1.
The failure of the Revolution to fulfil the visionary hopes which had
dazzled France for a brief period--a failure intensified by the horrors
that had attended the experiment--was followed by a reaction against the
philosophical doctrines and tendencies which had inspired its leaders.
Forces, which the eighteenth century had underrated or endeavoured to
suppress, emerged in a new shape, and it seemed for a while as if the
new century might definitely turn its back on its predecessor. There
was an intellectual rehabilitation of Catholicism, which will always
be associated with the names of four thinkers of exceptional talent,
Chateaubriand, De Maistre, Bonald, and Lamennais.
But the outstanding fame of these great reactionaries must not mislead
us into exaggerating the reach of this reaction. The spirit and
tendencies of the past century still persisted in the circles which were
most permanently influential. Many eminent savants who had been imbued
with the ideas of Condillac and Helvetius, and had taken part in
the Revolution and survived it, were active under the Empire and the
restored Monarchy, still true to the spirit of their masters, and
commanding influence by the value of their scientific work. M. Picavet's
laborious researches into the activities of this school of thinkers has
helped us to understand the transition from the age of Condorcet to
the age of Comte. The two central figures are Cabanis, the friend of
Condorcet, [Footnote: He has already claimed our notice, above, p. 215.]
and Destutt de Tracy. M. Picavet has grouped around them, along with
many obscurer names, the great scientific men of the time, like Laplace,
Bichat, Lamarck, as all in the direct line of eighteenth century
thought. "Ideologists" he calls them. [Footnote: Ideology is now
sometimes used to convey a criticism; for instance, to contrast the
methods of Lamarck with those of Darwin.] Ideology, the science
of ideas, was the word invented by de Tracy to distinguish the
investigation of thought in accordance with the methods of Locke and
Condillac from old-fashioned metaphysics. The guiding principle of the
ideologists was to apply reason to observed facts and eschew a priori
deductions. Thinkers of this school had an influential organ, the Decade
philosophique, of which J. B. Say the economist was one of the founders
in 1794. The Institut, which had been established by the Convention, was
crowded with "ideologists," and may be said to have continued the work
of the Encyclopaedia. [Footnote: Picavet, op. cit. p. 69. The members of
the 2nd Class of the Institut, that of moral and political science, were
so predominantly Ideological that the distrust of Napoleon was excited,
and he abolished it in 1803, distributing its members among the other
Classes.] These men had a firm faith in the indefinite progress of
knowledge, general enlightenment, and "social reason."
2.
Thus the ideas of the "sophists" of the age of Voltaire were alive
in the speculative world, not withstanding political, religious, and
philosophical reaction. But their limitations were to be transcended,
and account taken of facts and aspects which their philosophy had
ignored or minimised. The value of the reactionary movement lay in
pressing these facts and aspects on the attention, in reopening chambers
of the human spirit which the age of Voltaire had locked and sealed.
The idea of Progress was particularly concerned in the general change of
attitude, intellectual and emotional, towards the Middle Ages. A fresh
interest in the great age of the Church was a natural part of the
religious revival, but extended far beyond the circle of ardent
Catholics. It was a characteristic feature, as every one knows, of
the Romantic movement. It did not affect only creative literature, it
occupied speculative thinkers and stimulated historians. For Guizot,
Michelet, and Auguste Comte, as well as for Chateaubriand and Victor
Hugo, the Middle Ages have a significance which Frenchmen of the
previous generation could hardly have comprehended.
We saw how that period had embarrassed the first pioneers who attempted
to trace the course of civilisation as a progressive movement, how
lightly they passed over it, how unconvincingly they explained it away.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century the medieval question was
posed in such a way that any one who undertook to develop the doctrine
of Progress would have to explore it more seriously. Madame de Stael saw
this when she wrote her book on Literature considered in its Relation
to Social Institutions (1801). She was then under the influence of
Condorcet and an ardent believer in perfectibility, and the work is
an attempt to extend this theory, which she testifies was falling into
discredit, to the realm of literature. She saw that, if man regressed
instead of progressing for ten centuries, the case for Progress was
gravely compromised, and she sought to show that the Middle Ages
contributed to the development of the intellectual faculties and to
the expansion of civilisation, and that the Christian religion was an
indispensable agent. This contention that Progress was uninterrupted is
an advance on Condorcet and an anticipation of Saint-Simon and Comte.
