1.
Nine months before the first part of Perrault's work appeared a younger
and more brilliant man had formulated, in a short tract, the essential
points of the doctrine of the progress of knowledge. It was Fontenelle.
Fontenelle was an anima naturaliter moderna. Trained in the principles
of Descartes, he was one of those who, though like Descartes himself,
too critical to swear by a master, appreciated unreservedly the value of
the Cartesian method. Sometimes, he says, a great man gives the tone
to his age; and this is true of Descartes, who can claim the glory
of having established a new art of reasoning. He sees the effects
in literature. The best books on moral and political subjects are
distinguished by an arrangement and precision which he traces to the
esprit geometrique characteristic of Descartes. [Footnote: Sur l'utilite
des mathematiques el de la physique (Oeuvres, iii. p. 6, ed. 1729).]
Fontenelle himself had this "geometrical mind," which we see at its best
in Descartes and Hobbes and Spinoza.
He had indeed a considerable aptitude for letters. He wrote poor verses,
and could not distinguish good poetry from bad. That perhaps was the
defect of l'esprit geometrique. But he wrote lucid prose. There was an
ironical side to his temper, and he had an ingenious paradoxical wit,
which he indulged, with no little felicity, in his early work, Dialogues
of the Dead. These conversations, though they show no dramatic power and
are simply a vehicle for the author's satirical criticisms on life, are
written with a light touch, and are full of surprises and unexpected
turns. The very choice of the interlocutors shows a curious fancy,
which we do not associate with the geometrical intellect. Descartes
is confronted with the Third False Demetrius, and we wonder what the
gourmet Apicius will find to say to Galileo.
2.
In the Dialogues of the Dead, which appeared in 1683, the Ancient and
Modern controversy is touched on more than once, and it is the subject
of the conversation between Socrates and Montaigne. Socrates ironically
professes to expect that the age of Montaigne will show a vast
improvement on his own; that men will have profited by the experience
of many centuries; and that the old age of the world will be wiser and
better regulated than its youth. Montaigne assures him that it is not
so, and that the vigorous types of antiquity, like Pericles, Aristides,
and Socrates himself, are no longer to be found. To this assertion
Socrates opposes the doctrine of the permanence of the forces of Nature.
Nature has not degenerated in her other works; why should she cease to
produce reasonable men?
He goes on to observe that antiquity is enlarged and exalted by
distance: "In our own day we esteemed our ancestors more than they
deserved, and now our posterity esteems us more than we deserve. There
is really no difference between our ancestors, ourselves, and our
posterity. C'est toujours la meme chose." But, objects Montaigne, I
should have thought that things were always changing; that different
ages had their different characters. Are there not ages of learning and
ages of ignorance, rude ages and polite? True, replies Socrates, but
these are only externalities. The heart of man does not change with
the fashions of his life. The order of Nature remains constant (l'ordre
general de la Nature a l'air bien constant).
This conclusion harmonises with the general spirit of the Dialogues. The
permanence of the forces of Nature is asserted, but for the purpose
of dismissing the whole controversy as rather futile. Elsewhere modern
discoveries, like the circulation of the blood and the motions of the
earth, are criticised as useless; adding nothing to the happiness and
pleasures of mankind. Men acquired, at an early period, a certain amount
of useful knowledge, to which they have added nothing; since then they
have been slowly discovering things that are unnecessary. Nature has not
been so unjust as to allow one age to enjoy more pleasures than
another. And what is the value of civilisation? It moulds our words, and
embarrasses our actions; it does not affect our feelings. [Footnote:
See the dialogues of Harvey with Erasistratus (a Greek physician of
the third century B.C.); Galileo with Apicius; Montezuma with Fernando
Cortez.]
One might hardly have expected the author of these Dialogues to come
forward a few years later as a champion of the Moderns, even though, in
the dedicatory epistle to Lucian, he compared France to Greece. But he
was seriously interested in the debated question, as an intellectual
problem, and in January 1688 he published his Digression on the Ancients
and Moderns, a short pamphlet, but weightier and more suggestive than
the large work of his friend Perrault, which began to appear nine months
later.
3.
The question of pre-eminence between the Ancients and Moderns is
reducible to another. Were trees in ancient times greater than to-day?
If they were, then Homer, Plato, and Demosthenes cannot be equalled in
modern times; if they were not, they can.
Fontenelle states the problem in this succinct way at the beginning of
the Digression. The permanence of the forces of Nature had been asserted
by Saint Sorlin and Perrault; they had offered no proof, and had used
the principle rather incidentally and by way of illustration. But
the whole inquiry hinged on it. If it can be shown that man has not
degenerated, the cause of the Moderns is practically won. The issue
of the controversy must be decided not by rhetoric but by physics. And
Fontenelle offers what he regards as a formal Cartesian proof of the
permanence of natural forces.
