1.
The idea of Progress could not help crossing the Channel. France and
England had been at war in the first year of the eighteenth century,
they were at war in the last, and their conflict for supremacy was the
leading feature of the international history of the whole century.
But at no period was there more constant intellectual intimacy or
more marked reciprocal influence between the two countries. It was
a commonplace that Paris and London were the two great foci of
civilisation, and they never lost touch of each other in the
intellectual sphere. Many of the principal works of literature that
appeared in either country were promptly translated, and some of the
French books, which the censorship rendered it dangerous to publish in
Paris, were printed in London.
It was not indeed to be expected that the theory should have the same
kind of success, or exert the same kind of effect in England as in
France. England had her revolution behind her, France had hers
before her. England enjoyed what were then considered large political
liberties, the envy of other lands; France groaned under the tyranny of
worthless rulers. The English constitution satisfied the nation, and
the serious abuses which would now appear to us intolerable were not
sufficient to awaken a passionate desire for reforms. The general
tendency of British thought was to see salvation in the stability
of existing institutions, and to regard change with suspicion. Now
passionate desire for reform was the animating force which propagated
the idea of Progress in France. And when this idea is translated from
the atmosphere of combat, in which it was developed by French men
of letters, into the calm climate of England, it appears like a cold
reflection.
Again, English thinkers were generally inclined to hold, with Locke,
that the proper function of government is principally negative, to
preserve order and defend life and property, not to aim directly at the
improvement of society, but to secure the conditions in which men may
pursue their own legitimate aims. Most of the French theorists believed
in the possibility of moulding society indefinitely by political action,
and rested their hopes for the future not only on the achievements of
science, but on the enlightened activity of governments. This difference
of view tended to give to the doctrine of Progress in France more
practical significance than in England.
But otherwise British soil was ready to receive the idea. There was the
same optimistic temper among the comfortable classes in both countries.
Shaftesbury, the Deist, had struck this note at the beginning of the
century by his sanguine theory, which was expressed in Pope's banal
phrase: "Whatever is, is right," and was worked into a system by
Hutcheson. This optimism penetrated into orthodox circles. Progress, far
from appearing as a rival of Providence, was discussed in the interests
of Christianity by the Scotch theologian, Turnbull. [Footnote: The
Principles of Modern Philosophy, 1740.]
2.
The theory of the indefinite progress of civilisation left Hume cold.
There is little ground, he argued, to suppose that "the world" is
eternal or incorruptible. It is probably mortal, and must therefore,
with all things in it, have its infancy, youth, manhood, and old age;
and man will share in these changes of state. We must then expect that
the human species should, when the world is in the age of manhood,
possess greater bodily and mental vigour, longer life, and a stronger
inclination and power of generation. But it is impossible to determine
when this stage is reached. For the gradual revolutions are too slow to
be discernible in the short period known to us by history and tradition.
Physically and in mental powers men have been pretty much the same in
all known ages. The sciences and arts have flourished now and have again
decayed, but when they reached the highest perfection among one people,
the neighbouring peoples were perhaps wholly unacquainted with them. We
are therefore uncertain whether at present man is advancing to his point
of perfection or declining from it. [Footnote: Essay on the Populousness
of Ancient Nations, ad init. ]
The argument is somewhat surprising in an eighteenth century thinker
like Hume, but it did not prevent him from recognising the superiority
of modern to ancient civilisation. This superiority forms indeed the
minor premiss in the general argument by which he confuted the commonly
received opinion as to the populousness of ancient nations. He insisted
on the improvements in art and industry, on the greater liberty and
security enjoyed by modern men. "To one who considers coolly on the
subject," he remarked, "it will appear that human nature in general
really enjoys more liberty at present in the most arbitrary government
of Europe than it ever did during the most flourishing period of ancient
times." [Footnote: The justification of this statement was the abolition
of slavery in Europe.]
He discussed many of the problems of civilisation, especially the
conditions in which the arts and sciences flourish, [Footnote: Essay on
the Rise of Arts and Sciences.] and drew some general conclusions, but
he was too sceptical to suppose that any general synthesis of history is
possible, or that any considerable change for the better in the manners
of mankind is likely to occur. [Footnote: Cf. Essay on the Idea of a
Perfect Commonwealth, ad init.]
