The theory of human Progress could not be durably established by
abstract arguments, or on the slender foundations laid by the Abbe de
Saint-Pierre. It must ultimately be judged by the evidence afforded
by history, and it is not accidental that, contemporaneously with the
advent of this idea, the study of history underwent a revolution. If
Progress was to be more than the sanguine dream of an optimist it must
be shown that man's career on earth had not been a chapter of accidents
which might lead anywhere or nowhere, but is subject to discoverable
laws which have determined its general route, and will secure his
arrival at the desirable place. Hitherto a certain order and unity had
been found in history by the Christian theory of providential design and
final causes. New principles of order and unity were needed to replace
the principles which rationalism had discredited. Just as the advance of
science depended on the postulate that physical phenomena are subject
to invariable laws, so if any conclusions were to be drawn from history
some similar postulate as to social phenomena was required.
It was thus in harmony with the general movement of thought that about
the middle of the eighteenth century new lines of investigation were
opened leading to sociology, the history of civilisation, and the
philosophy of history. Montesquieu's De l'esprit des lois, which may
claim to be the parent work of modern social science, Voltaire's Essai
sur les moeurs, and Turgot's plan of a Histoire universelle begin a new
era in man's vision of the past.
1.
Montesquieu was not among the apostles of the idea of Progress. It
never secured any hold upon his mind. But he had grown up in the same
intellectual climate in which that idea was produced; he had been
nurtured both on the dissolving, dialectic of Bayle, and on the
Cartesian enunciation of natural law. And his work contributed to the
service, not of the doctrine of the past, but of the doctrine of the
future.
For he attempted to extend the Cartesian theory to social facts. He laid
down that political, like physical, phenomena are subject to general
laws. He had already conceived this, his most striking and important
idea, when he wrote the Considerations on the Greatness and Decadence of
the Romans (1734), in which he attempted to apply it:
It is not Fortune who governs the world, as we see from the history of
the Romans. There are general causes, moral or physical, which operate
in every monarchy, raise it, maintain it, or overthrow it; all that
occurs is subject to these causes; and if a particular cause, like the
accidental result of a battle, has ruined a state, there was a general
cause which made the downfall of this state ensue from a single battle.
In a word, the principal movement (l'allure principale) draws with it
all the particular occurrences.
But if this excludes Fortune it also dispenses with Providence, design,
and final causes; and one of the effects of the Considerations which
Montesquieu cannot have overlooked was to discredit Bossuet's treatment
of history.
The Esprit des lois appeared fourteen years later. Among books which
have exercised a considerable influence on thought few are more
disappointing to a modern reader. The author had not the gift of what
might be called logical architecture, and his work produces the effect
of a collection of ideas which he was unable to co-ordinate in the
clarity of a system. A new principle, the operation of general causes,
is enthroned; but, beyond the obvious distinction of physical and moral,
they are not classified. We have no guarantee that the moral causes are
fully enumerated, and those which are original are not distinguished
from those which are derived. The general cause which Montesquieu
impresses most clearly on the reader's mind is that of physical
environment--geography and climate.
The influence of climate on civilisation was not a new idea. In modern
times, as we have seen, it was noticed by Bodin and recognised by
Fontenelle. The Abbe de Saint-Pierre applied it to explain the origin of
the Mohammedan religion, and the Abbe Du Bos in his Reflexions on Poetry
and Painting maintained that climate helps to determine the epochs
of art and science. Chardin in his Travels, a book which Montesquieu
studied, had also appreciated its importance. But Montesquieu drew
general attention to it, and since he wrote, geographical conditions
have been recognised by all inquirers as an influential factor in the
development of human societies. His own discussion of the question did
not result in any useful conclusions. He did not determine the limits of
the action of physical conditions, and a reader hardly knows whether to
regard them as fundamental or accessory, as determining the course of
civilisation or only perturbing it. "Several things govern men," he
says, "climate, religion, laws, precepts of government, historical
examples, morals, and manners, whence is formed as their result a
general mind (esprit general)." This co-ordination of climate with
products of social life is characteristic of his unsystematic thought.
But the remark which the author went on to make, that there is always
a correlation between the laws of a people and its esprit general, was
important. It pointed to the theory that all the products of social life
are closely interrelated.
In Montesquieu's time people were under the illusion that legislation
has an almost unlimited power to modify social conditions. We have seen
this in the case of Saint-Pierre. Montesquieu's conception of general
laws should have been an antidote to this belief. It had however less
effect on his contemporaries than we might have expected, and they
found more to their purpose in what he said of the influence of laws on
manners. There may be something in Comte's suggestion that he could not
give his conception any real consistency or vigour, just because he
was himself unconsciously under the influence of excessive faith in the
effects of legislative action.