If the Ancients had better intellects than ours, the brains of that
age must have been better arranged, formed of firmer or more delicate
fibres, fuller of "animal spirits." But if such a difference existed,
Nature must have been more vigorous; and in that case the trees must
have profited by that superior vigour and have been larger and finer.
The truth is that Nature has in her hands a certain paste which is
always the same, which she is ever turning over and over again in a
thousand ways, and of which she forms men, animals, and plants. She has
not formed Homer, Demosthenes, and Plato of a finer or better kneaded
clay than our poets, orators, and philosophers. Do not object that minds
are not material. They are connected by a material bond with the brain,
and it is the quality of this material bond that determines intellectual
differences.
But although natural processes do not change from age to age, they
differ in their effects in different climates. "It is certain that as
a result of the reciprocal dependence which exists between all parts of
the material world, differences of climate, which so clearly affect the
life of plants, must also produce some effect on human brains." May it
not be said then that, in consequence of climatic conditions, ancient
Greece and Rome produced men of mental qualities different from those
which could be produced in France? Oranges grow easily in Italy; it is
more difficult to cultivate them in France. Fontenelle replies that art
and cultivation exert a much greater influence on human brains than
on the soil; ideas can be transported more easily from one country
to another than plants; and as a consequence of commerce and mutual
influence, peoples do not retain the original mental peculiarities due
to climate. This may not be true of the extreme climates in the torrid
and glacial zones, but in the temperate zone we may discount entirely
climatic influence. The climates of Greece and Italy and that of France
are too similar to cause any sensible difference between the Greeks or
Latins and the French.
Saint Sorlin and Perrault had argued directly from the permanence of
vigour in lions or trees to the permanence of vigour in man. If trees
are the same as ever, brains must also be the same. But what about the
minor premiss? Who knows that trees are precisely the same? It is an
indemonstrable assumption that oaks and beeches in the days of Socrates
and Cicero were not slightly better trees than the oaks and beeches of
to-day. Fontenelle saw the weakness of this reasoning. He saw that it
was necessary to prove that the trees, no less than human brains, have
not degenerated. But his a priori proof is simply a statement of the
Cartesian principle of the stability of natural processes, which he put
in a thoroughly unscientific form. The stability of the laws of nature
is a necessary hypothesis, without which science would be impossible.
But here it was put to an illegitimate use. For it means that, given
precisely the same conditions, the same physical phenomena will occur.
Fontenelle therefore was bound to show that conditions had not altered
in such a way as to cause changes in the quality of nature's organic
productions. He did not do this. He did not take into consideration, for
instance, that climatic conditions may vary from age to age as well as
from country to country.
4.
Having established the natural equality of the Ancients and Moderns,
Fontenelle inferred that whatever differences exist are due to external
conditions--(1) time; (2) political institutions and the estate of
affairs in general.
The ancients were prior in time to us, therefore they were the authors
of the first inventions. For that, they cannot be regarded as our
superiors. If we had been in their place we should have been the
inventors, like them; if they were in ours, they would add to those
inventions, like us. There is no great mystery in that. We must impute
equal merit to the early thinkers who showed the way and to the later
thinkers who pursued it. If the ancient attempts to explain the universe
have been recently replaced by the discovery of a simple system (the
Cartesian), we must consider that the truth could only be reached by
the elimination of false routes, and in this way the numbers of the
Pythagoreans, the ideas of Plato, the qualities of Aristotle, all served
indirectly to advance knowledge. "We are under an obligation to the
ancients for having exhausted almost all the false theories that could
be formed." Enlightened both by their true views and by their errors, it
is not surprising that we should surpass them.
But all this applies only to scientific studies, like mathematics,
physics, and medicine, which depend partly on correct reasoning and
partly on experience. Methods of reasoning improve slowly, and the most
important advance which has been made in the present age is the method
inaugurated by Descartes. Before him reasoning was loose; he introduced
a more rigid and precise standard, and its influence is not only
manifest in our best works on physics and philosophy, but is even
discernible in books on ethics and religion.
We must expect posterity to excel us as we excel the Ancients, through
improvement of method, which is a science in itself--the most difficult
and least studied of all--and through increase of experience. Evidently
the process is endless (il est evident que tout cela n'a point de fin),
and the latest men of science must be the most competent.