The greatest work dealing with social problems, that Britain produced
in the eighteenth century, was Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, and his
luminous exposition of the effects of the division of labour was the
most considerable contribution made by British thinkers of the age
to the study of human development. It is much more than a treatise
on economic principles; it contains a history of the gradual economic
progress of human society, and it suggests the expectation of an
indefinite augmentation of wealth and well-being. Smith was entirely
at one with the French Economists on the value of opulence for the
civilisation and happiness of mankind. But it was indirectly perhaps
that his work contributed most effectively to the doctrine of the
Progress of collective mankind. [Footnote: It has been observed by
Mr. Leslie Stephen that the doctrine of the rights of man lies in the
background of Adam Smith's speculations.] His teaching that the free
commercial intercourse of all the peoples of the world, unfettered by
government policies, was to the greatest advantage of each, presented an
ideal of the economic "solidarity" of the race, which was one element in
the ideal of Progress. And this principle soon began to affect practice.
Pitt assimilated it when he was a young man, and it is one of the
distinctions of his statesmanship that he endeavoured to apply the
doctrines of his master so far as the prevailing prejudices would allow
him.
3.
A few writers of less weight and fame than Hume or Smith expressly
studied history in the light of Progress. It would not help us, in
following the growth of the idea, to analyse the works of Ferguson,
Dunbar, or Priestley. [Footnote: In his Essay on the History of Civil
Society Adam Ferguson treated the growth of civilisation as due to the
progressive nature of man, which insists on carrying him forward to
limits impossible to ascertain. He formulated the process as a
movement from simplicity to complexity, but contributed little to its
explanation.] But I will quote one passage from Priestley, the most
eminent of the three, and the most enthusiastic for the Progress of man.
As the division of labour--the chief principle of organised society--is
carried further he anticipates that
... nature, including both its materials and its laws, will be more at
our command; men will make their situation in this world abundantly more
easy and comfortable; they will probably prolong their existence in it
and will grow daily more happy.... Thus, whatever was the beginning of
this world, the end will be glorious and paradisiacal beyond what our
imaginations can now conceive. Extravagant as some people may suppose
these views to be, I think I could show them to be fairly suggested by
the true theory of human nature and to arise from the natural course of
human affairs.
[Footnote: This passage of Priestley occurs in his Essay on the First
Principles of Government and on the Nature of Political, Civil, and
Religious Liberty (1768, 2nd ed. 1771), pp. 2-4. His Lectures on History
and General Policy appeared in 1788.
Priestley was a strict utilitarian, who held that there is nothing
intrinsically excellent in justice and veracity apart from their
relation to happiness. The degree of public happiness is measured by
the excellence of religion, science, government, laws, arts, commerce,
conveniences of life, and especially by the degrees of personal security
and personal liberty. In all these the ancients were inferior, and
therefore they enjoyed less happiness. The present state of Europe is
vastly preferable to what it was in any former period. And "the plan of
this divine drama is opening more and more." In the future, Knowledge
will increase and accumulate and diffuse itself to the lower ranks of
society, who, by degrees, will find leisure for speculation; and looking
beyond their immediate employment, they will consider the complex
machine of society, and in time understand it better than those who now
write about it.
See his Lectures, pp. 371, 388 sqq., 528-53.
The English thinker did not share all the views of his French masters.
As a Unitarian, he regarded Christianity as a "great remedy of vice and
ignorance," part of the divine plan; and he ascribed to government
a lesser role than they in the improvement of humanity. He held, for
instance, that the state should not interfere in education, arguing that
this art was still in the experimental stage, and that the intervention
of the civil power might stereotype a bad system.
Not less significant, though less influential, than the writings of
Priestley and Ferguson was the work of James Dunbar, Professor of
Philosophy at Aberdeen, entitled Essays on the History of Mankind
in Rude and Cultivated Ages (2nd ed., 1781). He conceived history as
progressive, and inquired into the general causes which determine
the gradual improvements of civilisation. He dealt at length with
the effects of climate and local circumstances, but unlike the French
philosophers did not ignore heredity. While he did not enter upon any
discussion of future developments, he threw out incidentally the idea
that the world may be united in a league of nations.
Posterity, he wrote, "may contemplate, from a concurrence of various
causes and events, some of which are hastening into light, the greater
part, or even the whole habitable globe, divided among nations free and
independent in all the interior functions of government, forming one
political and commercial system" (p. 287).
