1.
The intellectual movement which prepared French opinion for the
Revolution and supplied the principles for reconstituting society may
be described as humanistic in the sense that man was the centre of
speculative interest.
"One consideration especially that we ought never to lose from sight,"
says Diderot, "is that, if we ever banish a man, or the thinking and
contemplative being, from above the surface of the earth, this pathetic
and sublime spectacle of nature becomes no more than a scene of
melancholy and silence... It is the presence of man that gives its
interest to the existence of other beings... Why should we not make him
a common centre?... Man is the single term from which we ought to set
out." [Footnote: The passage from Diderot's article Encyclopedie is
given as translated by Morley, Diderot, i, 145.] Hence psychology,
morals, the structure of society, were the subjects which riveted
attention instead of the larger supra-human problems which had occupied
Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibnitz. It mattered little whether the
universe was the best that could be constructed; what mattered was the
relation of man's own little world to his will and capacities.
Physical science was important only in so far as it could help social
science and minister to the needs of man. The closest analogy to this
development of thought is not offered by the Renaissance, to which the
description HUMANISTIC has been conventionally appropriated, but rather
by the age of illumination in Greece in the latter half of the fifth
century B.C., represented by Protagoras, Socrates, and others who turned
from the ultimate problems of the cosmos, hitherto the main study of
philosophers, to man, his nature and his works.
In this revised form of "anthropo-centrism" we see how the general
movement of thought has instinctively adapted itself to the astronomical
revolution. On the Ptolemaic system it was not incongruous or absurd
that man, lord of the central domain in the universe, should regard
himself as the most important cosmic creature. This is the view,
implicit in the Christian scheme, which had been constructed on the old
erroneous cosmology. When the true place of the earth was shown and
man found himself in a tiny planet attached to one of innumerable solar
worlds, his cosmic importance could no longer be maintained. He was
reduced to the condition of an insect creeping on a "tas de boue," which
Voltaire so vividly illustrated in Micromegas. But man is resourceful;
[words in Greek]. Displaced, along with his home, from the centre of
things, he discovers a new means of restoring his self-importance;
he interprets his humiliation as a deliverance. Finding himself in an
insignificant island floating in the immensity of space, he decides that
he is at last master of his own destinies; he can fling away the old
equipment of final causes, original sin, and the rest; he can construct
his own chart and, bound by no cosmic scheme, he need take the universe
into account only in so far as he judges it to be to his own profit. Or,
if he is a philosopher, he may say that, after all, the universe for
him is built out of his own sensations, and that by virtue of this
relativity "anthropo-centrism" is restored in a new and more effective
form.
Built out of his own sensations: for the philosophy of Locke was now
triumphant in France. I have used the term Cartesianism to designate,
not the metaphysical doctrines of Descartes (innate ideas, two
substances, and the rest), but the great principles which survived the
passing of his metaphysical system--the supremacy of reason, and the
immutability of natural laws, not subject to providential interventions.
These principles still controlled thought, but the particular views
of Descartes on mental phenomena were superseded in France by the
psychology of Locke, whose influence was established by Voltaire and
Condillac. The doctrine that all our ideas are derived from the senses
lay at the root of the whole theory of man and society, in the light of
which the revolutionary thinkers, Diderot, Helvetius, and their fellows,
criticised the existing order and exposed the reigning prejudices. This
sensationalism (which went beyond what Locke himself had really meant)
involved the strict relativity of knowledge and led at once to the old
pragmatic doctrine of Protagoras, that man is the measure of all things.
And the spirit of the French philosophers of the eighteenth century was
distinctly pragmatic. The advantage of man was their principle, and the
value of speculation was judged by its definite service to humanity.
"The value and rights of truth are founded on its utility," which is
"the unique measure of man's judgements," one thinker asserts; another
declares that "the useful circumscribes everything," l'utile circonscrit
tout; another lays down that "to be virtuous is to be useful; to be
vicious is to be useless or harmful; that is the sum of morality."