But this does not apply to poetry or eloquence, round which the
controversy has most violently raged. For poetry and eloquence do not
depend on correct reasoning. They depend principally on vivacity of
imagination, and "vivacity of imagination does not require a long
course of experiments, or a great multitude of rules, to attain all the
perfection of which it is capable." Such perfection might be attained in
a few centuries. If the ancients did achieve perfection in imaginative
literature, it follows that they cannot be surpassed; but we have no
right to say, as their admirers are fond of pretending, that they cannot
be equalled.
5.
Besides the mere nature of time, we have to take into account external
circumstances in considering this question.
If the forces of nature are permanent, how are we to explain the fact
that in the barbarous centuries after the decline of Rome--the term
Middle Ages has not yet come into currency--ignorance was so dense and
deep? This breach of continuity is one of the plausible arguments of
the advocates of the Ancients. Those ages, they say, were ignorant and
barbarous because the Greek and Latin writers had ceased to be read;
as soon as the study of the classical models revived there was a
renaissance of reason and good taste. That is true, but it proves
nothing. Nature never forgot how to mould the head of Cicero or Livy.
She produces in every age men who might be great men; but the age does
not always allow them to exert their talents. Inundations of barbarians,
universal wars, governments which discourage or do not favour science
and art, prejudices which assume all variety of shapes--like the
Chinese prejudice against dissecting corpses--may impose long periods of
ignorance or bad taste.
But observe that, though the return to the study of the ancients
revived, as at one stroke, the aesthetic ideals which they had created
and the learning which they had accumulated, yet even if their works
had not been preserved we should, though it would have cost us many long
years of labour, have discovered for ourselves "ideas of the true and
the beautiful." Where should we have found them? Where the ancients
themselves found them, after much groping.
6.
The comparison of the life of collective humanity to the life of a
single man, which had been drawn by Bacon and Pascal, Saint Sorlin and
Perrault, contains or illustrates an important truth which bears on
the whole question. Fontenelle puts it thus. An educated mind is, as it
were, composed of all the minds of preceding ages; we might say that a
single mind was being educated throughout all history. Thus this secular
man, who has lived since the beginning of the world, has had his infancy
in which he was absorbed by the most urgent needs of life; his youth in
which he succeeded pretty well in things of imagination like poetry
and eloquence, and even began to reason, but with more courage than
solidity. He is now in the age of manhood, is more enlightened, and
reasons better; but he would have advanced further if the passion for
war had not distracted him and given him a distaste for the sciences to
which he has at last returned.
Figures, if they are pressed, are dangerous; they suggest unwarrantable
conclusions. It may be illuminative to liken the development of humanity
to the growth of an individual; but to infer that the human race is now
in its old age, merely on the strength of the comparison, is obviously
unjustifiable. That is what Bacon and the others had done. The fallacy
was pointed out by Fontenelle.
From his point of view, an "old age" of humanity, which if it meant
anything meant decay as well as the wisdom of experience, was contrary
to the principle of the permanence of natural forces. Man, he asserts,
will have no old age. He will be always equally capable, of achieving
the successes of his youth; and he will become more and more expert in
the things which become the age of virility. Or "to drop metaphor,
men will never degenerate." In ages to come we may be regarded--say in
America--with the same excess of admiration with which we regard the
ancients. We might push the prediction further. In still later ages the
interval of time which divides us from the Greeks and Romans will appear
so relatively small to posterity that they will classify us and the
ancients as virtually contemporary; just in the same way as we group
together the Greeks and Romans, though the Romans in their own day were
moderns in relation to the Greeks. In that remote period men will be
able to judge without prejudice the comparative merits of Sophocles and
Corneille.
Unreasonable admiration for the ancients is one of the chief obstacles
to progress (le progres des choses). Philosophy not only did not
advance, but even fell into an abyss of unintelligible ideas, because,
through devotion to the authority of Aristotle, men sought truth in his
enigmatic writings instead of seeking it in nature. If the authority of
Descartes were ever to have the same fortune, the results would be no
less disastrous.
7.
This memorable brochure exhibits, without pedantry, perspicuous
arrangement and the "geometrical" precision on which Fontenelle remarked
as one of the notes of the new epoch introduced by Descartes. It
displays too the author's open-mindedness, and his readiness to
follow where the argument leads. He is able already to look beyond
Cartesianism; he knows that it cannot be final. No man of his time was
more open-minded and free from prejudice than Fontenelle. This quality
of mind helped him to turn his eyes to the future. Perrault and his
predecessors were absorbed in the interest of the present and the past.
Descartes was too much engaged in his own original discoveries to do
more than throw a passing glance at posterity.
