The revolutionary speculations on the social and moral condition of man
which were the outstanding feature of the eighteenth century in France,
and began about 1750, were the development of the intellectual movement
of the seventeenth, which had changed the outlook of speculative
thought. It was one continuous rationalistic movement. In the days
of Racine and Perrault men had been complacently conscious of the
enlightenment of the age in which they were living, and as time went on,
this consciousness became stronger and acuter; it is a note of the age
of Voltaire. In the last years of Louis XIV., and in the years which
followed, the contrast between this mental enlightenment and the dark
background--the social evils and miseries of the kingdom, the gross
misgovernment and oppression--began to insinuate itself into men's
minds. What was the value of the achievements of science, and
the improvement of the arts of life, if life itself could not be
ameliorated? Was not some radical reconstruction possible, in the social
fabric, corresponding to the radical reconstruction inaugurated by
Descartes in the principles of science and in the methods of thought?
Year by year the obscurantism of the ruling powers became more glaring,
and the most gifted thinkers, towards the middle of the century, began
to concentrate their brains on the problems of social science and to
turn the light of reason on the nature of man and the roots of society.
They wrought with unscrupulous resolution and with far-reaching effects.
With the extension of rationalism into the social domain, it came about
naturally that the idea of intellectual progress was enlarged into the
idea of the general Progress of man. The transition was easy. If
it could be proved that social evils were due neither to innate and
incorrigible disabilities of the human being nor to the nature of
things, but simply to ignorance and prejudices, then the improvement of
his state, and ultimately the attainment of felicity, would be only
a matter of illuminating ignorance and removing errors, of increasing
knowledge and diffusing light. The growth of the "universal human
reason"--a Cartesian phrase, which had figured in the philosophy of
Malebranche--must assure a happy destiny to humanity.
Between 1690 and 1740 the conception of an indefinite progress of
enlightenment had been making its way in French intellectual circles,
and must often have been a topic of discussion in the salons, for
instance, of Madame de Lambert, Madame de Tencin, and Madame Dupin,
where Fontenelle was one of the most conspicuous guests. To the same
circle belonged his friend the Abbe de Saint-Pierre, and it is in his
writings that we first find the theory widened in its compass to embrace
progress towards social perfection. [Footnote: For his life and works
the best book is J. Drouet's monograph, L'Abbe de Saint-Pierre: l'homme
et l'oeuvre (1912), but on some points Goumy's older study (1859) is
still worth consulting. I have used the edition of his works in 12
volumes published during his lifetime at Rotterdam, 1733-37.]
1.
He was brought up on Cartesian principles, and he idealised Descartes
somewhat as Lucretius idealised Epicurus. But he had no aptitude for
philosophy, and he prized physical science only as far as it directly
administered to the happiness of men. He was a natural utilitarian, and
perhaps no one was ever more consistent in making utility the criterion
of all actions and theories. Applying this standard he obliterated from
the roll of great men most of those whom common opinion places among
the greatest. Alexander, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne receive short shrift
from the Abbe de Saint-Pierre. [Footnote: Compare Voltaire, Lettres sur
les Anglais, xii., where Newton is acclaimed as the greatest man who
ever lived.] He was superficial in his knowledge both of history and of
science, and his conception of utility was narrow and a little vulgar.
Great theoretical discoverers like Newton and Leibnitz he sets in a
lower rank than ingenious persons who used their scientific skill to
fashion some small convenience of life. Monuments of art, like Notre
Dame, possessed little value in his eyes compared with a road, a bridge,
or a canal.
Like most of his distinguished contemporaries he was a Deist. On his
deathbed he received the usual rites of the Church in the presence of
his household, and then told the priest that he did not believe a word
of all that. His real views are transparent in some of his works through
the conventional disguises in which prudent writers of the time were
wont to wrap their assaults on orthodoxy. To attack Mohammedanism by
arguments which are equally applicable to Christianity was a device for
propagating rationalism in days when it was dangerous to propagate
it openly. This is what the Abbe did in his Discourse against
Mohammedanism. Again, in his Physical Explanation of an Apparition he
remarks: "To diminish our fanatical proclivities, it would be useful if
the Government were to establish an annual prize, to be awarded by the
Academy of Sciences, for the best explanation, by natural laws, of the
extraordinary effects of imagination, of the prodigies related in Greek
and Latin literature, and of the pretended miracles told by Protestants,
Schismatics, and Mohammedans." The author carefully keeps on the right
side of the fence. No Catholic authorities could take exception to
this. But no intelligent reader could fail to see that all miracles were
attacked. The miracles accepted by the Protestants were also believed in
by the Catholics.
