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

7.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8.

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

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

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

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

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



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

1.

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

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

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

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

2.

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

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

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

3.

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

He tells us that all his speculations and controversial activities are penetrated with the idea of Progress, which he described as "the railway of liberty"; and his radical criticism on current social theories, whether conservative or democratic, was that they did not take Progress seriously though they invoked it.

"What dominates in all my studies, what forms their beginning and end, their summit and their base, their reason, what makes my originality as a thinker (if I have any), is that I affirm Progress resolutely, irrevocably, and everywhere, and deny the Absolute. All that I have ever written, all I have denied or affirmed, I have written, denied or affirmed in the name of one unique idea, Progress. My adversaries, on the other hand, are all partisans of the Absolute, IN OMNI GENERE, CASU, ET NUMERO, to use the phrase of Sganarelle." [Footnote: Philosophie du progres, Premiere lettre (1851).]

4.

A vague confidence in Progress had lain behind and encouraged the revolution of 1789, but in the revolution of 1848 the idea was definitely enthroned as the regnant principle. It presided over the session of the Committee which drew up the Constitution of the second Republic. Armand Marrast, the most important of the men who framed that document, based the measure of universal suffrage upon "the invisible law which rules societies," the law of progress which has been so long denied but which is rooted in the nature of man. His argument was this: Revolutions are due to the repression of progress, and are the expression and triumph of a progress which has been achieved. But such convulsions are an undesirable method of progressing; how can they be avoided? Only by organising elastic institutions in which new ideas of amelioration can easily be incorporated, and laws which can be accommodated without struggle or friction to the rise of new opinions. What is needed is a flexible government open to the penetration of ideas, and the key to such a government is universal suffrage.

[Footnote: Marrast, "the invisible law"; "Oui," he continues, "toute societe est progressive, parce que tout individu est educable, perfectible; on peut mesurer, limiter, peut-etre les facultes d'un individu; on ne saurait limiter, mesurer ce que peuvent, dans l'ordre des idees, les intelligences dont les produits ne s'ajoutent pas seulement mais se fecondent et se multiplient dans une progression indefinie." No. 393 Republique francoise. Assemblee nationale. Projet de Constitution... precede par un rapport fait au nom de la Commission par le citoyen Armand Marrast. Seance du 30 aout, 1848.]

Universal suffrage was practical politics, but the success of the revolution fluttered agreeably all the mansions of Utopia, and social reformers of every type sought to improve the occasion. In the history of the political struggles of 1848 the names are written of Proudhon, of Victor Considerant the disciple of Fourier, of Pierre Leroux the humanitarian communist, and his devoted pupil George Sand. The chief title of Leroux to be remembered is just his influence over the soul of the great novelist. Her later romances are pervaded by ideas derived from his teaching. His communism was vague and ineffectual, but he was one of the minor forces in the thought of the period, and there are some features in his theory which deserve to be pointed out.

Leroux had begun as a member of the Saint-Simonian school, but he diverged into a path of his own. He reinstated the ideal of equality which Saint-Simon rejected, and made the approach to that ideal the measure of Progress. The most significant process in history, he held, is the gradual breaking down of caste and class: the process is now approaching its completion; "today MAN is synonymous with EQUAL."

In order to advance to the city of the future we must have a force and a lever. Man is the force, and the lever is the idea of Progress. It is supplied by the study of history which displays the improvement of our faculties, the increase of our power over nature, the possibility of organising society more efficaciously. But the force and the lever are not enough. A fulcrum is also required, and this is to be found in the "solidarity" of the human race. But this conception meant for Leroux something different from what is ordinarily meant by the phrase, a deeper and even mystical bond. Human "solidarity" was a corollary from the pantheistic religion of the Saint-Simonians, but with Leroux, as with Fourier, it was derived from the more difficult doctrine of palingenesis. We of this generation, he believed, are not merely the sons and descendants of past generations, we are the past generations themselves, which have come to birth again in us.

Through many pages of the two volumes [Footnote: De l'humanite, 1840 (dedicated to Beranger).] in which he set forth his thesis, Leroux expended much useless learning in endeavouring to establish this doctrine, which, were it true, might be the central principle in a new religion of humanity, a transformed Pythagoreanism. It is easy to understand the attractiveness of palingenesis to a believer in Progress: for it would provide a solution of the anomaly that generations after generations are sacrificed for the sake of posterity, and so appear to have no value in themselves. Believers in Progress, who are sensitive to the sufferings of mankind, past and present, need a stoical resolution to face this fact. We saw how Herder refused to accept it. A pantheistic faith, like that of the Saint-Simonian Church, may help some, it cannot do more, to a stoical acquiescence. The palingenesis of Leroux or Fourier removes the radical injustice. The men of each generation are sacrificed and suffer for the sake of their descendants, but as their descendants are themselves come to life again, they are really suffering in their own interests. They will themselves reach the desirable state to which the slow, painful process of history is tending.

But palingenesis, notwithstanding all the ancient opinions and traditions that the researches of Leroux might muster, could carry little conviction to those who were ceasing to believe in the familiar doctrine of a future life detached from earth, and Madame Dudevant was his only distinguished convert.

5.

The ascendency of the idea of Progress among thoughtful people in France in the middle of the last century is illustrated by the work which Ernest Renan composed under the immediate impression of the events of 1848. He desired to understand the significance of the current revolutionary doctrines, and was at once involved in speculation on the future of humanity. This is the purport of L'AVENIR DE LA SCIENCE. [Footnote: L'Avenir de la science—Pensees de (1848). Published in 1890.]