Dunbar's was an optimistic book, but his optimism was more cautious than
Priestley's. These are his final words:
If human nature is liable to degenerate, it is capable of proportionable
improvement from the collected wisdom of ages. It is pleasant to infer
from the actual progress of society, the glorious possibilities of human
excellence. And, if the principles can be assembled into view, which
most directly tend to diversify the genius and character of nations,
some theory may be raised on these foundations that shall account
more systematically for past occurrences and afford some openings and
anticipations into the eventual history of the world.]
The problem of dark ages, which an advocate of Progress must explain,
was waved away by Priestley in his Lectures on History with the
observation that they help the subsequent advance of knowledge by
"breaking the progress of authority." [Footnote: This was doubtless
suggested to him by some remarks of Hume in The Rise of Arts and
Sciences.] This is not much of a plea for such periods viewed as
machinery in a Providential plan. The great history of the Middle Ages,
which in the words of its author describes "the triumph of barbarism and
religion," had been completed before Priestley's Lectures appeared, and
it is remarkable that he takes no account of it, though it might seem to
be a work with which a theory of Progress must come to terms.
Yet the sceptical historian of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, who was more at home in French literature than any of his
fellow-countrymen, was not opposed to the theory of Progress, and he
even states it in a moderate form. Having given reasons for believing
that civilised society will never again be threatened by such
an irruption of barbarians as that which oppressed the arms and
institutions of Rome, he allows us to "acquiesce in the pleasing
conclusion that every age of the world has increased, and still
increases, the real wealth, the happiness, the knowledge and perhaps the
virtue of the human race."
"The discoveries of ancient and modern navigators, and the domestic
history or tradition of the most enlightened nations, represent the
HUMAN SAVAGE, naked both in mind and body, and destitute of laws, of
arts, of ideas, and almost of language. From this abject condition,
perhaps the primitive and universal state of man, he has gradually
arisen to command the animals, to fertilise the earth, to traverse the
ocean, and to measure the heavens. His progress in the improvement and
exercise of his mental and corporeal faculties has been irregular and
various, infinitely slow in the beginning, and increasing by degrees
with redoubled velocity; ages of laborious ascent have been followed by
a moment of rapid downfall; and the several climates of the globe have
felt the vicissitudes of light and darkness. Yet the experience of four
thousand years should enlarge our hopes and diminish our apprehensions;
we cannot determine to what height the human species may aspire in
their advances towards perfection; but it may safely be presumed that
no people, unless the face of nature is changed, will relapse into their
original barbarism." [Footnote: Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
ch. xxxviii. ad fin.]
But Gibbon treats the whole subject as a speculation, and he treats
it without reference to any of the general principles on which French
thinkers had based their theory. He admits that his reasons for holding
that civilisation is secure against a barbarous cataclysm may be
considered fallacious; and he also contemplates the eventuality that
the fabric of sciences and arts, trade and manufacture, law and policy,
might be "decayed by time." If so, the growth of civilisation would have
to begin again, but not ab initio. For "the more useful or at least
more necessary arts," which do not require superior talents or national
subordination for their exercise, and which war, commerce, and religious
zeal have spread among the savages of the world, would certainly
survive.
These remarks are no more than obiter dicta but they show how the
doctrine of Progress was influencing those who were temperamentally the
least likely to subscribe to extravagant theories.
4.
The outbreak of the French Revolution evoked a sympathetic movement
among English progressive thinkers which occasioned the Government
no little alarm. The dissenting minister Dr. Richard Price, whose
Observations on Civil Liberty (1776), defending the action of the
American colonies, had enjoyed an immense success, preached the sermon
which provoked Burke to write his Reflections; and Priestley, no
less enthusiastic in welcoming the Revolution, replied to Burke. The
Government resorted to tyrannous measures; young men who sympathised
with the French movement and agitated for reforms at home were sent to
Botany Bay. Paine was prosecuted for his Rights of Man, which directly
preached revolution. But the most important speculative work of the
time, William Godwin's Political Justice, escaped the censorship because
it was not published at a popular price. [Footnote: Godwin had helped to
get Paine's book published in 1791, and he was intimate with the group
of revolutionary spirits who were persecuted by the Government. A good
account of the episode will be found in Brailsford's Shelley, Godwin,
and their Circle.]