He was one of the remarkable figures of his age. We might almost say
that he was a new type--a nineteenth century humanitarian and pacifist
in an eighteenth century environment. He was a born reformer, and he
devoted his life to the construction of schemes for increasing human
happiness. He introduced the word bienfaisance into the currency of
the French language, and beneficence was in his eyes the sovran virtue.
There were few departments of public affairs in which he did not point
out the deficiencies and devise ingenious plans for improvement. Most
of his numerous writings are projets--schemes of reform in government,
economics, finance, education, all worked out in detail, and all aiming
at the increase of pleasure and the diminution of pain. The Abbe's
nimble intelligence had a weak side, which must have somewhat
compromised his influence. He was so confident in the reasonableness of
his projects that he always believed that if they were fairly considered
the ruling powers could not fail to adopt them in their own interests.
It is the nature of a reformer to be sanguine, but the optimism of
Saint-Pierre touched naivete. Thousands might have agreed with his view
that the celibacy of the Catholic clergy was an unwholesome institution,
but when he drew up a proposal for its abolition and imagined that the
Pope, unable to resist his arguments, would immediately adopt it, they
might be excused for putting him down as a crank who could hardly be
taken seriously. The form in which he put forward his memorable scheme
for the abolition of war exhibits the same sanguine simplicity. All his
plans, Rousseau observed, showed a clear vision of what their effects
would be, "but he judged like a child of means to bring them about." But
his abilities were great, and his actual influence was considerable. It
would have been greater if he had possessed the gift of style.
2.
He was not the first to plan a definite scheme for establishing a
perpetual peace. Long ago Emeric Cruce had given to the world a proposal
for a universal league, including not only the Christian nations of
Europe, but the Turks, Persians, and Tartars, which by means of a court
of arbitration sitting at Venice should ensure the settlement of all
disputes by peaceful means. [Footnote: Le Nouveau Cynee (Paris, 1623).
It has recently been reprinted with an English translation by T. W.
Balch, Philadelphia (1909).] The consequence of universal peace, he
said, will be the arrival of "that beautiful century which the ancient
theologians promise after there have rolled by six thousand years. For
they say that then the world will live happily and in repose. Now it
happens that that time has nearly expired, and even if it is not, it
depends only on the Princes to give beforehand this happiness to their
peoples." Later in the century, others had ventilated similar projects
in obscure publications, but the Abbe does not refer to any of his
predecessors.
He was not blinded by the superficial brilliancy of the reign of Louis
XIV. to the general misery which the ambitious war-policy of that sovran
brought both upon France and upon her enemies. His Annales politiques
are a useful correction to the Siecle de Louis Quatorze. It was in the
course of the great struggle of the Spanish Succession that he
turned his attention to war and came to the conclusion that it is an
unnecessary evil and even an absurdity. In 1712 he attended the congress
at Utrecht in the capacity of secretary to Cardinal de Polignac, one
of the French delegates. His experiences there confirmed his optimistic
mind in the persuasion that perpetual peace was an aim which might
readily be realised; and in the following year he published the memoir
which he had been preparing, in two volumes, to which he added a third
four years later.
Though he appears not to have known the work of Cruce he did not claim
originality. He sheltered his proposal under an august name, entitling
it Project of Henry the Great to render Peace Perpetual, explained
by the Abbe de Saint-Pierre. The reference is to the "great design"
ascribed to Henry IV. by Sully, and aimed at the abasement of the power
of Austria: a federation of the Christian States of Europe arranged
in groups and under a sovran Diet, which would regulate international
affairs and arbitrate in all quarrels. [Footnote: It is described
in Sully's Memoires, Book XXX.] Saint-Pierre, ignoring the fact that
Sully's object was to eliminate a rival power, made it the text for
his own scheme of a perpetual alliance of all the sovrans of Europe
to guarantee to one another the preservation of their states and to
renounce war as a means of settling their differences. He drew up the
terms of such an alliance, and taking the European powers one by
one demonstrated that it was the plain interest of each to sign the
articles. Once the articles were signed the golden age would begin.