Helvetius, anticipating Bentham, works out the theory that utility is
the only possible basis of ethics. Bacon, the utilitarian, was
extolled like Locke. [Footnote: The passages quoted on utility are
from d'Holbach, Systems de la nature, i. c. 12, p. 224; c. 15, p. 312;
Diderot, De I'interpretation de la nature in OEuvres, ii. p. 13; Raynal,
Histoire des deux Indes, vii. p. 416. The effectiveness of the teaching
may be illustrated from the Essay on Man, by Antoine Rivarol, whom Burke
called the Tacitus of the Revolution. "The virtues are only virtues
because they are useful to the human race." OEuvres choisis (ed. de
Lescure), i. p. 211.] As, a hundred years before, his influence had
inspired the foundation of the Royal Society, so now his name
was invoked by the founders of the Encyclopaedia. [Footnote: See
d'Alembert's tribute to him in the Discours preliminaire.]
Beneath all philosophical speculation there is an undercurrent of
emotion, and in the French philosophers of the eighteenth century this
emotional force was strong and even violent. They aimed at practical
results. Their work was a calculated campaign to transform the
principles and the spirit of governments and to destroy sacerdotalism.
The problem for the human race being to reach a state of felicity by its
own powers, these thinkers believed that it was soluble by the gradual
triumph of reason over prejudice and knowledge over ignorance. Violent
revolution was far from their thoughts; by the diffusion of knowledge
they hoped to create a public opinion which would compel governments to
change the tenor of their laws and administration and make the happiness
of the people their guiding principle. The optimistic confidence that
man is perfectible, which means capable of indefinite improvement,
inspired the movement as a whole, however greatly particular thinkers
might differ in their views.
Belief in Progress was their sustaining faith, although, occupied by
the immediate problems of amelioration, they left it rather vague and
ill-defined. The word itself is seldom pronounced in their writings. The
idea is treated as subordinate to the other ideas in the midst of which
it had grown up: Reason, Nature, Humanity, Illumination (lumieres). It
has not yet entered upon an independent life of its own and received a
distinct label, though it is already a vital force.
In reviewing the influences which were forming a new public opinion
during the forty years before the Revolution, it is convenient for the
present purpose to group together the thinkers (including Voltaire)
associated with the Encyclopaedia, who represented a critical and
consciously aggressive force against traditional theories and existing
institutions. The constructive thinker Rousseau was not less
aggressive, but he stands apart and opposed, by his hostility to modern
civilisation. Thirdly, we must distinguish the school of Economists,
also reformers and optimists, but of more conservative temper than the
typical Encyclopaedists.
2.
The Encyclopaedia (1751-1765) has rightly been pronounced the central
work of the rationalistic movement which made the France of 1789 so
different from the France of 1715. [Footnote: The general views which
governed the work may be gathered from d'Alembert's introductory
discourse and from Diderot's article Encyclopedie. An interesting sketch
of the principal contributors will be found in Morley's Diderot, i.
chap. v. Another modern study of the Encyclopaedic movement is the
monograph of L. Ducros, Les Encyclopidistes (1900). Helvetius has
recently been the subject of a study by Albert Keim (Helvetius, sa vie
et son oeuvre, 1907). Among other works which help the study of the
speculations of this age from various points of view may be mentioned:
Marius Roustan, Les Philosophes et la societe francaise au xviii
siecle(1906); Espinas, La Philosophie sociale du xviii siecle et la
Revolution (1898); Lichtenberger, Le Socialisme au xviii siecle(1895).
I have not mentioned in the text Boullanger (1722-1758), who contributed
to the Encyclopaedia the article on Political Economy (which has nothing
to do with economics but treats of ancient theocracies); the emphasis
laid on his views on progress by Buchez (op. cit. i. III sqq.) is
quite excessive.] It was the organised section of a vast propaganda,
speculative and practical, carried on by men of the most various
views, most of whom were associated directly with it. As has well been
observed, it did for the rationalism of the eighteenth century in France
much what the Fortnightly Review, under the editorship of Mr. Morley
(from 1868 to 1882) did for that of the nineteenth in England, as an
organ for the penetrating criticism of traditional beliefs. If Diderot,
who directed the Encyclopaedia with the assistance of d'Alembert the
mathematician, had lived a hundred years later he would probably have
edited a journal.