The Enquiry concerning Political Justice, begun in 1791, appeared in
1793. The second edition, three years later, shows the influence of
Condorcet's Sketch, which had appeared in the meantime. Godwin says
that his original idea was to produce a work on political science to
supersede Montesquieu. The note of Montesquieu's political philosophy
was respect for social institutions. Godwin's principle was that social
institutions are entirely pernicious, that they perpetuate harmful
prejudices, and are an almost insuperable obstacle to improvement. If
he particularly denounced monarchical government, he regarded all
government as evil, and held that social progress would consist, not in
the reformation of government, but in its abolition. While he recognised
that man had progressed in the past, he considered history mainly a
sequence of horrors, and he was incapable of a calm survey of the course
of civilisation. In English institutions he saw nothing that did not
outrage the principles of justice and benevolence. The present state of
humanity is about as bad as it could be.
It is easy to see the deep influence which the teaching of Rousseau
exercised on Godwin. Without accepting the theory of Arcadia Godwin
followed him in unsparing condemnation of existing conditions. Rousseau
and Godwin are the two great champions in the eighteenth century of the
toiling and suffering masses. But Godwin drew the logical conclusion
from Rousseau's premisses which Rousseau hesitated to draw himself. The
French thinker, while he extolled the anarchical state of uncivilised
society, and denounced government as one of the sources of its
corruption, nevertheless sought the remedy in new social and political
institutions. Godwin said boldly, government is the evil; government
must go. Humanity can never be happy until all political authority and
social institutions disappear.
Now the peculiarity of Godwin's position as a doctrinaire of Progress
lies in the fact that he entertained the same pessimistic view of
some important sides of civilisation as Rousseau, and at the same time
adopted the theories of Rousseau's opponents, especially Helvetius. His
survey of human conditions seems to lead inevitably to pessimism; then
he turns round and proclaims the doctrine of perfectibility.
The explanation of this argument was the psychological theory of
Helvetius. He taught, as we saw, and Godwin developed the view in his
own way, that the natures and characters of men are moulded entirely by
their environment--not physical, but intellectual and moral environment,
and therefore can be indefinitely modified. A man is born into the world
without innate tendencies. His conduct depends on his opinions. Alter
men's opinions and they will act differently. Make their opinions
conformable to justice and benevolence, and you will have a just and
benevolent society. Virtue, as Socrates taught, is simply a question of
knowledge. The situation, therefore, is not hopeless. For it is not due
to the radical nature of man; it is caused by ignorance and prejudice,
by governments and institutions, by kings and priests. Transform the
ideas of men, and society will be transformed. The French philosopher
considered that a reformed system of educating children would be one of
the most powerful means for promoting progress and bringing about the
reign of reason; and Condorcet worked out a scheme of universal state
education. This was entirely opposed to Godwin's principles. State
schools would only be another instrument of power in the hands of a
government, worse even than a state Church. They would strengthen the
poisonous influence of kings and statesmen, and establish instead of
abolishing prejudices. He seems to have relied entirely on the private
efforts of enlightened thinkers to effect a gradual conversion of public
opinion.
In his study of the perfectibility of man and the prospect of a future
reign of general justice and benevolence, Godwin was even more visionary
than Condorcet, as in his political views he was more radical than the
Revolutionists. Condorcet had at least sought to connect his picture of
the future with a reasoned survey of the past, and to find a chain of
connection, but the perfectibility of Godwin hung in the air, supported
only by an abstract theory of the nature of man.
It can hardly be said that he contributed anything to the theoretical
problem of civilisation. His significance is that he proclaimed in
England at an opportune moment, and in a more impressive and startling
way than a sober apostle like Priestley, the creed of progress taught by
French philosophers, though considerably modified by his own anarchical
opinions.
5.
Perfectibility, as expounded by Condorcet and Godwin, encountered
a drastic criticism from Malthus, whose Essay on the Principle of
Population appeared in its first form anonymously in 1798. Condorcet had
foreseen an objection which might be raised as fatal to the realisation
of his future state. Will not the progress of industry and happiness
cause a steady increase in population, and must not the time come when
the number of the inhabitants of the globe will surpass their means of
subsistence? Condorcet did not grapple with this question. He contented
himself with saying that such a period must be very far away, and that
by then "the human race will have achieved improvements of which we can
now scarcely form an idea." Similarly Godwin, in his fancy picture of
the future happiness of mankind, notices the difficulty and shirks it.