[Footnote: For Sully's grand Design compare the interesting article of
Sir Geoffrey Butler in the Edinburgh Review, October 1919.]
It is not to our present purpose to comment on this plan which the
author with his characteristic simplicity seriously pressed upon the
attention of statesmen. It is easy to criticise it in the light of
subsequent history, and to see that, if the impossible had happened and
the experiment had been tried and succeeded, it might have caused more
suffering than all the wars from that day to this. For it was based on a
perpetuation of the political status quo in Europe. It assumed that the
existing political distribution of power was perfectly satisfactory and
conformable to the best interests of all the peoples concerned. It would
have hindered the Partition of Poland, but it would have maintained the
Austrian oppression of Italians. The project also secured to the sovrans
the heritage of their authority and guarded against civil wars. This
assumed that the various existing constitutions were fundamentally just.
The realisation of the scheme would have perpetuated all the evils of
autocratic governments. Its author did not perceive that the radical
evil in France was irresponsible power. It needed the reign of Louis XV.
and the failure of attempts at reform under his successor to bring this
home. The Abbe even thought that an increase of the despotic authority
of the government was desirable, provided this were accompanied by an
increase in the enlightenment and virtue of its ministers.
In 1729 he published an abridgment of his scheme, and here he looks
beyond its immediate results to its value for distant posterity. No one,
he says, can imagine or foresee the advantages which such an alliance
of European states will yield to Europe five hundred years after its
establishment. Now we can see the first beginnings, but it is beyond the
powers of the human mind to discern its infinite effects in the future.
It may produce results more precious than anything hitherto experienced
by man. He supports his argument by observing that our primitive
ancestors could not foresee the improvements which the course of ages
would bring in their rudimentary arrangements for securing social order.
3.
It is characteristic that the Abbe de Saint-Pierre's ideas about
Progress were a by-product of his particular schemes. In 1773 he
published a Project to Perfect the Government of States, and here he
sketched his view of the progressive course of civilisation. The old
legend of the golden age, when men were perfectly happy, succeeded by
the ages of silver, bronze, and iron, exactly reverses the truth of
history. The age of iron came first, the infancy of society, when men
were poor and ignorant of the arts; it is the present condition of the
savages of Africa and America. The age of bronze ensued, in which there
was more security, better laws, and the invention of the most necessary
arts began. There followed the age of silver, and Europe has not yet
emerged from it. Our reason has indeed reached the point of considering
how war may be abolished, and is thus approaching the golden age of the
future; but the art of government and the general regulation of society,
notwithstanding all the improvements of the past, is still in its
infancy. Yet all that is needed is a short series of wise reigns in our
European states to reach the age of gold or, in other words, a paradise
on earth.
A few wise reigns. The Abbe shared the illusion of many that government
is omnipotent and can bestow happiness on men. The imperfections
of governments were, he was convinced, chiefly due to the fact that
hitherto the ablest intellects had not been dedicated to the study of
the science of governing. The most essential part of his project was the
formation of a Political Academy which should do for politics what the
Academy of Sciences did for the study of nature, and should act as
an advisory body to ministers of state on all questions of the public
welfare. If this proposal and some others were adopted, he believed that
the golden age would not long be delayed. These observations--hardly
more than obiter dicta--show that Saint-Pierre's general view of the
world was moulded by a conception of civilisation progressing towards a
goal of human happiness. In 1737 he published a special work to
explain this conception: the Observations on the Continuous Progress of
Universal Reason.
He recurs to the comparison of the life of collective humanity to that
of an individual, and, like Fontenelle and Terrasson, accentuates the
point where the analogy fails. We may regard our race as composed of all
the nations that have been and will be--and assign to it different ages.
For instance, when the race is ten thousand years old a century will be
what a single year is in the life of a centenarian. But there is this
prodigious difference. The mortal man grows old and loses his reason and
happiness through the enfeeblement of his bodily machine; whereas the
human race, by the perpetual and infinite succession of generations,
will find itself at the end of ten thousand years more capable of
growing in wisdom and happiness than it was at the end of four thousand.