Now the prospect of the future was one of the two elements which were
still needed to fashion the theory of the progress of knowledge. All the
conditions for such a theory were present. Bodin and Bacon, Descartes
and the champions of the Moderns--the reaction against the Renaissance,
and the startling discoveries of science--had prepared the way; progress
was established for the past and present. But the theory of the progress
of knowledge includes and acquires its value by including the indefinite
future. This step was taken by Fontenelle. The idea had been almost
excluded by Bacon's misleading metaphor of old age, which Fontenelle
expressly rejects. Man will have no old age; his intellect will never
degenerate; and "the sound views of intellectual men in successive
generations will continually add up."
But progress must not only be conceived as extending indefinitely into
the future; it must also be conceived as necessary and certain. This is
the second essential feature of the theory. The theory would have
little value or significance, if the prospect of progress in the future
depended on chance or the unpredictable discretion of an external will.
Fontenelle asserts implicitly the certainty of progress when he declares
that the discoveries and improvements of the modern age would have been
made by the ancients if they exchanged places with the moderns; for
this amounts to saying that science will progress and knowledge increase
independently of particular individuals. If Descartes had not been born,
some one else would have done his work; and there could have been no
Descartes before the seventeenth century. For, as he says in a later
work, [Footnote: Preface des elemens de la geometrie de l'infini
(OEuvres, x. p. 40, ed. 1790).] "there is an order which regulates our
progress. Every science develops after a certain number of preceding
sciences have developed, and only then; it has to await its turn to
burst its shell."
Fontenelle, then, was the first to formulate the idea of the progress,
of knowledge, as a complete doctrine. At the moment the import and
far-reaching effects of the idea were not realised, either by himself or
by others, and his pamphlet, which appeared in the company of a perverse
theory of pastoral poetry, was acclaimed merely as an able defence of
the Moderns.
8.
If the theory of the indefinite progress of knowledge is true, it is one
of those truths which were originally established by false reasoning. It
was established on a principle which excluded degeneration, but equally
excluded evolution; and the whole conception of nature which Fontenelle
had learned from Descartes is long since dead and buried.
But it is more important to observe that this principle, which seemed
to secure the indefinite progress of knowledge, disabled Fontenelle from
suggesting a theory of the progress of society. The invariability of
nature, as he conceived it, was true of the emotions and the will,
as well as of the intellect. It implied that man himself would be
psychically always the same--unalterable, incurable. L'ordre general
de la Nature a Fair bien constant. His opinion of the human race was
expressed in the Dialogues of the Dead, [Footnote: It may be seen too in
the Plurality of Worlds.] and it never seems to have varied. The world
consists of a multitude of fools, and a mere handful of reasonable men.
Men's passions will always be the same and will produce wars in the
future as in the past. Civilisation makes no difference; it is little
more than a veneer.
Even if theory had not stood in his way, Fontenelle was the last man who
was likely to dream dreams of social improvement. He was temperamentally
an Epicurean, of the same refined stamp as Epicurus himself, and he
enjoyed throughout his long life--he lived to the age of a hundred--the
tranquillity which was the true Epicurean ideal. He was never troubled
by domestic cares, and his own modest ambition was satisfied when, at
the age of forty, he was appointed permanent Secretary of the Academy of
Sciences. He was not the man to let his mind dwell on the woes and
evils of the world; and the follies and perversities which cause them
interested him only so far as they provided material for his wit.
It remains, however, noteworthy that the author of the theory of the
progress of knowledge, which was afterwards to expand into a general
theory of human Progress, would not have allowed that this extension was
legitimate; though it was through this extension that Fontenelle's idea
acquired human value and interest and became a force in the world.
9.
Fontenelle did a good deal more than formulate the idea. He reinforced
it by showing that the prospect of a steady and rapid increase of
knowledge in the future was certified.
The postulate of the immutability of the laws of nature, which has
been the indispensable basis for the advance of modern science, is
fundamental with Descartes. But Descartes did not explicitly insist on
it, and it was Fontenelle, perhaps more than any one else, who made it
current coin. That was a service performed by the disciple; but he seems
to have been original in introducing the fruitful idea of the sciences
as confederate and intimately interconnected [Footnote: Roger Bacon,
as we saw, had a glimpse of this principle.]; not forming a number of
isolated domains, as hitherto, but constituting a system in which the
advance of one will contribute to the advance of the others. He
exposed with masterly ability the reciprocal relations of physics and
mathematics. No man of his day had a more comprehensive view of all the
sciences, though he made no original contributions to any. His curiosity
was universal, and as Secretary of the Academy he was obliged, according
to his own high standard of his duty, to keep abreast of all that was
being done in every branch of knowledge. That was possible then; it
would be impossible now.