[Footnote: The ascendency of the idea of Progress at this epoch may be further illustrated by E. Pelletan's Profession de foi du dix-neuvieme siecle, 1852 (4th ed., 1857), where Progress is described as the general law of the universe; and by Jean Reynaud's Philosophie religieuse: Terre et ciel (3rd ed., 1858), a religious but not orthodox book, which acclaims the "sovran principle of perfectibility" (cp. p. 138). I may refer also to the rhetorical pages of E. Vacherot on the Doctrine du progres, printed (as part of an essay on the Philosophy of History) in his Essais de philosophie critique (1864).]

The author was then convinced that history has a goal, and that mankind tends perpetually, though in an oscillating line, towards a more perfect state, through the growing dominion of reason over instinct and caprice. He takes the French Revolution as the critical moment in which humanity first came to know itself. That revolution was the first attempt of man to take the reins into his own hands. All that went before we may call, with Owen, the irrational period of human existence.

We have now come to a point at which we must choose between two faiths. If we despair of reason, we may find a refuge from utter scepticism in a belief in the external authority of the Roman Church. If we trust reason, we must accept the march of the human mind and justify the modern spirit. And it can be justified only by proving that it is a necessary step towards perfection. Renan affirmed his belief in the second alternative, and felt confident that science—including philology, on the human bearings of which he enlarged,—philosophy, and art would ultimately enable men to realise an ideal civilisation, in which all would be equal. The state, he said, is the machine of Progress, and the Socialists are right in formulating the problem which man has to solve, though their solution is a bad one. For individual liberty, which socialism would seriously limit, is a definite conquest, and ought to be preserved inviolate.

Renan wrote this work in 1848 and 1849, but did not publish it at the time. He gave it to the world forty years later. Those forty years had robbed him of his early optimism. He continues to believe that the unfortunate conditions of our race might be ameliorated by science, but he denounces the view that men can ever be equal. Inequality is written in nature; it is not only a necessary consequence of liberty, but a necessary postulate of Progress. There will always be a superior minority. He criticises himself too for having fallen into the error of Hegel, and assigned to man an unduly important place in the universe.

[Footnote: Renan, speaking of the Socialists, paid a high tribute to Bazard (L'Avenir de la science, p. 104). On the other hand, he criticised Comte severely (p. 149).

Renan returned to speculation on the future in 1863, in a letter to M. Marcellin-Berthelot (published in Dialogues et fragments philosophiques, 1876): "Que sera Ie monde quand un million de fois se sera reproduit ce qui s'est passe depuis 1763 quand la chimie, au lieu de quatre-vingt ans de progres, en aura cent millions?" (p. 183). And again in the Dialogues written in 1871 (ib.), where it is laid down that the end of humanity is to produce great men: "le grand oeuvre s'accomplira par la science, non par la democratic. Rien sans grands hommes; le salut se fera par des grands hommes" (p. 103).]

In 1890 there was nothing left of the sentimental socialism which he had studied in 1848; it had been blown away by the cold wind of scientific socialism which Marx and Engels created. And Renan had come to think that in this new form socialism would triumph. [Footnote: He reckoned without the new forces, opposed to socialism as well as to parliamentary democracy, represented by Bakunin and men like Georges Sorel.] He had criticised Comte for believing that "man lives exclusively by science, or rather little verbal tags, like geometrical theorems, dry formulae." Was he satisfied by the concrete doctrine of Marx that all the phenomena of civilisation at a given period are determined by the methods of production and distribution which then prevail? But the future of socialism is a minor issue, and the ultimate goal of humanity is quite uncertain. "Ce qu'il y a de consolant, c'est qu'on arrive necessairement quelque part." We may console ourselves with the certainty that we must get somewhere.

6.

Proudhon described the idea of Progress as the railway of liberty. It certainly supplied motive power to social ideals which were repugnant and alarming to the authorities of the Catholic Church. At the Vatican it was clearly seen that the idea was a powerful engine driven by an enemy; and in the famous SYLLABUS of errors which Pope Pius IX. flung in the face of the modern world at the end of 1864, Progress had the honour of being censured. The eightieth error, which closes the list, runs thus:

Romanus Pontifex potest ac debet cum progressu, cum liberalismo et cum recenti civilitate sese reconciliare et componere.

"The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, be reconciled and come to terms with progress, with liberalism, and with modern civilisation."

No wonder, seeing that Progress was invoked to justify every movement that offended the nostrils of the Vatican—liberalism, toleration, democracy, and socialism. And the Roman Church well understood the intimate connection of the idea with the advance of rationalism.



CHAPTER XVIII. MATERIAL PROGRESS: THE EXHIBITION OF 1851

1.

It is not easy for a new idea of the speculative order to penetrate and inform the general consciousness of a community until it has assumed some external and concrete embodiment or is recommended by some striking material evidence. In the case of Progress both these conditions were fulfilled in the period 1820 to 1850. In the Saint-Simonian Church, and in the attempts of Owen and Cabet to found ideal societies, people saw practical enterprises inspired by the idea. They might have no sympathy with these enterprises, but their attention was attracted. And at the same time they were witnessing a rapid transformation of the external conditions of life, a movement to the continuation of which there seemed no reason for setting any limit in the future. The spectacular results of the advance of science and mechanical technique brought home to the mind of the average man the conception of an indefinite increase of man's power over nature as his brain penetrated her secrets. This evident material progress which has continued incessantly ever since has been a mainstay of the general belief in Progress which is prevalent to-day.

England was the leader in this material progress, of which the particulars are familiar and need not be enumerated here. The discovery of the power of steam and the potentialities of coal revolutionised the conditions of life. Men who were born at the beginning of the century had seen, before they had passed the age of thirty, the rapid development of steam navigation, the illumination of towns and houses by gas, the opening of the first railway.