A fundamental defect in Montesquieu's treatment of social phenomena is
that he abstracted them from their relations in time. It was his merit
to attempt to explain the correlation of laws and institutions with
historical circumstances, but he did not distinguish or connect stages
of civilisation. He was inclined to confound, as Sorel has observed,
all periods and constitutions. Whatever be the value of the idea of
Progress, we may agree with Comte that, if Montesquieu had grasped
it, he would have produced a more striking work. His book announces a
revolution in the study of political science, but in many ways belongs
itself to the pre-Montesquieu era.
2.
In the same years in which Montesquieu was busy on the composition of
the Esprit des lois, Voltaire was writing his Age of Louis XIV. and his
Essay on the Manners and Mind of Nations, and on the Principal Facts of
History from Charlemagne to the Death of Louis XIII. The former work,
which everybody reads still, appeared in 1751. Parts of the Essay, which
has long since fallen into neglect, were published in the Mercure de
France between 1745 and 1751; it was issued complete in 1756, along with
the Age of Louis XIV., which was its continuation. If we add the Precis
of the Reign of Louis XV. (1769), and observe that the Introduction and
first fourteen chapters of the Essay sketch the history of the world
before Charlemagne, and that China, India, and America are included
in the survey, Voltaire's work amounts to a complete survey of the
civilisation of the world from the earliest times to his own. If
Montesquieu founded social science, Voltaire created the history of
civilisation, and the Essay, for all its limitations, stands out as one
of the considerable books of the century.
In his Age of Louis XIV. he announced that his object was "to paint not
the actions of a single man, but the mind of men (l'esprit des hommes)
in the most enlightened age that had ever been," and that "the progress
of the arts and sciences" was an essential part of his subject. In
the same way he proposed in the Essay to trace "l'histoire de l'esprit
humain," not the details of facts, and to show by what steps man
advanced "from the barbarous rusticity" of the times of Charlemagne and
his successors "to the politeness of our own." To do this, he said, was
really to write the history of opinion, for all the great successive
social and political changes which have transformed the world were due
to changes of opinion. Prejudice succeeded prejudice, error followed
error; "at last, with time men came to correct their ideas and learn to
think."
The motif of the book is, briefly, that wars and religions have been
the great obstacles to the progress of humanity, and that if they were
abolished, with the prejudices which engender them, the world would
rapidly improve.
"We may believe," he says, "that reason and industry will always
progress more and more; that the useful arts will be improved; that
of the evils which have afflicted men, prejudices, which are not their
least scourge, will gradually disappear among all those who govern
nations, and that philosophy, universally diffused, will give some
consolation to human nature for the calamities which it will experience
in all ages."
This indeed is not the tone of the Abbe de Saint-Pierre. Voltaire's
optimism was always tempered with cynicism. But the idea of Progress
is there, though moderately conceived. And it is based on the same
principle--universal reason implanted in man, which "subsists in spite
of all the passions which make war on it, in spite of all the tyrants
who would drown it in blood, in spite of the imposters who would
annihilate it by superstition." And this was certainly his considered
view. His common sense prevented him from indulging in Utopian
speculations about the future; and his cynicism constantly led him to
use the language of a pessimist. But at an early stage of his career he
had taken up arms for human nature against that "sublime misanthrope"
Pascal, who "writes against human nature almost as he wrote against
the Jesuits"; and he returned to the attack at the end of his life. Now
Pascal's Pensees enshrined a theory of life--the doctrine of original
sin, the idea that the object of life is to prepare for death--which was
sternly opposed to the spirit of Progress. Voltaire instinctively felt
that this was an enemy that had to be dealt with. In a lighter vein he
had maintained in a well-known poem, Le Mondain, [Footnote: 1756.] the
value of civilisation and all its effects, including luxury, against
those who regretted the simplicity of ancient times, the golden age of
Saturn.
O le bon temps que ce siecle de fer!
Life in Paris, London, or Rome to-day is infinitely preferable to life
in the garden of Eden.
D'un bon vin frais ou la mousse ou la seve
Ne gratta point le triste gosier d'Eve.
La soie et l'or ne brillaient point chez eux.
Admirez-vous pour cela nos aieux?
Il leur manquait l'industrie et l'aisance:
Est-ce vertu? c'etait pure ignorance.