In the famous series of obituary discourses which he delivered on
savants who were members of the Academy, Fontenelle probably
thought that he was contributing to the realisation of this ideal of
"solidarity," for they amounted to a chronicle of scientific progress in
every department. They are free from technicalities and extraordinarily
lucid, and they appealed not only to men of science, but to those of the
educated public who possessed some scientific curiosity. This brings us
to another important role of Fontenelle--the role of interpreter of
the world of science to the world outside. It is closely related to our
subject.
For the popularisation of science, which was to be one of the features
of the nineteenth century, was in fact a condition of the success of the
idea of Progress. That idea could not insinuate itself into the public
mind and become a living force in civilised societies until the meaning
and value of science had been generally grasped, and the results of
scientific discovery had been more or less diffused. The achievements of
physical science did more than anything else to convert the imaginations
of men to the general doctrine of Progress.
Before the later part of the seventeenth century, the remarkable
physical discoveries of recent date had hardly escaped beyond academic
circles. But an interest in these subjects began to become the fashion
in the later years of Louis XIV. Science was talked in the salons;
ladies studied mechanics and anatomy. Moliere's play, Les Femmes
savantes, which appeared in 1672, is one of the first indications. In
1686 Fontenelle published his Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds,
in which a savant explains the new astronomy to a lady in the park of
a country house. [Footnote: The Marquise of the Plurality of Worlds
is supposed to be Madame de la Mesangere, who lived near Rouen,
Fontenelle's birthplace. He was a friend and a frequent visitor at her
chateau. See Maigron, Fontenelle, p. 42. The English translation of 1688
was by Glanvill. A new translation was published at Dublin as late as
1761.] It is the first book--at least the first that has any claim to be
remembered--in the literature of popular science, and it is one of
the most striking. It met with the success which it deserved. It was
reprinted again and again, and it was almost immediately translated into
English.
The significance of the Plurality of Worlds is indeed much greater
than that of a pioneer work in popularisation and a model in the art
of making technical subjects interesting. We must remember that at this
time the belief that the sun revolves round the earth still prevailed.
Only the few knew better. The cosmic revolution which is associated with
the names of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo was slow in producing its
effects. It was rejected by Bacon; and the condemnation of Galileo by
the Church made Descartes, who dreaded nothing so much as a collision
with the ecclesiastical authorities unwilling to insist on it.
[Footnote: Cp. Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartesienne, i. p.
42-3.] Milton's Raphael, in the Eighth Book of Paradise Lost (published
1667), does not venture to affirm the Copernican system; he explains
it sympathetically, but leaves the question open. [Footnote: Masson
(Milton's Poetical Works, vol. 2) observes that Milton's life (1608-74)
"coincides with the period of the struggle between the two systems"
(p. 90). Milton's friends, the Smectymnians, in answer to Bishop Hall's
Humble Remonstrance (1641), "had cited the Copernican doctrine as
an unquestionable instance of a supreme absurdity." Masson has some
apposite remarks on the influence of the Ptolemaic system "upon the
thinkings and imaginations of mankind everywhere on all subjects
whatsoever till about two hundred years ago."] Fontenelle's book was an
event. It disclosed to the general public a new picture of the universe,
to which men would have to accustom their imaginations.
We may perhaps best conceive all that this change meant by supposing
what a difference it would make to us if it were suddenly discovered
that the old system which Copernicus upset was true after all, and that
we had to think ourselves back into a strictly limited universe of which
the earth is the centre. The loss of its privileged position by our own
planet; its degradation, from a cosmic point of view, to insignificance;
the necessity of admitting the probability that there may be many other
inhabited worlds--all this had consequences ranging beyond the field of
astronomy. It was as if a man who dreamed that he was living in Paris or
London should awake to discover that he was really in an obscure island
in the Pacific Ocean, and that the Pacific Ocean was immeasurably vaster
than he had imagined. The Marquise, in the Plurality of Worlds, reacts
to the startling illumination: "Voila l'univers si grand que je m'y
perds, je ne sais plus ou je suis; je ne suis plus rien.--La terre est
si effroyablement petite!"
Such a revolution in cosmic values could not fail to exert a penetrating
influence on human thought. The privileged position of the earth had
been a capital feature of the whole doctrine, as to the universe and
man's destinies, which had been taught by the Church, and it had made
that doctrine more specious than it might otherwise have seemed. Though
the Churches could reform their teaching to meet the new situation, the
fact remained that the Christian scheme sounded less plausible when the
central importance of the human race was shown to be an illusion. Would
man, stripped of his cosmic pretensions, and finding himself lost in
the immensities of space, invent a more modest theory of his destinies
confined to his own little earth--si effroyablement petite? The
eighteenth century answered this question by the theory of Progress.
10.