It was just before this event, the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester railway, which showed how machinery would abbreviate space as it had SIR THOMAS MORE, OR COLLOQUIES ON THE PROGRESS OF SOCIETY (1829). There we see the effect of the new force on his imagination. "Steam," he says, "will govern the world next,... and shake it too before its empire is established." The biographer of Nelson devotes a whole conversation to the subject of "steam and war." But the theme of the book is the question of moral and social progress, on which the author inclines to the view that "the world will continue to improve, even as it has hitherto been continually improving; and that the progress of knowledge and the diffusion of Christianity will bring about at last, when men become Christian in reality as well as in name, something like that Utopian state of which philosophers have loved to dream." This admission of Progress, cautious though it was, circumscribed by reserves and compromised by hesitations, coming from such a conservative pillar of Church and State as Southey, is a notable sign of the times, when we remember that the idea was still associated then with revolution and heresy.

It is significant too that at the same time an octogenarian mathematician of Aberdeen was composing a book on the same subject. Hamilton's PROGRESS OF SOCIETY is now utterly forgotten, but it must have contributed in its day to propagating the same moderate view of Progress, consistent with orthodoxy, which Southey held. "The belief of the perfectibility of human nature and the attainment of a golden age in which vice and misery have no place, will only be entertained by an enthusiast; but an inquiry into the means of improving our nature and enlarging our happiness is consistent with sober reason, and is the most important subject, merely human, that can engage the mind of man." [Footnote: P. 13. The book was published posthumously by Murray in 1830, a year after the author's death.] [Footnote: "Progress of Society." The phrase was becoming common; e.g. Russell's History of Modern Europe (1822) has the sub-title A view of the Progress of Society, etc. The didactic poem of Payne Knight, The Progress of Civil Society (1796), a very dull performance, was quite unaffected by the dreams of Priestley or Godwin. It was towards the middle of the nineteenth century that Progress, without any qualifying phrase, came into use.]

2.

We have been told by Tennyson that when he went by the first train from Liverpool to Manchester (1830) he thought that the wheels ran in grooves.

"Then I made this line:

Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change." [Footnote: See Tennyson, Memoir by his Son, vol. i. p. 195.]

LOCKSLEY HALL, which was published in 1842, illustrates how the idea of Progress had begun to creep into the imagination of Englishmen. Though subsidiary to a love story, it is the true theme of the poem. The pulsation of eager interest in the terrestrial destinies of humanity, the large excitement of living in a "wondrous Mother-age," dreams of the future, quicken the passion of the hero's youth. His disappointment in love disenchants him; he sees the reverse side of civilisation, but at last he finds an anodyne for his palsied heart in a more sober version of his earlier faith, a chastened belief in his Mother-age. He can at least discern an increasing purpose in history, and can be sure that "the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns." The novelty of the poem lay in finding a cathartic cure for a private sorrow, not in religion or in nature, but in the modern idea of Progress. It may be said to mark a stage in the career of the idea.

The view of civilisation which Tennyson took as his MOTIF had no revolutionary implications, suggested no impatience or anger with the past. The startling prospect unfolding itself before "the long result of time," and history is justified by the promise of to-day:

The centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed.

Very different was the spirit in which another great poet composed, nearly twenty years later, a wonderful hymn of Progress. Victor Hugo's PLEIN CEIL, in his epic LA LEGENDE DES SIECLES,[Footnote: A.D. 1859.] announces a new era of the world in which man, the triumphant rebel, delivered from his past, will move freely forward on a glorious way. The poet is inspired not by faith in a continuous development throughout the ages, but by the old spirit of the Revolution, and he sees in the past only a heavy chain which the race at last flings off. The horrible past has gone, not to return: "ce monde est mort"; and the poem is at once a paean on man's victorious rebellion against it and a dithyramb on the prospect of his future.

Man is imagined as driving through the heavens an aerial car to which the four winds are harnessed, mounting above the clouds, and threatening to traverse the ether.

Superbe, il plane, avec un hymne en ses agres; Et l'on voit voir passer la strophe du progres. Il est la nef, il est le phare! L'homme enfin prend son sceptre et jette son baton. Et l'on voit s'envoler le calcul de Newton Monte sur l'ode de Pindare.

But if this vision foreshadows the conquest of the air, its significance is symbolic rather than literal, and, like Pindar checking the steeds of his song, Hugo returns to earth:

Pas si loin! pas si haut! redescendons. Restons L'homme, restons Adam; mais non l'homme a tatons, Mais non l'Adam tombe! Tout autre reve altere L'espece d'ideal qui convient a la terre. Contentons-nous du mot: meilleur! ecrit partout.

Dawn has appeared, after six thousand years in the fatal way, and man, freed by "the invisible hand" from the weight of his chains, has embarked for new shores:

Ou va-t-il ce navire? II va, de jour vetu, A l'avenir divin et pur, a la vertu, A la science qu'on voit luire, A la mort des fleaux, a l'oubli genereux, A l'abondance, au caime, au rire, a l'homme heureux, Il va, ce glorieux navire.

Oh! ce navire fait le voyage sacre! C'est l'ascension bleue a son premier degre; Hors de l'antique et vil decombre, Hors de la pesanteur, c'est l'avenir fonde; C'est le destin de l'homme a la fin evade, Qui leve l'ancre et sort de l'ombre!

The union of humanity in a universal commonwealth, which Tennyson had expressed as "the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World," the goal of many theorists of Progress, becomes in Hugo's imagination something more sublime. The magic ship of man's destiny is to compass the cosmopolis of the Stoics, a terrestrial order in harmony with the whole universe.

Nef magique et supreme! elle a, rien qu'eri marchant, Change le cri terrestre en pur et joyeux chant, Rajeuni les races fletries, Etabli l'ordre vrai, montre le chemin sur, Dieu juste! et fait entrer dans l'homme tant d'azur Qu'elle a supprime les patries!