To return to the Essay, it flung down the gage of battle to that
conception of the history of the world which had been brilliantly
represented by Bossuet's Discours sur l'histoire universelle. This work
was constantly in Voltaire's mind. He pointed out that it had no claim
to be universal; it related only to four or five peoples, and especially
the little Jewish nation which "was unknown to the rest of the world or
justly despised," but which Bossuet made the centre of interest, as
if the final cause of all the great empires of antiquity lay in their
relations to the Jews. He had Bossuet in mind when he said "we will
speak of the Jews as we would speak of Scythians or Greeks, weighing
probabilities and discussing facts." In his new perspective the
significance of Hebrew history is for the first time reduced to moderate
limits.
But it was not only in this particular, though central, point that
Voltaire challenged Bossuet's view. He eliminated final causes
altogether, and Providence plays no part on his historical stage. Here
his work reinforced the teaching of Montesquieu. Otherwise Montesquieu
and Voltaire entirely differed in their methods. Voltaire concerned
himself only with the causal enchainment of events and the immediate
motives of men. His interpretation of history was confined to the
discovery of particular causes; he did not consider the operation of
those larger general causes which Montesquieu investigated. Montesquieu
sought to show that the vicissitudes of societies were subject to law;
Voltaire believed that events were determined by chance where they
were not consciously guided by human reason. The element of chance is
conspicuous even in legislation: "almost all laws have been instituted
to meet passing needs, like remedies applied fortuitously, which have
cured one patient and kill others."
On Voltaire's theory, the development of humanity might at any moment
have been diverted into a different course; but whatever course it
took the nature of human reason would have ensured a progress in
civilisation. Yet the reader of the Essay and Louis XIV. might well
have come away with a feeling that the security of Progress is frail
and precarious. If fortune has governed events, if the rise and fall
of empires, the succession of religions, the revolutions of states, and
most of the great crises of history were decided by accidents, is there
any cogent ground for believing that human reason, the principle to
which Voltaire attributes the advance of civilisation, will prevail in
the long run? Civilisation has been organised here and there, now and
then, up to a certain point; there have been eras of rapid progress,
but how can we be sure that these are not episodes, themselves also
fortuitous? For growth has been followed by decay, progress by regress;
can it be said that history, authorises the conclusion that reason will
ever gain such an ascendancy that the play of chance will no longer
be able to thwart her will? Is such a conclusion more than a hope,
unsanctioned by the data of past experience, merely one of the
characteristics of the age of illumination?
Voltaire and Montesquieu thus raised fundamental questions of great
moment for the doctrine of Progress, questions which belong to what
was soon to be known as the Philosophy of History, a name invented by
Voltaire, though hardly meant by him in the sense which it afterwards
assumed.
3.
Six years before Voltaire's Essay was published in its complete form a
young man was planning a work on the same subject. Turgot is honourably
remembered as an economist and administrator, but if he had ever written
the Discourses on Universal History which he designed at the age
of twenty-three his position in historical literature might have
overshadowed his other claims to be remembered. We possess a partial
sketch of its plan, which is supplemented by two lectures he delivered
at the Sorbonne in 1750; so that we know his general conceptions.
He had assimilated the ideas of the Esprit des lois, and it is probable
that he had read the parts of Voltaire's work which had appeared in
a periodical. His work, like Voltaire's, was to be a challenge to
Bossuet's view of history; his purpose was to trace the fortunes of the
race in the light of the idea of Progress. He occasionally refers to
Providence but this is no more than a prudent lip-service. Providence
has no functions in his scheme. The part which it played in Bossuet is
usurped by those general causes which he had learned from Montesquieu.
But his systematic mind would have organised and classified the ideas
which Montesquieu left somewhat confused. He criticised the inductions
drawn in the Esprit des lois concerning the influence of climate as
hasty and exaggerated; and he pointed out that the physical causes can
only produce their effects by acting on "the hidden principles which
contribute to form our mind and character." It follows that the
psychical or moral causes are the first element to consider, and it is
a fault of method to try to evaluate physical causes till we have
exhausted the moral, and are certain that the phenomena cannot be
explained by these alone. In other words, the study of the development
of societies must be based on psychology; and for Turgot, as for all his
progressive contemporaries, psychology meant the philosophy of Locke.
General necessary causes, therefore, which we should rather call
conditions, have determined the course of history--the nature of man,
his passions, and his reason, in the first place; and in the second, his
environment,--geography and climate. But its course is a strict sequence
of particular causes and effects, "which bind the state of the world (at
a given moment) to all those which have preceded it." Turgot does not
discuss the question of free-will, but his causal continuity does not
exclude "the free action of great men." He conceives universal history
as the progress of the human race advancing as an immense whole
steadily, though slowly, through alternating periods of calm and
disturbance towards greater perfection. The various units of the entire
mass do not move with equal steps, because nature is not impartial with
her gifts. Some men have talents denied to others, and the gifts of
nature are sometimes developed by circumstances, sometimes left buried
in obscurity. The inequalities in the march of nations are due to the
infinite variety of circumstances; and these inequalities may be taken
to prove that the world had a beginning, for in an eternal duration they
would have disappeared.
