in 1804 man had crossed the threshold of the fourth epoch. He asserted that the progress of "culture" and science will depend henceforward chiefly on Germany.] Fichte has deduced this scheme purely a priori without any reference to actual experience. "The philosopher," he says, "follows the a priori thread of the world-plan which is clear to him without any history; and if he makes use of history, it is not to prove anything, since his theses are already proved independently of all history."

Historical development is thus presented as a necessary progress towards a goal which is known but cannot be reached. And this fact as to the destiny of the race constitutes the basis of morality, of which the fundamental law is to act in such a way as to promote the free realisation of reason upon earth. It has been claimed by a recent critic that Fichte was the first modern philosopher to humanise morals. He completely rejected the individualistic conception which underlay Kantian as well as Christian ethics. He asserted that the true motive of morality is not the salvation of the individual man but the Progress of humanity. In fact, with Fichte Progress is the principle of ethics. That the Christian ideal of ascetic saintliness detached from society has no moral value is a plain corollary from the idea of earthly Progress. [Footnote: X. Leon, La Philosophie de Fichte (1902), pp. 477-9.]

One other point in Fichte's survey of history deserves notice—the social role of the savant. It is the function of the savant to discover the truths which are a condition of moral progress; he may be said to incarnate reason in the world. We shall see how this idea played a prominent part in the social schemes of Saint-Simon and Comte. [Footnote: Fichte, Ueber die Bestimmung des Gelehrten (1794).]

5.

Hegel's philosophy of history is better known than Fichte's. Like Fichte, he deduced the phases a priori from his metaphysical principles, but he condescended to review in some detail the actual phenomena. He conceived the final cause of the world as Spirit's consciousness of its own freedom. The ambiguous term "freedom" is virtually equivalent to self-consciousness, and Hegel defines Universal History as the description of the process by which Spirit or God comes to the consciousness of its own meaning. This freedom does not mean that Spirit could choose at any moment to develop in a different way; its actual development is necessary and is the embodiment of reason. Freedom consists in fully recognising the fact.

Of the particular features which distinguish Hegel's treatment, the first is that he identifies "history" with political history, the development of the state. Art, religion, philosophy, the creations of social man, belong to a different and higher stage of Spirit's self-revelation. [Footnote: The three phases of Spirit are (1) subjective; (2) objective; (3) absolute. Psychology, e.g., is included in (1), law and history in (2), religion in (3).] In the second place, Hegel ignores the primitive prehistoric ages of man, and sets the beginning of his development in the fully-grown civilisation of China. He conceives the Spirit as continually moving from one nation to another in order to realise the successive stages of its self-consciousness: from China to India, from India to the kingdoms of Western Asia; then from the Orient to Greece, then to Rome, and finally to the Germanic world. In the East men knew only that ONE is free, the political characteristic was despotism; in Greece and Rome they knew that SOME are free, and the political forms were aristocracy and democracy; in the modern world they know that ALL are free, and the political form is monarchy. The first period, he compared to childhood, the second to youth (Greece) and manhood (Rome), the third to old age, old but not feeble. The third, which includes the medieval and modern history of Europe, designated by Hegel as the Germanic world—for "the German spirit is the spirit of the modern world"—is also the final period. In it God realises his freedom completely in history, just as in Hegel's own absolute philosophy, which is final, God has completely understood his own nature.