Faisant a l'homme avec le ciel une cite, Une pensee avec toute l'immensite, Elle abolit les vieilles regles; Elle abaisse les monts, elle annule les tours; Splendide, elle introduit les peuples, marcheurs lourds, Dans la communion des aigles.

3.

Between 1830 and 1850 railway transport spread throughout Great Britain and was introduced on the Continent, and electricity was subdued to man's use by the invention of telegraphy. The great Exhibition of London in 1851 was, in one of its aspects, a public recognition of the material progress of the age and the growing power of man over the physical world. Its aim, said a contemporary, was "to seize the living scroll of human progress, inscribed with every successive conquest of man's intellect."[Footnote: Edinburgh Review (October 1851), p. 562, in a review of the Official Catalogue of the Exhibition.] The Prince Consort, who originated the Exhibition, explained its significance in a public speech:

"Nobody who has paid any attention to the peculiar features of our present era will doubt for a moment that we are living at a period of most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end to which indeed all history points—THE REALISATION OF THE UNITY OF MANKIND.... The distances which separated the different nations and parts of the globe are rapidly vanishing before the achievements of modern invention, and we can traverse them with incredible ease; the languages of all nations are known, and their acquirements placed within the reach of everybody; thought is communicated with the rapidity, and even by the power, of lightning. On the other hand, the GREAT PRINCIPLE OF DIVISION OF LABOUR, which may be called the moving power of civilisation, is being extended to all branches of science, industry, and art... Gentlemen, the Exhibition of 1851 is to give us a true test and a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived in this great task, and a new starting-point from which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions." [Footnote: Martin, Life of the Prince Consort (ed. 3), iii. p. 247. The speech was delivered at a banquet at the Mansion House on March 21, 1850.]

The point emphasised here is the "solidarity" of the world. The Exhibition is to bring home to men's consciousness the community of all the inhabitants of the earth. The assembled peoples, wrote Thackeray, in his "May-day Ode," [Footnote: Published in the Times, April 30, 1851. The Exhibition was opened on May I.] See the sumptuous banquet set, The brotherhood of nations met Around the feast.

And this was the note struck in the leading article of the Times on the opening day: "The first morning since the creation that all peoples have assembled from all parts of the world and done a common act." It was claimed that the Exhibition signified a new, intelligent, and moral movement which "marks a great crisis in the history of the world," and foreshadows universal peace.

England, said another writer, produced Bacon and Newton, the two philosophers "who first lent direction and force to the stream of industrial science; we have been the first also to give the widest possible base to the watch-tower of international progress, which seeks the formation of the physical well-being of man and the extinction of the meaner jealousies of commerce."[Footnote: Edinburgh Review, loc. cit.]

These quotations show that the great Exhibition was at the time optimistically regarded, not merely as a record of material achievements, but as a demonstration that humanity was at last well on its way to a better and happier state, through the falling of barriers and the resulting insight that the interests of all are closely interlocked. A vista was suggested, at the end of which far-sighted people might think they discerned Tennyson's "Federation of the World."

4.

Since the Exhibition, western civilisation has advanced steadily, and in some respects more rapidly than any sober mind could have predicted—civilisation, at least, in the conventional sense, which has been not badly defined as "the development of material ease, of education, of equality, and of aspirations to rise and succeed in life." [Footnote: B. Kidd, Social Evolution, p. 368.] The most striking advance has been in the technical conveniences of life—that is, in the control over natural forces. It would be superfluous to enumerate the discoveries and inventions since 1850 which have abridged space, economised time, eased bodily suffering, and reduced in some ways the friction of life, though they have increased it in others. This uninterrupted series of technical inventions, proceeding concurrently with immense enlargements of all branches of knowledge, has gradually accustomed the least speculative mind to the conception that civilisation is naturally progressive, and that continuous improvement is part of the order of things.

So far the hopes of 1851 have been fulfilled. But against all this technical progress, with the enormous expansion of industry and commerce, dazzling to the man in the market-place when he pauses to reflect, have to be set the exploitation and sufferings of industrial workers, the distress of intense economic competition, the heavier burdens of preparation for modern war. The very increase of "material ease" seemed unavoidably to involve conditions inconsistent with universal happiness; and the communications which linked the peoples of the world together modified the methods of warfare instead of bringing peace. "Toutes nos merveilleuses inventions sont aussi puissantes pour le mal que pour le bien." [Footnote: H. de Ferron, Theorie du progres (1867), ii. 439.] One fact indeed might be taken as an index that humanity was morally advancing—the abolition of slavery in America at the price of a long and sanguinary war. Yet some triumphs of philanthropy hardly seemed to endanger the conclusion that, while knowledge is indefinitely progressive, there is no good reason for sanguine hopes that man is "perfectible" or that universal happiness is attainable. A thoughtful writer observed, discussing Progress in 1864, that the innumerable individual steps in the growth of knowledge and business organisation have not been combined, so far, to produce a general advance in the happiness of life; each step brings increase of pressure. [Footnote: Lotze, Microcosmus (Eng. tr.), vol. ii. p. 396.]

Yet in spite of all adverse facts and many eminent dissenters the belief in social Progress has on the whole prevailed. This triumph of optimism was promoted by the victory of a revolutionary hypothesis in another field of inquiry, which suddenly electrified the world. [Footnote: Against Lotze we might set many opinions which do not seem to have been influenced by the doctrine of evolution. For instance, the optimism of M. Marcellin-Berthelot in a letter to Renan in 1863. He says (Renan, Dialogues, p. 233) that one of the general results of historical study is "the fact of the incessant progress of human societies in science, in material conditions, and in morality, three correlatives.... Societies become more and more civilised, and I will venture to say more and more virtuous. The sum of good is always increasing, and the sum of evil diminishing, in the same measure as the sum of truth increases and the sum of ignorance diminishes."