At present the race is apparently not more than seven or eight thousand
years old, and is only "in the infancy of human reason," compared with
what it will be five or six thousand years hence. And when that stage is
reached, it will only have entered on what we may call its first youth,
when we consider what it will be when it is a hundred thousand years
older still, continually growing in reason and wisdom.
Here we have for the first time, expressed in definite terms, the vista
of an immensely long progressive life in front of humanity. Civilisation
is only in its infancy. Bacon, like Pascal, had conceived it to be in
its old age. Fontenelle and Perrault seem to have regarded it as in its
virility; they set no term to its duration, but they did not dwell on
future prospects. The Abbe was the first to fix his eye on the remote
destinies of the race and name immense periods of time. It did not occur
to him to consider that our destinies are bound up with those of the
solar system, and that it is useless to operate with millennial periods
of progress unless you are assured of a corresponding stability in the
cosmic environment.
As a test of the progress which reason has already made, Saint-Pierre
asserts that a comparison of the best English and French works on morals
and politics with the best works of Plato and Aristotle proves that the
human race has made a sensible advance. But that advance would have been
infinitely greater were it not that three general obstacles retarded it
and even, at some times and in some countries, caused a retrogression.
These obstacles were wars, superstition, and the Jealousy of rulers who
feared that progress in the science of politics would be dangerous to
themselves. In consequence of these impediments it was only in the time
of Bodin and Bacon that the human race began to start anew from the
point which it had reached in the days of Plato and Aristotle.
Since then the rate of progress has been accelerated, and this has been
due to several causes. The expansion of sea commerce has produced more
wealth, and wealth means greater leisure, and more writers and readers.
In the second place, mathematics and physics are more studied in
colleges, and their tendency is to liberate us from subjection to the
authority of the ancients. Again, the foundation of scientific Academies
has given facilities both for communicating and for correcting new
discoveries; the art of printing provides a means for diffusing them;
and, finally, the habit of writing in the vulgar tongue makes them
accessible. The author might also have referred to the modern efforts to
popularise science, in which his friend Fontenelle had been one of the
leaders.
He proceeds, in this connection, to lay down a rather doubtful
principle, that in any two countries the difference in enlightenment
between the lowest classes will correspond to the difference between the
most highly educated classes. At present, he says, Paris and London are
the places where human wisdom has reached the most advanced stage. It
is certain that the ten best men of the highest class at Ispahan or
Constantinople will be inferior in their knowledge of politics and
ethics to the ten most distinguished sages of Paris or London. And this
will be true in all classes. The thirty most intelligent children of the
age of fourteen at Paris will be more enlightened than the thirty most
intelligent children of the same age at Constantinople, and the same
proportional difference will be true of the lowest classes of the two
cities.
But while the progress of speculative reason has been rapid, practical
reason--the distinction is the Abbe's--has made little advance. In point
of morals and general happiness the world is apparently much the same
as ever. Our mediocre savants know twenty times as much as Socrates and
Confucius, but our most virtuous men are not more virtuous than they.
The growth of science has added much to the arts and conveniences of
life, and to the sum of pleasures, and will add more. The progress
in physical science is part of the progress of the "universal human
reason," whose aim is the augmentation of our happiness. But there are
two other sciences which are much more important for the promotion of
happiness--Ethics and Politics--and these, neglected by men of genius,
have made little way in the course of two thousand years. It is a
grave misfortune that Descartes and Newton did not devote themselves to
perfecting these sciences, so incomparably more useful for mankind
than those in which they made their great discoveries. They fell into a
prevailing error as to the comparative values of the various domains of
knowledge, an error to which we must also ascribe the fact that while
Academies of Sciences and Belles-Lettres exist there are no such
institutions for Politics or Ethics.
By these arguments he establishes to his own satisfaction that there
are no irremovable obstacles to the Progress of the human race towards
happiness, no hindrances that could not be overcome if governments only
saw eye to eye with the Abbe de Saint-Pierre. Superstition is already
on the decline; there would be no more wars if his simple scheme for
permanent peace were adopted. Let the State immediately found Political
and Ethical Academies; let the ablest men consecrate their talents to
the science of government; and in a hundred years we shall make more
progress than we should make in two thousand at the rate we are moving.