We saw that the "solidarity" of the sciences was one of the conceptions
associated with the theory of intellectual progress, and that the
popularisation of knowledge was another. Both these conceptions
inspired the Encyclopaedia, which was to gather up and concentrate
the illumination of the modern age. It was to establish the lines of
communication among all departments, "to enclose in the unity of a
system the infinitely various branches of knowledge." And it was to be a
library of popular instruction. But it was also intended to be an organ
of propaganda. In the history of the intellectual revolution it is
in some ways the successor of the Dictionary of Bayle, which,
two generations before, collected the material of war to demolish
traditional doctrines. The Encyclopaedia carried on the campaign against
authority and superstition by indirect methods, but it was the work of
men who were not sceptics like Bayle, but had ideals, positive purposes,
and social hopes. They were not only confident in reason and in
science, but most of them had also a more or less definite belief in the
possibility of an advance of humanity towards perfection.
As one of their own band afterwards remarked, they were less occupied in
enlarging the bounds of knowledge than in spreading the light and making
war on prejudice. [Footnote: Condorcet, Esquisse, p. 206 (ed. 1822).]
The views of the individual contributors differed greatly, and they
cannot be called a school, but they agreed so far in common tendencies
that they were able to form a co-operative alliance.
The propaganda of which the Encyclopaedia was the centre was reinforced
by the independent publications of some of the leading men who
collaborated or were closely connected with their circle, notably those
of Diderot himself, Baron d'Holbach, and Helvetius.
3.
The optimism of the Encyclopaedists was really based on an intense
consciousness of the enlightenment of their own age. The progressiveness
of knowledge was taken as axiomatic, but was there any guarantee that
the light, now confined to small circles, could ever enlighten the world
and regenerate mankind? They found the guarantee they required, not in
an induction from the past experience of the race, but in an a priori
theory: the indefinite malleability of human nature by education
and institutions. This had been, as we saw, assumed by the Abbe de
Saint-Pierre. It pervaded the speculation of the age, and was formally
deduced from the sensational psychology of Locke and Condillac. It was
developed, in an extreme form, in the work of Helvetius, De l'esprit
(1758).
In this book, which was to exert a large influence in England, Helvetius
sought, among other things, to show that the science of morals is
equivalent to the science of legislation, and that in a well-organised
society all men are capable of rising to the highest point of mental
development. Intellectual and moral inequalities between man and man
arise entirely from differences in education and social circumstances.
Genius itself is not a gift of nature; the man of genius is a product of
circumstances--social, not physical, for Helvetius rejects the
influence of climate. It follows that if you change education and social
institutions you can change the character of men.
The error of Helvetius in ignoring the irremovable physical differences
between individuals, the varieties of cerebral organisation, was at once
pointed out by Diderot. This error, however, was not essential to the
general theory of the immeasurable power of social institutions over
human character, and other thinkers did not fall into it. All alike,
indeed, were blind to the factor of heredity. But the theory in its
collective application contains a truth which nineteenth century
critics, biassed by their studies in heredity, have been prone to
overlook. The social inheritance of ideas and emotions to which
the individual is submitted from infancy is more important than the
tendencies physically transmitted from parent to child. The power
of education and government in moulding the members of a society
has recently been illustrated on a large scale in the psychological
transformation of the German people in the life of a generation.
It followed from the theory expounded by Helvetius that there is no
impassable barrier between the advanced and the stationary or retrograde
races of the earth. [Footnote: The most informing discussion of the
relations between the Advanced and Backward races is Bryce's Romanes
Lecture (1902).] "True morality," Baron d'Holbach wrote, "should be
the same for all the inhabitants of the globe. The savage man and
the civilised; the white man, the red man, the black man; Indian and
European, Chinaman and Frenchman, Negro and Lapp have the same nature.
The differences between them are only modifications of the common nature
produced by climate, government, education, opinions, and the various
causes which operate on them. Men differ only in the ideas they form
of happiness and the means which they have imagined to obtain it." Here
again the eighteenth century theorists held a view which can no longer
be dismissed as absurd. Some are coming round to the opinion that
enormous differences in capacity which seem fundamental are a result of
the differences in social inheritance, and that these again are due to
a long sequence of historical circumstances; and consequently that there
is no people in the world doomed by nature to perpetual inferiority
or irrevocably disqualified by race from playing a useful part in the
future of civilisation.
4.