"Three-fourths of the habitable globe are now uncultivated. The parts
already cultivated are capable of immeasurable improvement. Myriads of
centuries of still increasing population may pass away and the earth be
still found sufficient for the subsistence of its inhabitants."
Malthus argued that these writers laboured under an illusion as to the
actual relations between population and the means of subsistence. In
present conditions the numbers of the race are only kept from increasing
far beyond the means of subsistence by vice, misery, and the fear of
misery. [Footnote: This observation had been made (as Hazlitt pointed
out) before Malthus by Robert Wallace (see A Dissertation on the Numbers
of Mankind, p. 13, 1753). It was another book of Wallace that suggested
the difficulty to Godwin.] In the conditions imagined by Condorcet and
Godwin these checks are removed, and consequently the population would
increase with great rapidity, doubling itself at least in twenty-five
years. But the products of the earth increase only in an arithmetical
progression, and in fifty years the food supply would be too small for
the demand. Thus the oscillation between numbers and food supply would
recur, and the happiness of the species would come to an end.
Godwin and his adherents could reply that one of the checks on
over-population is prudential restraint, which Malthus himself
recognised, and that this would come more extensively into operation
with that progress of enlightenment which their theory assumed.
[Footnote: This is urged by Hazlitt in his criticism of Malthus in the
Spirit of the Age.] But the criticisms of Malthus dealt a trenchant
blow to the doctrine that human reason, acting through legislation and
government, has a virtually indefinite power of modifying the condition
of society. The difficulty, which he stated so vividly and definitely,
was well calculated to discredit the doctrine, and to suggest that the
development of society could be modified by the conscious efforts of man
only within restricted limits. [Footnote: The recent conclusions of Mr.
Knibbs, statistician to the Commonwealth of Australia, in vol. i. of
his Appendix to the Census of the Commonwealth, have an interest in this
connection. I quote from an article in the Times of August 5, 1918: "An
eminent geographer, the late Mr. E. G. Ravenstein, some years ago, when
the population of the earth was estimated at 1400 million, foretold that
about the middle of this century population would have reached a
limit beyond which increase would be disastrous. Mr. Knibbs is not so
pessimistic and is much more precise; though he defers the disastrous
culmination, he has no doubt as to its inevitability. The limits of
human expansion, he assures us, are much nearer than popular opinion
imagines; the difficulty of food supplies will soon be most grave; the
exhaustion of sources of energy necessary for any notable increase of
population, or advance in the standards of living, or both combined, is
perilously near. The present rate of increase in the world's population
cannot continue for four centuries."]
6.
The Essay of Malthus afterwards became one of the sacred books of the
Utilitarian sect, and it is interesting to notice what Bentham himself
thought of perfectibility. Referring to the optimistic views of
Chastellux and Priestley on progressive amelioration he observed that
"these glorious expectations remind us of the golden age of poetry."
For perfect happiness "belongs to the imaginary region of philosophy and
must be classed with the universal elixir and the philosopher's stone."
There will always be jealousies through the unequal gifts of nature and
of fortune; interests will never cease to clash and hatred to ensue;
"painful labour, daily subjection, a condition nearly allied to
indigence, will always be the lot of numbers"; in art and poetry the
sources of novelty will probably be exhausted. But Bentham was far from
being a pessimist. Though he believes that "we shall never make this
world the abode of happiness," he asserts that it may be made a most
delightful garden "compared with the savage forest in which men so long
have wandered." [Footnote: Works, vol. i. p. 193 seq.]
7.
The book of Malthus was welcomed at the moment by all those who had been
thoroughly frightened by the French Revolution and saw in the "modern
philosophy," as it was called, a serious danger to society. [Footnote:
Both Hazlitt and Shelley thought that Malthus was playing to the
boxes, by sophisms "calculated to lull the oppressors of mankind into
a security of everlasting triumph" (Revolt of Islam, Preface). Bentham
refers in his Book of Fallacies (Works, ii. p. 462) to the unpopularity
of the views of Priestley, Godwin, and Condorcet: "to aim at perfection
has been pronounced to be utter folly or wickedness."] Vice and misery
and the inexorable laws of population were a godsend to rescue the state
from "the precipice of perfectibility." We can understand the alarm
occasioned to believers in the established constitution of things, for
Godwin's work--now virtually forgotten, while Malthus is still appealed
to as a discoverer in social science--produced an immense effect on
impressionable minds at the time. All who prized liberty, sympathised
with the downtrodden, and were capable of falling in love with social
ideals, hailed Godwin as an evangelist. "No one," said a contemporary,
"was more talked of, more looked up to, more sought after; and wherever
liberty, truth, justice was the theme, his name was not far off." Young
graduates left the Universities to throw themselves at the feet of the
new Gamaliel; students of law and medicine neglected their professional
studies to dream of "the renovation of society and the march of
mind." Godwin carried with him "all the most sanguine and fearless
understandings of the time." [Footnote: Hazlitt, Spirit of the Age:
article on Godwin (written in 1814).]