But the development of human societies has not been guided by human
reason. Men have not consciously made general happiness the end of their
actions. They have been conducted by passion and ambition and have
never known to what goal they were moving. For if reason had presided,
progress would soon have been arrested. To avoid war peoples would have
remained in isolation, and the race would have lived divided for ever
into a multitude of isolated groups, speaking different tongues. All
these groups would have been limited in the range of their ideas,
stationary in science, art, and government, and would never have risen
above mediocrity. The history of China is an example of the results of
restricted intercourse among peoples. Thus the unexpected conclusion
emerges, that without unreason and injustice there would have been no
progress.
It is hardly necessary to observe that this argument is untenable.
The hypothesis assumes that reason is in control among the primitive
peoples, and at the same time supposes that its power would completely
disappear if they attempted to engage in peaceful intercourse. But
though Turgot has put his point in an unconvincing form, his purpose was
to show that as a matter of fact "the tumultuous and dangerous passions"
have been driving-forces which have moved the world in a desirable
direction till the time should come for reason to take the helm.
Thus, while Turgot might have subscribed to Voltaire's assertion that
history is largely "un ramas de crimes, de folies, et de malheurs," his
view of the significance of man's sufferings is different and almost
approaches the facile optimism of Pope--"whatever is, is right." He
regards all the race's actual experiences as the indispensable mechanism
of Progress, and does not regret its mistakes and calamities. Many
changes and revolutions, he observes, may seem to have had most
mischievous effects; yet every change has brought some advantage, for
it has been a new experience and therefore has been instructive.
Man advances by committing errors. The history of science shows (as
Fontenelle had pointed out) that truth is reached over the ruins of
false hypotheses.
The difficulty presented by periods of decadence and barbarism
succeeding epochs of enlightenment is met by the assertion that in
such dark times the world has not stood still; there has really been a
progression which, though relatively inconspicuous, is not unimportant.
In the Middle Ages, which are the prominent case, there were
improvements in mechanical arts, in commerce, in some of the habits of
civil life, all of which helped to prepare the way for happier times.
Here Turgot's view of history is sharply opposed to Voltaire's. He
considers Christianity to have been a powerful agent of civilisation,
not a hinderer or an enemy. Had he executed his design, his work might
well have furnished a notable makeweight to the view held by Voltaire,
and afterwards more judicially developed by Gibbon, that "the triumph of
barbarism and religion" was a calamity for the world.
Turgot also propounded two laws of development. He observed that when a
people is progressing, every step it takes causes an acceleration in the
rate of progress. And he anticipated Comte's famous "law" of the three
stages of intellectual evolution, though without giving it the extensive
and fundamental significance which Comte claimed for it. "Before man
understood the causal connection of physical phenomena, nothing was
so natural as to suppose they were produced by intelligent beings,
invisible and resembling ourselves; for what else would they have
resembled?" That is Comte's theological stage. "When philosophers
recognised the absurdity of the fables about the gods, but had not yet
gained an insight into natural history, they thought to explain the
causes of phenomena by abstract expressions such as essences and
faculties." That is the metaphysical stage. "It was only at a later
period, that by observing the reciprocal mechanical action of bodies
hypotheses were formed which could be developed by mathematics and
verified by experience." There is the positive stage. The observation
assuredly does not possess the far-reaching importance which Comte
attached to it; but whatever value it has, Turgot deserves the credit of
having been the first to state it.
The notes which Turgot made for his plan permit us to conjecture that
his Universal History would have been a greater and more profound work
than the Essay of Voltaire. It would have embodied in a digested form
the ideas of Montesquieu to which Voltaire paid little attention, and
the author would have elaborated the intimate connection and mutual
interaction among all social phenomena--government and morals, religion,
science, and arts. While his general thesis coincided with that
of Voltaire--the gradual advance of humanity towards a state of
enlightenment and reasonableness,--he made the idea of Progress more
vital; for him it was an organising conception, just as the idea of
Providence was for St. Augustine and Bossuet an organising conception,
which gave history its unity and meaning. The view that man has
throughout been blindly moving in the right direction is the counterpart
of what Bossuet represented as a divine plan wrought out by the actions
of men who are ignorant of it, and is sharply opposed to the views, of
Voltaire and the other philosophers of the day who ascribed Progress
exclusively to human reason consciously striving against ignorance and
passion.