This doctrine of the possibility of indefinitely moulding the characters
of men by laws and institutions--whether combined or not with a belief
in the natural equality of men's faculties--laid a foundation on which
the theory of the perfectibility of humanity could be raised. It marked,
therefore, an important stage in the development of the doctrine of
Progress.
It gave, moreover, a new and larger content to that doctrine by its
applicability, not only to the peoples which are at present in the van
of civilisation, but also to those which have lagged far behind and may
appear irreclaimably barbarous--thus potentially including all humanity
in the prospect of the future. Turgot had already conceived "the total
mass of the human race moving always slowly forward"; he had declared
that the human mind everywhere contains the germs of progress and
that the inequality of peoples is due to the infinite variety of their
circumstances. This enlarging conception was calculated to add strength
to the idea of Progress, by raising it to a synthesis comprehending not
merely the western civilised nations but the whole human world.
Interest in the remote peoples of the earth, in the unfamiliar
civilisations of the East, in the untutored races of America and Africa,
was vivid in France in the eighteenth century. Everyone knows how
Voltaire and Montesquieu used Hurons or Persians to hold up the glass to
Western manners and morals, as Tacitus used the Germans to criticise the
society of Rome. But very few ever look into the seven volumes of the
Abbe Raynal's History of the Two Indies which appeared in 1772. It
is however, one of the remarkable books of the century. Its immediate
practical importance lay in the array of facts which it furnished to the
friends of humanity in the movement against negro slavery. But it was
also an effective attack on the Church and the sacerdotal system. The
author's method was the same which his greater contemporary Gibbon
employed on a larger scale. A history of facts was a more formidable
indictment than any declamatory attack.
Raynal brought home to the conscience of Europeans the miseries
which had befallen the natives of the New World through the Christian
conquerors and their priests. He was not indeed an enthusiastic preacher
of Progress. He is unable to decide between the comparative advantages
of the savage state of nature and the most highly cultivated society.
But he observes that "the human race is what we wish to make it," that
the felicity of man depends entirely on the improvement of legislation;
and in the survey of the history of Europe to which the last Book of
his work is devoted, his view is generally optimistic. [Footnote:
cp. Raynal, Histoire, vii. 214, 256. This book was first published
anonymously; the author's name appeared in the edition of 1780.]
5. Baron d'Holbach had a more powerful brain than Helvetius, but his
writings had probably less influence, though he was the spiritual father
of two prominent Revolutionaries, Hebert and Chaumette. His System of
Nature (1770) develops a purely naturalistic theory of the universe, in
which the prevalent Deism is rejected: there is no God; material Nature
stands out alone, self-sufficing, dominis privata superbis. The book
suggests how the Lucretian theory of development might have led to the
idea of Progress. But it sent a chilly shock to the hearts of many
and probably convinced few. The effective part was the outspoken and
passionate indictment of governments and religions as causes of most of
the miseries of mankind.
It is in other works, especially in his Social System, that his views
of Progress are to be sought. Man is simply a part of nature; he has
no privileged position, and he is born neither good nor bad. Erras, as
Seneca said, si existumas vitia nobiscum esse: supervenerunt, ingesta
sunt. [Footnote: Seneca, Ep. 124.] We are made good or bad by education,
public opinion, laws, government; and here the author points to the
significance of the instinct of imitation as a social force, which a
modern writer, M. Tarde, has worked into a system.
The evils, which are due to the errors of tyranny and superstition, the
force of truth will gradually diminish if it cannot completely banish
them; for our governments and laws may be perfected by the progress
of useful knowledge. But the process will be a long one: centuries of
continuous mental effort in unravelling the causes of social ill-being
and repeated experiments to determine the remedies (des experiences
reiterees de la societe). In any case we cannot look forward to the
attainment of an unchangeable or unqualified felicity. That is a mere
chimera "incompatible with the nature of a being whose feeble machine
is subject to derangement and whose ardent imagination will not always
submit to the guidance of reason. Sometimes to enjoy, sometimes to
suffer, is the lot of man; to enjoy more often than to suffer is what
constitutes well-being."