The most famous of his disciples were the poets Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Southey, and afterwards Shelley. Wordsworth had been an ardent
sympathiser with the French Revolution. In its early days he had visited
Paris:
An emporium then
Of golden expectations and receiving
Freights every day from a new world of hope.
He became a Godwinian in 1795, when the Terror had destroyed his faith
in Revolutionary France. Southey, who had come under the influence of
Rousseau, was initiated by Coleridge into Godwin's theories, and
in their utopian enthusiasm they formed the design of founding a
"pantisocratic" settlement in America, to show how happiness could be
realised in a social environment in which duty and interest coincide and
consequently all are virtuous. The plan anticipated the experiments
of Owen and Cabet; but the pantisocrats did not experience the
disappointments of the socialists, for it was never carried out.
Coleridge and Southey as well as Wordsworth soon abandoned their
Godwinian doctrines. [Footnote: In letters of 1797 and 1798 Coleridge
repudiated the French doctrines and Godwin's philosophy. See Cestre, La
Revolution francaise et les poetes anglais (1789-1809), pp. 389, 414.]
They had, to use a phrase of Hazlitt, lost their way in Utopia, and they
gave up the abstract and mechanical view of society which the French
philosophy of the eighteenth century taught, for an organic conception
in which historic sentiment and the wisdom of our ancestors had their
due place. Wordsworth could presently look back and criticise his
Godwinian phase as that of
A proud and most presumptuous confidence
In the transcendent wisdom of the age
And its discernment. [Footnote: Excursion, Book ii.]
He and Southey became conservative pillars of the state. Yet Southey,
reactionary as he was in politics, never ceased to believe in social
Progress. [Footnote: See his Colloquies; and Shelley, writing in 1811,
says that Southey "looks forward to a state when all shall be perfected
and matter become subjected to the omnipotence of mind" (Dowden, Life of
Shelley, i. p. 212). Compare below, p. 325.] Amelioration was indeed to
be effected by slow and cautious reforms, with the aid of the Church,
but the intellectual aberrations of his youth had left an abiding
impression.
While these poets were sitting at Godwin's feet, Shelley was still a
child. But he came across Political Justice at Eton; in his later life
he reread it almost every year; and when he married Godwin's daughter he
was more Godwinian than Godwin himself. Hazlitt, writing in 1814, says
that Godwin's reputation had "sunk below the horizon," but Shelley
never ceased to believe in his theory, though he came to see that the
regeneration of man would be a much slower process than he had at first
imagined. In the immature poem Queen Mab the philosophy of Godwin was
behind his description of the future, and it was behind the longer and
more ambitious poems of his maturer years. The city of gold, of the
Revolt of Islam, is Godwin's future society, and he describes that
poem as "an experiment on the temper of the public mind as to how far a
thirst for a happier condition of moral and political society survives,
among the enlightened and refined, the tempests which have shaken the
age in which we live." As to Prometheus Unbound his biographer observes:
[Footnote: Dowden, ib. ii. p. 264. Elsewhere Dowden remarks on the
singular insensibility of Shelley's mind "to the wisdom or sentiment of
history" (i. p. 55).]
All the glittering fallacies of "Political Justice"--now sufficiently
tarnished--together with all its encouraging and stimulating truths,
may be found in the caput mortuum left when the critic has reduced the
poetry of the "Prometheus" to a series of doctrinaire statements.
The same dream inspired the final chorus of Hellas. Shelley was the poet
of perfectibility.
8.
The attraction of perfectibility reached beyond the ranks of men of
letters, and in Robert Owen, the benevolent millowner of Lanark, it
had an apostle who based upon it a very different theory from that of
Political Justice and became one of the founders of modern socialism.