Fontenelle is one of the most representative thinkers of that
period--we have no distinguishing name for it--which lies between
the characteristic thinkers of the seventeenth century and the
characteristic thinkers of the eighteenth. It is a period of over sixty
years, beginning about 1680, for though Montesquieu and Voltaire were
writing long before 1740, the great influential works of the "age of
illumination" begin with the Esprit des lois in 1748. The intellectual
task of this intervening period was to turn to account the ideas
provided by the philosophy of Descartes, and use them as solvents of
the ideas handed down from the Middle Ages. We might almost call it the
Cartesian period for, though Descartes was dead, it was in these years
that Cartesianism performed its task and transformed human thought.
When we speak of Cartesianism we do not mean the metaphysical system of
the master, or any of his particular views such as that of innate
ideas. We mean the general principles, which were to leave an abiding
impression on the texture of thought: the supremacy of reason over
authority, the stability of the laws of Nature, rigorous standards of
proof. Fontenelle was far from accepting all the views of Descartes,
whom he does not scruple to criticise; but he was a true Cartesian
in the sense that he was deeply imbued with these principles, which
generated, to use an expression of his own, "des especes de rebelles,
qui conspiraient contre l'ignorance et les prejuges dominants."
[Footnote: Eloge de M. Lemery.] And of all these rebels against ruling
prejudices he probably did more than any single man to exhibit the
consequences of the Cartesian ideas and drive them home.
The Plurality of Worlds was a contribution to the task of transforming
thought and abolishing ancient error; but the History of Oracles which
appeared in the following year was more characteristic. It was a free
adaptation of an unreadable Latin treatise by a Dutchman, which in
Fontenelle's skilful hands becomes a vehicle for applying Cartesian
solvents to theological authority. The thesis is that the Greek oracles
were a sacerdotal imposture, and not, as ecclesiastical tradition said,
the work of evil spirits, who were stricken silent at the death of Jesus
Christ. The effect was to discredit the authority of the early Fathers
of the Church, though the writer has the discretion to repudiate such
an intention. For the publication was risky; and twenty years later a
Jesuit Father wrote a treatise to confute it, and exposed the secret
poison, with consequences which might have been disastrous for
Fontenelle if he had not had powerful friends among the Jesuits
themselves. Fontenelle had none of the impetuosity of Voltaire,
and after the publication of the History of Oracles he confined his
criticism of tradition to the field of science. He was convinced that
"les choses fort etablies ne peuvent etre attaquees que par degrez."
[Footnote: Eloge de M. Lemery.]
The secret poison, of which Fontenelle prepared this remarkable dose
with a touch which reminds us of Voltaire, was being administered in
the same Cartesian period, and with similar precautions, by Bayle. Like
Fontenelle, this great sceptic, "the father of modern incredulity" as
he was called by Joseph de Maistre, stood between the two centuries and
belonged to both. Like Fontenelle, he took a gloomy view of humanity;
he had no faith in that goodness of human nature which was to be a
characteristic dogma of the age of illumination. But he was untouched
by the discoveries of science; he took no interest in Galileo or Newton;
and while the most important work of Fontenelle was the interpretation
of the positive advances of knowledge, Bayle's was entirely subversive.
The principle of unchangeable laws in nature is intimately connected
with the growth of Deism which is a note of this period. The function of
the Deity was virtually confined to originating the machine of nature,
which, once regulated, was set beyond any further interference on His
part, though His existence might be necessary for its conservation. A
view so sharply opposed to the current belief could not have made way
as it did without a penetrating criticism of the current theology.
Such criticism was performed by Bayle. His works were a school for
rationalism for about seventy years. He supplied to the thinkers of the
eighteenth century, English as well as French, a magazine of subversive
arguments, and he helped to emancipate morality both from theology and
from metaphysics.
This intellectual revolutionary movement, which was propagated in salons
as well as by books, shook the doctrine of Providence which Bossuet had
so eloquently expounded. It meant the enthronement of reason--Cartesian
reason--before whose severe tribunal history as well as opinions were
tried. New rules of criticism were introduced, new standards of proof.
When Fontenelle observed that the existence of Alexander the Great
could not be strictly demonstrated and was no more than highly probable,
[Footnote: Plurality des mondes, sixieme soir.] it was an undesigned
warning that tradition would receive short shrift at the hands of men
trained in analytical Cartesian methods.
11.
That the issue between the claims of antiquity and the modern age should
have been debated independently in England and France indicates that the
controversy was an inevitable incident in the liberation of the human
spirit from the authority of the ancients. Towards the end of the
century the debate in France aroused attention in England and led to
a literary quarrel, less important but not less acrimonious than that
which raged in France. Sir William Temple's Essay, Wotton's Reflexions,
and Swift's satire the Battle of the Books are the three outstanding
works in the episode, which is however chiefly remembered on account
of its connection with Bentley's masterly exposure of the fabricated
letters of Phalaris.