D'Holbach was a strict determinist; he left no room for freewill in
the rigorous succession of cause and effect, and the pages in which he
drives home the theory of causal necessity are still worth reading. From
his naturalistic principles he inferred that the distinction between
nature and art is not fundamental; civilisation is as rational as the
savage state. Here he was at one with Aristotle.
All the successive inventions of the human mind to change or perfect
man's mode of existence and render it happier were only the necessary
consequence of his essence and that of the existences which act upon
him. All we do or think, all we are or shall be, is only an effect of
what universal nature has made us. Art is only nature acting by the aid
of the instruments which she has fashioned. [Footnote: The passages of
d'Holbach specially referred to are: Systeme social, i. 1, p. 13; Syst.
de la nature, i. 6, p. 88; Syst. soc. i. 15, p. 271; Syst. de la n. i.
1, p. 3.]
Progress, therefore, is natural and necessary, and to criticise or
condemn it by appealing to nature is only to divide the house of nature
against itself.
If d'Holbach had pressed his logic further, he would have taken a more
indulgent and calmer view of the past history of mankind. He would have
acknowledged that institutions and opinions to which modern reason may
give short shrift were natural and useful in their day, and would have
recognised that at any stage of history the heritage of the past is no
less necessary to progress than the solvent power of new ideas. Most
thinkers of his time were inclined to judge the past career of humanity
anachronistically. All the things that had been done or thought which
could not be justified in the new age of enlightenment, were regarded
as gratuitous and inexcusable errors. The traditions, superstitions, and
customs, the whole "code of fraud and woe" transmitted from the past,
weighed then too heavily in France to allow the school of reform to
do impartial justice to their origins. They felt a sort of resentment
against history. D'Alembert said that it would be well if history could
be destroyed; and the general tendency was to ignore the social memory
and the common heritage of past experiences which mould a human
society and make it something very different from a mere collection of
individuals.
Belief in Progress, however, took no extravagant form. It did
not beguile d'Holbach or any other of the leading thinkers of the
Encyclopaedia epoch into optimistic dreams of the future which might
await mankind. They had a much clearer conception of obstacles than the
good Abbe de Saint-Pierre. Helvetius agrees with d'Holbach that progress
will be slow, and Diderot is wavering and sceptical of the question of
indefinite social improvement. [Footnote: De l'esprit, Disc. ii. cc. 24,
25.]
6.
The reformers of the Encyclopaedia group were not alone in disseminating
the idea of Progress. Another group of thinkers, who widely differed in
their principles, though some of them had contributed articles to
the Encyclopaedia, [Footnote: Quesnay and Turgot, who, though not
professedly a Physiocrat, held the same views as the sect.] also did
much to make it a power. The rise of the special study of Economics
was one of the most significant facts in the general trend of thought
towards the analysis of civilisation. Economical students found that in
seeking to discover a true theory of the production, distribution, and
employment of wealth, they could not avoid the consideration of the
constitution and purpose of society. The problems of production and
distribution could not be divorced from political theory: production
raises the question of the functions of government and the limits of its
intervention in trade and industry; distribution involve questions of
property, justice, and equality. The employment of riches leads into the
domain of morals.
The French Economists or "Physiocrats," as they were afterwards called,
who formed a definite school before 1760--Quesnay the master, Mirabeau,
Mercier de la Riviere, and the rest--envisaged their special subject
from a wide philosophical point of view; their general economic theory
was equivalent to a theory of human society. They laid down the doctrine
of a Natural Order in political communities, and from it they deduced
their economic teaching.
They assumed, like the Encyclopaedists, that the end of society is the
attainment of terrestrial happiness by its members, and that this is the
sole purpose of government. The object of a treatise by Mercier de la
Riviere [Footnote: L'ordre naturel et essentiel des societes politiqes,
1767.] (a convenient exposition of the views of the sect) is, in his own
words, to discover the natural order for the government of men living in
organised communities, which will assure to them temporal felicity: an
order in which everything is well, necessarily well, and in which the
interests of all are so perfectly and intimately consolidated that all
are happy, from the ruler to the least of his subjects.
But in what does this happiness consist? His answer is that "humanly
speaking, the greatest happiness possible for us consists in the
greatest possible abundance of objects suitable to our enjoyment and in
the greatest liberty to profit by them." And liberty is necessary not
only to enjoy them but also to produce them in the greatest abundance,
since liberty stimulates human efforts. Another condition of abundance
is the multiplication of the race; in fact, the happiness of men and
their numbers are closely bound up together in the system of nature.