The success of the idea of Progress has been promoted by its association
with socialism. [Footnote: The word was independently invented in
England and France. An article in the Poor Man's Guardian (a periodical
edited by H. Hetherington, afterwards by Bronterre O'Brien), Aug. 24,
1833, is signed "A Socialist"; and in 1834 socialisme is opposed to
individualism by P. Leroux in an article in the Revue Encyclopedique.
The word is used in the New Moral World, and from 1836 was applied to
the Owenites. See Dolleans, Robert Owen (1907), p. 305.] The first phase
of socialism, what has been called its sentimental phase, was originated
by Saint-Simon in France and Owen in England at about the same time;
Marx was to bring it down from the clouds and make it a force in
practical politics. But both in its earlier and in its later forms the
economical doctrines rest upon a theory of society depending on the
assumption, however disguised, that social institutions have been solely
responsible for the vice and misery which exist, and that institutions
and laws can be so changed as to abolish misery and vice. That is
pure eighteenth century doctrine; and it passed from the revolutionary
doctrinaires of that period to the constructive socialists of the
nineteenth century.
Owen learned it probably from Godwin, and he did not disguise it. His
numerous works enforce it ad nauseam. He began the propagation of his
gospel by his "New View of Society, or Essays on the formation of the
human character, preparatory to the development of a plan for gradually
ameliorating the condition of mankind," which he dedicated to the Prince
Regent. [Footnote: 3rd ed. 1817. The Essays had appeared separately in
1813-14.] Here he lays down that "any general character, from the best
to the worst, may be given to any community, even to the world at large,
by the application of proper means; which means are to a great extent
at the command and under the control of those who have influence in the
affairs of men." [Footnote: P. 19.] The string on which he continually
harps is that it is the cardinal error in government to suppose that
men are responsible for their vices and virtues, and therefore for their
actions and characters. These result from education and institutions,
and can be transformed automatically by transforming those agencies.
Owen founded several short-lived journals to diffuse his theories. The
first number of the New Moral World (1834-36) [Footnote: This was not
a journal, but a series of pamphlets which appeared in 1836-1844. Other
publications of Owen were: Outline of the Rational System of Society
(6th ed., Leeds, 1840); The Revolution in the Mind and Practice of
the Human Race, or the coming change from Irrationality to Rationality
(1849); The Future of the Human Race, or a great, glorious and peaceful
Revolution, near at hand, to be effected through the agency of departed
spirits of good and superior men and women (1853); The New Existence of
Man upon Earth, Parts i.-viii., 1854-55.] proclaimed the approach of an
ideal society in which there will be no ignorance, no poverty, and no
charity--a system "which will ensure the happiness of the human race
throughout all future ages," to replace one "which, so long as it shall
be maintained, must produce misery to all." His own experimental
attempt to found such a society on a miniature scale in America proved a
ludicrous failure.
It is to be observed that in these socialist theories the conception of
Progress as indefinite tends to vanish or to lose its significance. If
the millennium can be brought about at a stroke by a certain arrangement
of society, the goal of development is achieved; we shall have reached
the term, and shall have only to live in and enjoy the ideal state--a
menagerie of happy men. There will be room for further, perhaps
indefinite, advance in knowledge, but civilisation in its social
character becomes stable and rigid. Once man's needs are perfectly
satisfied in a harmonious environment there is no stimulus to cause
further changes, and the dynamic character of history disappears.
Theories of Progress are thus differentiating into two distinct types,
corresponding to two radically opposed political theories and appealing
to two antagonistic temperaments. The one type is that of constructive
idealists and socialists, who can name all the streets and towers
of "the city of gold," which they imagine as situated just round a
promontory. The development of man is a closed system; its term is known
and is within reach. The other type is that of those who, surveying
the gradual ascent of man, believe that by the same interplay of forces
which have conducted him so far and by a further development of
the liberty which he has fought to win, he will move slowly towards
conditions of increasing harmony and happiness. Here the development
is indefinite; its term is unknown, and lies in the remote future.
Individual liberty is the motive force, and the corresponding political
theory is liberalism; whereas the first doctrine naturally leads to a
symmetrical system in which the authority of the state is preponderant,
and the individual has little more value than a cog in a well-oiled
wheel: his place is assigned; it is not his right to go his own way. Of
this type the principal example that is not socialistic is, as we shall
see, the philosophy of Comte.