The literary debate in France, indeed, could not have failed to
reverberate across the Channel; for never perhaps did the literary world
in England follow with more interest, or appreciate more keenly the
productions of the great French writers of the time. In describing
Will's coffee-house, which was frequented by Dryden and all who
pretended to be interested in polite letters, Macaulay says, "there was
a faction for Perrault and the moderns, a faction for Boileau and the
ancients." In the discussions on this subject a remarkable Frenchman who
had long lived in England as an exile, M. de Saint Evremond, must have
constantly taken part. The disjointed pieces of which Saint Evremond's
writings consist are tedious and superficial, but they reveal a mind
of much cultivation and considerable common sense. His judgement on
Perrault's Parallel is that the author "has discovered the defects of
the ancients better than he has made out the advantage of the moderns;
his book is good and capable of curing us of abundance of errors."
[Footnote: In a letter to the Duchess of Mazarin, Works, Eng. tr., iii.
418.] He was not a partisan. But his friend, Sir William Temple, excited
by the French depreciations of antiquity, rushed into the lists with
greater courage than discretion.
Temple was ill equipped for the controversy, though his Essay on
Ancient and Modern Learning (1690) is far from deserving the disdain of
Macaulay, who describes its matter as "ludicrous and contemptible to the
last degree." [Footnote: The only point in it which need be noted here
is that the author questioned the cogency of Fontenelle's argument, that
the forces of nature being permanent human ability is in all ages
the same. "May there not," he asks, "many circumstances concur to one
production that do not to any other in one or many ages?" Fontenelle
speaks of trees. It is conceivable that various conditions and accidents
"may produce an oak, a fig, or a plane-tree, that shall deserve to
be renowned in story, and shall not perhaps be paralleled in other
countries or times. May not the same have happened in the production,
growth, and size of wit and genius in the world, or in some parts or
ages of it, and from many more circumstances that contributed towards it
than what may concur to the stupendous growth of a tree or animal?"] And
it must be confessed that the most useful result of the Essay was the
answer which it provoked from Wotton. For Wotton had a far wider
range of knowledge, and a more judicious mind, than any of the other
controversialists, with the exception of Fontenelle; and in knowledge
of antiquity he was Fontenelle's superior. His inquiry stands out as
the most sensible and unprejudiced contribution to the whole debate. He
accepts as just the reasoning of Fontenelle "as to the comparative force
of the geniuses of men in the several ages of the world and of the equal
force of men's understandings absolutely considered in all times since
learning first began to be cultivated amongst mankind." But this is not
incompatible with the thesis that in some branches the ancients excelled
all who came after them. For it is not necessary to explain such
excellence by the hypothesis that there was a particular force of genius
evidently discernible in former ages, but extinct long since, and that
nature is now worn out and spent. There is an alternative explanation.
There may have been special circumstances "which might suit with those
ages which did exceed ours, and with those things wherein they did
exceed us, and with no other age nor thing besides."
But we must begin our inquiry by sharply distinguishing two fields
of mental activity--the field of art, including poetry, oratory,
architecture, painting, and statuary; and the field of knowledge,
including mathematics, natural science, physiology, with all their
dependencies. In the case of the first group there is room for variety
of opinion; but the superiority of the Greeks and Romans in poetry and
literary style may be admitted without prejudice to the mental equality
of the moderns, for it may be explained partly by the genius of their
languages and partly by political circumstances--for example, in the
case of oratory, [Footnote: This had been noted by Fontenelle in his
Digression.] by the practical necessity of eloquence. But as regards
the other group, knowledge is not a matter of opinion or taste, and
a definite judgement is possible. Wotton then proceeds to review
systematically the field of science, and easily shows, with more
completeness and precision than Perrault, the superiority of modern
methods and the enormous strides which had been made.
As to the future, Wotton expresses himself cautiously. It is not easy to
say whether knowledge will advance in the next age proportionally to
its advance in this. He has some fears that there may be a falling away,
because ancient learning has still too great a hold over modern books,
and physical and mathematical studies tend to be neglected. But he ends
his Reflexions by the speculation that "some future age, though perhaps
not the next, and in a country now possibly little thought of, may do
that which our great men would be glad to see done; that is to say, may
raise real knowledge, upon foundations laid in this age, to the utmost
possible perfection to which it may be brought by mortal men in this
imperfect state."