In 1867 Emerson delivered an address at Harvard on the "Progress of Culture" (printed in his Letters and Social Aims), in which he enumerates optimistically the indications of social advance: "the new scope of social science; the abolition of capital punishment and of imprisonment for debt: the improvement of prisons; the efforts for the suppression of intemperance, vice, etc.," and asks: "Who would live in the stone age, or the bronze, or the iron, or the lacustrine? Who does not prefer the age of steel, of gold, of coal, petroleum, cotton, steam, electricity, and the spectroscope?"

The discursive Thoughts on the Future of the Human Race, published in 1866, by W. Ellis (1800-81), a disciple of J. S. Mill, would have been remarkable if it had appeared half a century earlier. He is untouched by the theory of evolution, and argues on common-sense grounds that Progress is inevitable.]



CHAPTER XIX. PROGRESS IN THE LIGHT OF EVOLUTION

1.

In the sixties of the nineteenth century the idea of Progress entered upon the third period of its history. During the FIRST period, up to the French Revolution, it had been treated rather casually; it was taken for granted and received no searching examination either from philosophers or from historians. In the SECOND period its immense significance was apprehended, and a search began for a general law which would define and establish it. The study of sociology was founded, and at the same time the impressive results of science, applied to the conveniences of life, advertised the idea. It harmonised with the notion of "development" which had become current both in natural science and in metaphysics. Socialists and other political reformers appealed to it as a gospel.

By 1850 it was a familiar idea in Europe, but was not yet universally accepted as obviously true. The notion of social Progress had been growing in the atmosphere of the notion of biological development, but this development still seemed a highly precarious speculation. The fixity of species and the creation of man, defended by powerful interests and prejudices, were attacked but were not shaken. The hypothesis of organic evolution was much in the same position as the Copernican hypothesis in the sixteenth century. Then in 1859 Darwin intervened, like Galileo. The appearance of the ORIGIN OF SPECIES changed the situation by disproving definitely the dogma of fixity of species and assigning real causes for "transformism." What might be set aside before as a brilliant guess was elevated to the rank of a scientific hypothesis, and the following twenty years were enlivened by the struggle around the evolution of life, against prejudices chiefly theological, resulting in the victory of the theory.

The ORIGIN OF SPECIES led to the THIRD stage of the fortunes of the idea of Progress. We saw how the heliocentric astronomy, by dethroning man from his privileged position in the universe of space and throwing him back on his own efforts, had helped that idea to compete with the idea of a busy Providence. He now suffers a new degradation within the compass of his own planet. Evolution, shearing him of his glory as a rational being specially created to be the lord of the earth, traces a humble pedigree for him. And this second degradation was the decisive fact which has established the reign of the idea of Progress.

2.

Evolution itself, it must be remembered, does not necessarily mean, applied to society, the movement of man to a desirable goal. It is a neutral, scientific conception, compatible either with optimism or with pessimism. According to different estimates it may appear to be a cruel sentence or a guarantee of steady amelioration. And it has been actually interpreted in both ways.

In order to base Progress on Evolution two distinct arguments are required. If it could be shown that social life obeys the same general laws of evolution as nature, and also that the process involves an increase of happiness, then Progress would be as valid a hypothesis as the evolution of living forms. Darwin had concluded his treatise with these words:

As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Silurian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of equally inappreciable length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental environments will tend to progress towards perfection.

Here the evolutionist struck the note of optimism. And he suggested that laws of Progress would be found in other quarters than those where they had hitherto been sought.

The ablest and most influential development of the argument from evolution to Progress was the work of Spencer. He extended the principle of evolution to sociology and ethics, and was the most conspicuous interpreter of it in an optimistic sense. He had been an evolutionist long before Darwin's decisive intervention, and in 1851 he had published his Social Statics, which, although he had not yet worked out the evolutionary laws which he began to formulate soon afterwards and was still a theist, exhibits the general trend of his optimistic philosophy. Progress here appears as the basis of a theory of ethics. The title indicates the influence of Comte, but the argument is sharply opposed to the spirit of Comte's teaching, and sociology is treated in a new way. [Footnote: Social Statics, or the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness specified, and the first of them developed, is the full title.]

Spencer begins by arguing that the constancy of human nature, so frequently alleged, is a fallacy. For change is the law of all things, of every single object as well as of the universe. "Nature in its infinite complexity is ever growing to a new development." It would be strange if, in this universal mutation, man alone were unchangeable, and it is not true. "He also obeys the law of indefinite variation." Contrast the houseless savages with Newtons and Shakespeares; between these extremes there are countless degrees of difference. If then humanity is indefinitely variable, perfectibility is possible.

In the second place, evil is not a permanent necessity. For all evil results from the non-adaptation of the organism to its conditions; this is true of everything that lives. And it is equally true that evil perpetually tends to disappear. In virtue of an essential principle of life, this non-adaptation of organisms to their conditions is ever being rectified, and one or both continue to be modified until the adaptation is perfect. And this applies to the mental as well as to the physical sphere.

In the present state of the world men suffer many evils, and this shows that their characters are not yet adjusted to the social state. Now the qualification requisite for the social state is that each individual shall have such desires only as may fully be satisfied without trenching upon the ability of others to obtain similar satisfaction. This qualification is not yet fulfilled, because civilised man retains some of the characteristics which were suitable for the conditions of his earlier predatory life. He needed one moral constitution for his primitive state, he needs quite another for his present state. The resultant is a process of adaptation which has been going on for a long time, and will go on for a long time to come.