If these things are done, human reason will have advanced so far in
two or three millenniums that the wisest men of that age will be as
far superior to the wisest of to-day as these are to the wisest African
savages. This "perpetual and unlimited augmentation of reason" will one
day produce an increase in human happiness which would astonish us more
than our own civilisation would astonish the Kaffirs.
4.
The Abbe de Saint-Pierre was indeed terribly at ease in confronting the
deepest and most complex problems which challenge the intellect of man.
He had no notion of their depth and complexity, and he lightly essayed
them, treating human nature, as if it were an abstraction, by a method
which he would doubtless have described as Cartesian. He was simply
operating with the ideas which were all round him in a society
saturated with Cartesianism,--supremacy of human reason, progressive
enlightenment, the value of this life for its own sake, and the standard
of utility. Given these ideas and the particular bias of his own mind,
it required no great ingenuity to advance from the thought of the
progress of science to the thought of progress in man's moral nature
and his social conditions. The omnipotence of governments to mould the
destinies of peoples, the possibility of the creation of enlightened
governments, and the indefinite progress of enlightenment--all articles
of his belief--were the terms of an argument of the sorites form, which
it was a simple matter to develop in his brief treatise.
But we must not do him injustice. He was a much more considerable
thinker than posterity for a long time was willing to believe. It is
easy to ridicule some of his projets, and dismiss him as a crank who was
also somewhat of a bore. The truth, however, is that many of his schemes
were sound and valuable. His economic ideas, which he thought out for
himself, were in advance of his time, and he has even been described by
a recent writer as "un contemporain egare au xviii siecle." Some of
his financial proposals were put into practice by Turgot. But his
significance in the development of the revolutionary ideas which were
to gain control in the second half of the eighteenth century has
hardly been appreciated yet, and it was imperfectly appreciated by his
contemporaries.
It is easy to see why. His theories are buried in his multitudinous
projets. If, instead of working out the details of endless particular
reforms, he had built up general theories of government and society,
economics and education, they might have had no more intrinsic
value, but he would have been recognised as the precursor of the
Encyclopaedists.
For his principles are theirs. The omnipotence of government and laws to
mould the morals of peoples; the subordination of all knowledge to the
goddess of utility; the deification of human reason; and the doctrine
of Progress. His crude utilitarianism led him to depreciate the study of
mathematical and physical sciences--notwithstanding his veneration for
Descartes--as comparatively useless, and he despised the fine arts as
waste of time and toil which might be better spent. He had no
knowledge of natural science and he had no artistic susceptibility. The
philosophers of the Encyclopaedia did not go so far, but they tended
in this direction. They were cold and indifferent towards speculative
science, and they were inclined to set higher value on artisans than on
artists.
In his religious ideas the Abbe differed from Voltaire and the later
social philosophers in one important respect, but this very difference
was a consequence of his utilitarianism. Like them he was a Deist, as we
saw; he had imbibed the spirit of Bayle and the doctrine of the English
rationalists, which were penetrating French society during the later
part of his life. His God, however, was more than the creator and
organiser of the Encyclopaedists, he was also the "Dieu vengeur et
remunerateur" in whom Voltaire believed. But here his faith was larger
than Voltaire's. For while Voltaire referred the punishments and rewards
to this life, the Abbe believed in the immortality of the soul,
in heaven and hell. He acknowledged that immortality could not be
demonstrated, that it was only probable, but he clung to it firmly and
even intolerantly. It is clear from his writings that his affection for
this doctrine was due to its utility, as an auxiliary to the magistrate
and the tutor, and also to the consideration that Paradise would add to
the total of human happiness.
But though his religion had more articles, he was as determined a foe of
"superstition" as Voltaire, Diderot, and the rest. He did not go so
far as they in aggressive rationalism--he belonged to an older
generation--but his principles were the same.
The Abbe de Saint-Pierre thus represents the transition from the earlier
Cartesianism, which was occupied with purely intellectual problems, to
the later thought of the eighteenth century, which concentrated itself
on social problems. He anticipated the "humanistic" spirit of the
Encyclopaedists, who were to make man, in a new sense, the centre of
the world. He originated, or at least was the first to proclaim, the new
creed of man's destinies, indefinite social progress.