From these axioms may be deduced the Natural Order of a human society,
the reciprocal duties and rights whose enforcement is required for the
greatest possible multiplication of products, in order to procure to the
race the greatest sum of happiness with the maximum population.
Now, individual property is the indispensable condition for full
enjoyment of the products of human labour; "property is the measure
of liberty, and liberty is the measure of property." Hence, to realise
general happiness it is only necessary to maintain property and
consequently liberty in all their natural extent. The fatal error which
has made history what it is has been the failure to recognise this
simple fact; for aggression and conquest, the causes of human miseries,
violate the law of property which is the foundation of happiness.
The practical inference was that the chief function of government was
to protect property and that complete freedom should be left to private
enterprise to exploit the resources of the earth. All would be well if
trade and industry were allowed to follow their natural tendencies. This
is what was meant by Physiocracy, the supremacy of the Natural Order. If
rulers observed the limits of their true functions, Mercier thought that
the moral effect would be immense. "The public system of government
is the true education of moral man. Regis ad exemplum totus componitur
orbis." [Footnote: The particulars of the Physiocratic doctrine as to
the relative values of agriculture and commerce which Adam Smith was
soon to criticise do not concern us; nor is it necessary to repeat the
obvious criticisms on a theory which virtually reduced the science of
society to a science of production and distribution.]
While they advocated a thorough reform of the principles which ruled the
fiscal policy of governments, the Economists were not idealists, like
the Encyclopaedic philosophers; they sowed no seeds of revolution. Their
starting-point was that which is, not that which ought to be. And, apart
from their narrower point of view, they differed from the philosophers
in two very important points. They did not believe that society was of
human institution, and therefore they did not believe that there could
be any deductive science of society based simply on man's nature.
Moreover, they held that inequality of condition was one of its
immutable features, immutable because it is a consequence of the
inequality of physical powers.
But they believed in the future progress of society towards a state of
happiness through the increase of opulence which would itself depend on
the growth of justice and "liberty"; and they insisted on the importance
of the increase and diffusion of knowledge. Their influence in promoting
a belief in Progress is vouched for by Condorcet, the friend and
biographer of Turgot. As Turgot stands apart from the Physiocrats
(with whom indeed he did not identify himself) by his wider views on
civilisation, it might be suspected that it is of him that Condorcet was
chiefly thinking. Yet we need not limit the scope of his statement
when we remember that as a sect the Economists assumed as their first
principle the eudaemonic value of civilisation, declared that temporal
happiness is attainable, and threw all their weight into the scales
against the doctrine of Regress which had found a powerful advocate in
Rousseau.
7.
By liberty the Economists meant economic liberty. Neither they nor the
philosophers nor Rousseau, the father of modern democracy, had any just
conception of what political liberty means. They contributed much to its
realisation, but their own ideas of it were narrow and imperfect. They
never challenged the principle of a despotic government, they only
contended that the despotism must be enlightened. The paternal rule of
a Joseph or a Catherine, acting under the advice of philosophers, seemed
to them the ideal solution of the problem of government; and when the
progressive and disinterested Turgot, whom they might regard as one of
themselves, was appointed financial minister on the accession of Louis
XVI., it seemed that their ideal was about to be realised. His speedy
fall dispelled their hopes, but did not teach them the secret of
liberty. They had no quarrel with the principle of the censorship,
though they writhed under its tyranny; they did not want to abolish it.
They only complained that it was used against reason and light, that is
against their own writings; and, if the Conseil d'Etat or the Parlement
had suppressed the works of their obscurantist opponents, they would
have congratulated themselves that the world was marching quickly
towards perfection. [Footnote: The principle that intolerance on the
part of the wise and strong towards the ignorant and weak is a good
thing is not alien to the spirit of the French philosophers, though I do
not think any of them expressly asserted it. In the following century
it was formulated by Colins, a Belgian (author of two works on
social science, 1857-60), who believed that an autocratic government
suppressing liberty of conscience is the most effective instrument of
Progress. It is possible that democracy may yet try the experiment.]