Civilisation represents the adaptations which have already been accomplished. Progress means the successive steps of the process. That by this process man will eventually become suited to his mode of life, Spencer has no doubts. All excess and deficiency of suitable faculties must disappear; in other words, all imperfection. "The ultimate development of the ideal man is logically certain—as certain as any conclusion in which we place the most implicit faith; for instance, that all men will die." Here is the theory of perfectibility asserted, on new grounds, with a confidence not less assured than that of Condorcet or Godwin.

Progress then is not an accident, but a necessity. Civilisation is a part of nature, being a development of man's latent capabilities under the action of favourable circumstances which were certain at some time or other to occur. Here Spencer's argument assumes a final cause. The ultimate purpose of creation, he asserts, is to produce the greatest amount of happiness, and to fulfil this aim it is necessary that each member of the race should possess faculties enabling him to experience the highest enjoyment of life, yet in such a way as not to diminish the power of others to receive like satisfaction. Beings thus constituted cannot multiply in a world tenanted by inferior creatures; these, therefore, must be dispossessed to make room; and to dispossess them aboriginal man must have an inferior constitution to begin with; he must be predatory, he must have the desire to kill. In general, given an unsubdued earth, and the human being "appointed" to overspread and occupy it, then, the laws of life being what they are, no other series of changes than that which has actually occurred could have occurred.

The argument might be put in a form free from the assumption of a final cause, and without introducing the conception of a divine Providence which in this work Spencer adopted, though in his later philosophy it was superseded by the conception of the Unknowable existing behind all phenomena. But the ROLE of the Divine ruler is simply to set in motion immutable forces to realise his design. "In the moral as in the material world accumulated evidence is gradually generating the conviction that events are not at bottom fortuitous, but that they are wrought out in a certain inevitable way by unchanging forces."

The optimism of Spencer's view could not be surpassed. "After patient study," he writes, "this chaos of phenomena into the midst of which he [man] was born has begun to generalise itself to him"; instead of confusion he begins to discern "the dim outlines of a gigantic plan. No accidents, no chance, but everywhere order and completeness One by one exceptions vanish, and all becomes systematic."

Always towards perfection is the mighty movement—towards a complete development and a more unmixed good; subordinating in its universality all petty irregularities and fallings back, as the curvature of the earth subordinates mountains and valleys. Even in evils the student learns to recognise only a struggling beneficence. But above all he is struck with the inherent sufficingness of things.

But the movement towards harmony, the elimination of evil, will not be effected by idealists imposing their constructions upon the world or by authoritarian governments. It means gradual adaptation, gradual psychological change, and its life is individual liberty. It proceeds by the give and take of opposed opinions. Guizot had said, "Progress, and at the same time resistance." And Spencer conceives that resistance is beneficial, so long as it comes from those who honestly think that the institutions they defend are really the best and the proposed innovations absolutely wrong.

It will be observed that Spencer's doctrine of perfectibility rests on an entirely different basis from the doctrine of the eighteenth century. It is one thing to deduce it from an abstract psychology which holds that human nature is unresistingly plastic in the hands of the legislator and the instructor. It is another to argue that human nature is subject to the general law of change, and that the process by which it slowly but continuously tends to adapt itself more and more to the conditions of social life—children inheriting the acquired aptitudes of their parents—points to an ultimate harmony. Here profitable legislation and education are auxiliary to the process of unconscious adaptation, and respond to the psychological changes in the community, changes which reveal themselves in public opinion.

3.

During the following ten years Spencer was investigating the general laws of evolution and planning his Synthetic Philosophy which was to explain the development of the universe. [Footnote: In an article on "Progress: its Law and Cause," in the Westminster Review, April 1857, Spencer explained that social progress, rightly understood, is not the increase of material conveniences or widening freedom of action, but changes of structure in the social organism which entail such consequences, and proceeded to show that the growth of the individual organism and the growth of civilisation obey the same law of advance from homogeneity to heterogeneity of structure. Here he used progress in a neutral sense; but recognising that a word is required which has no teleological implications (Autobiography, i. 500), he adopted evolution six months later in an article on "Transcendental Physiology" (National Review, Oct. 1857). In his study of organic laws Spencer was indirectly influenced by the ideas of Schelling through von Baer.] He aimed at showing that laws of change are discoverable which control all phenomena alike, inorganic, biological, psychical, and social. In the light of this hypothesis the actual progression of humanity is established as a necessary fact, a sequel of the general cosmic movement and governed by the same principles; and, if that progression is shown to involve increasing happiness, the theory of Progress is established. The first section of the work, FIRST PRINCIPLES, appeared in 1862. The BIOLOGY, the PSYCHOLOGY, and finally the SOCIOLOGY, followed during the next twenty years; and the synthesis of the world-process which these volumes lucidly and persuasively developed, probably did more than any other work, at least in England, both to drive home the significance of the doctrine of evolution and to raise the doctrine of Progress to the rank of a commonplace truth in popular estimation, an axiom to which political rhetoric might effectively appeal.

Many of those who were allured by Spencer's gigantic synthesis hardly realised that his theory of social evolution, of the gradual psychical improvement of the race, depends upon the validity of the assumption that parents transmit to their children faculties and aptitudes which they have themselves acquired. On this question experts notoriously differ. Some day it will probably be definitely decided, and perhaps in Spencer's favour. But the theory of continuous psychical improvement by a process of nature encounters an obvious difficulty, which did not escape some critics of Spencer, in the prominent fact of history that every great civilisation of the past progressed to a point at which instead of advancing further it stood still and declined, to become the prey of younger societies, or, if it survived, to stagnate. Arrest, decadence, stagnation has been the rule. It is not easy to reconcile this phenomenon with the theory of mental improvement.