The distinction, on which Wotton insisted, between the sciences which
require ages for their development and the imaginative arts which may
reach perfection in a short time had been recognised by Fontenelle,
whose argument on this point differs from that of his friend Perrault.
For Perrault contended that in literature and art, as well as in
science, later generations can, through the advantage of time and longer
experience, attain to a higher excellence than their predecessors.
Fontenelle, on the other hand, held that poetry and eloquence have a
restricted field, and that therefore there must be a time at which
they reach a point of excellence which cannot be exceeded. It was his
personal opinion that eloquence and history actually reached the highest
possible perfection in Cicero and Livy.
But neither Fontenelle nor Wotton came into close quarters with the
problem which was raised--not very clearly, it is true--by Perrault. Is
there development in the various species of literature and art? Do they
profit and enrich themselves by the general advance of civilisation?
Perrault, as we have seen, threw out the suggestion that increased
experience and psychological study enabled the moderns to penetrate more
deeply into the recesses of the human soul, and therefore to bring to a
higher perfection the treatment of the character, motives, and passions
of men. This suggestion admits of being extended. In the Introduction
to his Revolt of Islam, Shelley, describing his own intellectual and
aesthetic experiences, writes:
The poetry of ancient Greece and Rome, and modern Italy, and our
own country, has been to me like external nature, a passion and an
enjoyment.... I have considered poetry in its most comprehensive sense;
and have read the poets and the historians and the metaphysicians whose
writings have been accessible to me--and have looked upon the beautiful
and majestic scenery of the earth--as common sources of those elements
which it is the province of the Poet to embody and combine. And he
appends a note:
In this sense there may be such a thing as perfectibility in works of
fiction, notwithstanding the concession often made by the advocates
of human improvement, that perfectibility is a term applicable only to
science.
In other words, all the increases of human experience, from age to age,
all the speculative adventures of the intellect, provide the artist,
in each succeeding generation, with more abundant sources for aesthetic
treatment. As years go on, life in its widest sense offers more and more
materials "which it is the province of the Poet to embody and combine."
This is evidently true; and would it not seem to follow that literature
is not excluded from participating in the common development of
civilisation? One of the latest of the champions of the Moderns, the
Abbe Terrasson, maintained that "to separate the general view of the
progress of the human mind in regard to natural science, and in regard
to belles-lettres, would be a fitting expedient to a man who had two
souls, but it is useless to him who has only one." [Footnote: Abbe
Terrasson, 1670-1750. His Philosophie applicable a tons les objets
de l'esprit et de la raison was issued posthumously in 1754. His
Dissertation critique sur l'Iliade appeared in 1715.]He put the matter
in too abstract a way to carry conviction; but the nineteenth century
was to judge that he was not entirely wrong. For the question was, as we
shall see, raised anew by Madame de Stael, and the theory was finally
to emerge that art and literature, like laws and institutions, are an
expression of society and therefore inextricably linked with the other
elements of social development--a theory, it may be observed, which
while it has discredited the habit of considering works of art in a
vacuum, dateless and detached, as they were generally considered by
critics of the seventeenth century, leaves the aesthetic problem much
where it was.
Perrault's suggestion as to the enrichment of the material of the artist
by new acquisitions would have served to bring literature and art
into the general field of human development, without compromising the
distinction on which Wotton and others insisted between the natural
sciences and the aesthetic arts. But that distinction, emphatically
endorsed by Voltaire, had the effect of excluding literature and art
from the view of those who in the eighteenth century recognised progress
in the other activities of man.
12.
It is notable that in this literary controversy the Moderns, even
Fontenelle, seem curiously negligent of the import of the theory which
they were propounding of the intellectual progress of man. They treat
it almost incidentally, as part of the case for the defence, not as
an immensely important conclusion. Its bearings were more definitely
realised by the Abbe Terrasson, whom I have just named. A geometer and a
Cartesian, he took part in the controversy in its latest stage, when La
Motte and Madame Dacier were the principal antagonists. The human mind,
he said, has had its infancy and youth; its maturity began in the age
of Augustus; the barbarians arrested its course till the Renaissance;
in the seventeenth century, through the illuminating philosophy of
Descartes, it passed beyond the stage which it had attained in the
Augustan age, and the eighteenth century should surpass the seventeenth.
Cartesianism is not final; it has its place in a development. It was
made possible by previous speculations, and it will be succeeded by
other systems. We must not pursue the analogy of humanity with an
individual man and anticipate a period of old age. For unlike the
individual, humanity "being composed of all ages," is always gaining
instead of losing. The age of maturity will last indefinitely, because
it is a progressive, not a stationary, maturity. Later generations
will always be superior to the earlier, for progress is "a natural and
necessary effect of the constitution of the human mind."