The receptive attitude of the public towards such a philosophy as Spencer's had been made possible by Darwin's discoveries, which were reinforced by the growing science of palaeontology and the accumulating material evidence of the great antiquity of man. By the simultaneous advances of geology and biology man's perspective in time was revolutionised, just as the Copernican astronomy had revolutionised his perspective in space. Many thoughtful and many thoughtless people were ready to discern—as Huxley suggested—in man's "long progress through the past, a reasonable ground of faith in his attainment of a nobler future." and Winwood Reade, a young African traveller, exhibited it in a vivid book as a long-drawn-out martyrdom. But he was a disciple of Spencer, and his hopes for the future were as bright as his picture of the past was dark. THE MARTYRDOM OF MAN, published in 1872, was so widely read that it reached an eighth edition twelve years later, and may be counted as one of the agencies which popularised Spencer's optimism.

That optimism was not endorsed by all the contemporary leaders of thought. Lotze had asserted emphatically in 1864 that "human nature will not change," and afterwards he saw no reason to alter his conviction.

Never one fold and one shepherd, never one uniform culture for all mankind, never universal nobleness. Our virtue and happiness can only flourish amid an active conflict with wrong. If every stumbling-block were smoothed away, men would no longer be like men, but like a flock of innocent brutes, feeding on good things provided by nature as at the very beginning of their course. [Footnote: Microcosmus, Bk. vii. 5 ad fin. (Eng. trans. p. 300). The first German edition (three vols.) appeared in 1856-64, the third, from which the English translation was made, in 1876. Lotze was optimistic as to the durability of modern civilisation: "No one will profess to foreknow the future, but as far as men may judge it seems that in our days there arc greater safeguards than there were in antiquity against unjustifiable excesses and against the external forces which might endanger the continued existence of civilisation."]

But even if we reject with Spencer the old dictum, endorsed by Lotze as by Fontenelle, that human nature is immutable, the dictum of ultimate harmony encounters the following objection. "If the social environment were stable," it is easy to argue, "it could be admitted that man's nature, variable EX HYPOTHESI, could gradually adapt itself to it, and that finally a definite equilibrium would be established. But the environment is continually changing as the consequence of man's very efforts to adapt himself; every step he takes to harmonise his needs and his conditions produces a new discord and confronts him with a new problem. In other words, there is no reason to believe that the reciprocal process which goes on in the growth of society between men's natures and the environment they are continually modifying will ever reach an equilibrium, or even that, as the character of the discords changes, the suffering which they cause diminishes."

In fact, upon the neutral fact of evolution a theory of pessimism may be built up as speciously as a theory of optimism. And such a theory was built up with great power and ability by the German philosopher E. von Hartmann, whose PHILOSOPHY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS appeared in 1869. Leaving aside his metaphysics and his grotesque theory of the destiny of the universe, we see here and in his subsequent works how plausibly a convinced evolutionist could revive the view of Rousseau that civilisation and happiness are mutually antagonistic, and that Progress means an increase of misery.

Huxley himself, [Footnote: See Agnosticism in Nineteenth Century (Feb. 1889); Government: Anarchy or Regimentation, ib. (May 1890); Essays on Evolution and Ethics (1894).] one of the most eminent interpreters of the doctrine of evolution, did not, in his late years at least, entertain very sanguine views of mankind. "I know of no study which is so saddening as that of the evolution of humanity as it is set forth in the annals of history.... Man is a brute, only more intelligent than other brutes"; and "even the best of modern civilisations appears to me to exhibit a condition of mankind which neither embodies any worthy ideal nor even possesses the merit of stability." There may be some hope of a large improvement, but otherwise he would "welcome a kindly comet to sweep the whole affair away." And he came to the final conclusion that such an improvement could only set in by deliberately resisting, instead of co-operating with, the processes of nature. "Social progress means the checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another which may be called the ethical process." [Footnote: Huxley considers progress exclusively from an ethical, not from an eudaemonic point of view.] How in a few centuries can man hope to gain the mastery over the cosmic process which has been at work for millions of years? "The theory of evolution encourages no millennial anticipations."

I have quoted these views to illustrate that evolution lends itself to a pessimistic as well as to an optimistic interpretation. The question whether it leads in a desirable direction or not is answered according to the temperament of the inquirer. In an age of prosperity and self-complacency the affirmative answer was readily received, and the term evolution attracted to itself in common speech the implications of value which belong to Progress.

It may be noticed that the self-complacency of the age was promoted by the popularisation of scientific knowledge. A rapidly growing demand (especially in England) for books and lectures, making the results of science accessible and interesting to the lay public, is a remarkable feature of the second half of the nineteenth century; and to supply this demand was a remunerative enterprise. This popular literature explaining the wonders of the physical world was at the same time subtly flushing the imaginations of men with the consciousness that they were living in an era which, in itself vastly superior to any age of the past, need be burdened by no fear of decline or catastrophe, but trusting in the boundless resources of science might securely defy fate.

4.

[It was said in 1881 by an American writer (who strongly dissented from Spencer's theory) that the current view was "fatalistic." See Henry George, Progress and Poverty. But it may be doubted whether those of the general public who optimistically accepted evolution without going very deeply into the question really believed that the future of man is taken entirely out of his hands and is determined exclusively by the nature of the cosmic process. Bagehot was a writer who had a good deal of influence in his day; and in Physics and Politics (1872), where he discusses Progress, there is no suggestion of fatalism. In France, the chief philosophical writers who accepted Progress as a fact protested against a fatalistic interpretation (Renouvier, Cournot, Caro; and cf. L. Carrau's article on Progress in the Revue des deux Mondes (Oct. 1875)).

Progress was discussed by Fiske in his Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy (1874), vol. ii. 192 sqq. For him (p. 201) "the fundamental characteristic of social progress is the continuous weakening of selfishness and the continuous strengthening of sympathy."]

Thus in the seventies and eighties of the last century the idea of Progress was becoming a general article of faith. Some might hold it in the fatalistic form that humanity moves in a desirable direction, whatever men do or may leave undone; others might believe that the future will depend largely on our own conscious efforts, but that there is nothing in the nature of things to disappoint the prospect of steady and indefinite advance. The majority did not inquire too curiously into such points of doctrine, but received it in a vague sense as a comfortable addition to their convictions. But it became a part of the general mental outlook of educated people.

When Mr. Frederic Harrison delivered in 1889 at Manchester an eloquent discourse on the "New Era," in which the dominant note is "the faith in human progress in lieu of celestial rewards of the separate soul," his general argument could appeal to immensely wider circles than the Positivists whom he was specially addressing.

The dogma—for a dogma it remains, in spite of the confidence of Comte or of Spencer that he had made it a scientific hypothesis—has produced an important ethical principle. Consideration for posterity has throughout history operated as a motive of conduct, but feebly, occasionally, and in a very limited sense. With the doctrine of Progress it assumes, logically, a preponderating importance; for the centre of interest is transferred to the life of future generations who are to enjoy conditions of happiness denied to us, but which our labours and sufferings are to help to bring about. If the doctrine is held in an extreme fatalistic form, then our duty is to resign ourselves cheerfully to sacrifices for the sake of unknown descendants, just as ordinary altruism enjoins the cheerful acceptance of sacrifices for the sake of living fellow-creatures. Winwood Reade indicated this when he wrote, "Our own prosperity is founded on the agonies of the past. Is it therefore unjust that we also should suffer for the benefit of those who are to come?" But if it is held that each generation can by its own deliberate acts determine for good or evil the destinies of the race, then our duties towards others reach out through time as well as through space, and our contemporaries are only a negligible fraction of the "neighbours" to whom we owe obligations. The ethical end may still be formulated, with the Utilitarians, as the greatest happiness of the greatest number; only the greatest number includes, as Kidd observed, "the members of generations yet unborn or unthought of." This extension of the moral code, if it is not yet conspicuous in treatises on Ethics, has in late years been obtaining recognition in practice.

5.

Within the last forty years nearly every civilised country has produced a large literature on social science, in which indefinite Progress is generally assumed as an axiom. But the "law" whose investigation Kant designated as the task for a Newton, which Saint-Simon and Comte did not find, and to which Spencer's evolutionary formula would stand in the same relation as it stands to the law of gravitation, remains still undiscovered. To examine or even glance at this literature, or to speculate how theories of Progress may be modified by recent philosophical speculation, lies beyond the scope of this volume, which is only concerned with tracing the origin of the idea and its growth up to the time when it became a current creed.

Looking back on the course of the inquiry, we note how the history of the idea has been connected with the growth of modern science, with the growth of rationalism, and with the struggle for political and religious liberty. The precursors (Bodin and Bacon) lived at a time when the world was consciously emancipating itself from the authority of tradition and it was being discovered that liberty is a difficult theoretical problem. The idea took definite shape in France when the old scheme of the universe had been shattered by the victory of the new astronomy and the prestige of Providence, CUNCTA SUPERCILIO MOUENTIS, was paling before the majesty of the immutable laws of nature. There began a slow but steady reinstatement of the kingdom of this world. The otherworldly dreams of theologians,

ceux qui reniaient la terre pour patrie,

which had ruled so long lost their power, and men's earthly home again insinuated itself into their affections, but with the new hope of its becoming a place fit for reasonable beings to live in. We have seen how the belief that our race is travelling towards earthly happiness was propagated by some eminent thinkers, as well as by some "not very fortunate persons who had a good deal of time on their hands." And all these high-priests and incense-bearers to whom the creed owes its success were rationalists, from the author of the Histoire des oracles to the philosopher of the Unknowable.

EPILOGUE

In achieving its ascendency and unfolding its meaning, the Idea of Progress had to overcome a psychological obstacle which may be described as THE ILLUSION OF FINALITY.

It is quite easy to fancy a state of society, vastly different from ours, existing in some unknown place like heaven; it is much more difficult to realise as a fact that the order of things with which we are familiar has so little stability that our actual descendants may be born into a world as different from ours as ours is from that of our ancestors of the pleistocene age.

The illusion of finality is strong. The men of the Middle Ages would have found it hard to imagine that a time was not far off in which the Last Judgement would have ceased to arouse any emotional interest. In the sphere of speculation Hegel, and even Comte, illustrate this psychological limitation: they did not recognise that their own systems could not be final any more than the system of Aristotle or of Descartes. It is science, perhaps, more than anything else—the wonderful history of science in the last hundred years—that has helped us to transcend this illusion.

But if we accept the reasonings on which the dogma of Progress is based, must we not carry them to their full conclusion? In escaping from the illusion of finality, is it legitimate to exempt that dogma itself? Must not it, too, submit to its own negation of finality? Will not that process of change, for which Progress is the optimistic name, compel "Progress" too to fall from the commanding position in which it is now, with apparent security, enthroned? [words in Greek]... A day will come, in the revolution of centuries, when a new idea will usurp its place as the directing idea of humanity. Another star, unnoticed now or invisible, will climb up the intellectual heaven, and human emotions will react to its influence, human plans respond to its guidance. It will be the criterion by which Progress and all other ideas will be judged. And it too will have its successor.

In other words, does not Progress itself suggest that its value as a doctrine is only relative, corresponding to a certain not very advanced stage of civilisation; just as Providence, in its day, was an idea of relative value, corresponding to a stage somewhat less advanced? Or will it be said that this argument is merely a disconcerting trick of dialectic played under cover of the darkness in which the issue of the future is safely hidden by Horace's prudent god?

THE END