A more eloquent and persuasive voice was raised in the following year
from the ranks of reaction. Chateaubriand's Genie du Christianisme
appeared in 1802, "amidst the ruins of our temples," as the author
afterwards said, when France was issuing from the chaos of her
revolution. It was a declaration of war against the spirit of the
eighteenth century which had treated Christianity as a barbarous system
whose fall was demanded in the name of Progress. But it was much more
than polemic. Chateaubriand arrayed arguments in support of orthodox
dogmas, original sin, primitive degeneration, and the rest; but the
appeal of the book did not lie in its logic, it lay in the appreciation
of Christianity from a new point of view. He approached it in the spirit
of an artist, as an aesthete, not as a philosopher, and so far as he
proved anything he proved that Christianity is valuable because it
is beautiful, not because it is true. He aimed at showing that it can
"enchanter l'ame aussi divinement que les dieux de Virgile et d'Homere."
He might call to his help the Fathers of the Church, but it was on
Dante, Milton, Racine that his case was really based. The book is an
apologia, from the aesthetic standpoint of the Romantic school. "Dieu ne
defend pas les routes fleuries quand elles servent a revenir a lui."
It was a matter of course that the defender of original sin should
reject the doctrine of perfectibility. "When man attains the highest
point of civilisation," wrote Chateaubriand in the vein of Rousseau,
"he is on the lowest stair of morality; if he is free, he is rude; by
civilising his manners, he forges himself chains. His heart profits at
the expense of his head, his head at the expense of his heart." And,
apart from considerations of Christian doctrine, the question of
Progress had little interest for the Romantic school. Victor Hugo, in
the famous Preface to his Cromwell (1827), where he went more deeply
than Chateaubriand into the contrasts between ancient and modern art,
revived the old likeness of mankind to an individual man, and declared
that classical antiquity was the time of its virility and that we are
now spectators of its imposing old age.
From other points of view powerful intellects were reverting to the
Middle Ages and eager to blot out the whole development of modern
society since the Reformation, as the Encyclopaedic philosophers had
wished to blot out the Middle Ages. The ideal of Bonald, De Maistre,
and Lamennais was a sacerdotal government of the world, and the
English constitution was hardly less offensive to their minds than the
Revolution which De Maistre denounced as "satanic." Advocates as they
were of the dead system of theocracy, they contributed, however, to the
advance of thought, not only by forcing medieval institutions on the
notice of the world but also by their perception that society had
been treated in the eighteenth century in too mechanical a way, that
institutions grow, that the conception of individual men divested of
their life in society is a misleading abstraction. They put this in
extravagant and untenable forms, but there was a large measure of truth
in their criticism, which did its part in helping the nineteenth century
to revise and transcend the results of eighteenth century speculation.
In this reactionary literature we can see the struggle of the doctrine
of Providence, declining before the doctrine of Progress, to gain the
upper-hand again. Chateaubriand, Bonald, De Maistre, Lamennais firmly
held the dogma of an original golden age and the degradation of man,
and denounced the whole trend of progressive thought from Bacon to
Condorcet. These writers were unconsciously helping Condorcet's doctrine
to assume a new and less questionable shape. [Footnote: Bonald indeed in
his treatise De pouvoir adopted the idea of development and applied it
to religion (as Newman did afterwards) for the purpose of condemning the
Reformation as a retrograde movement.]
3.
Along with the discovery of the Middle Ages came the discovery of German
literature. In the intellectual commerce between the two countries in
the age of Frederick the Great, France had been exclusively the giver,
Germany the recipient. It was due, above all, to Madame de Stael
that the tide began to flow the other way. Among the writers of the
Napoleonic epoch, Madame de Stael is easily first in critical talent
and intellectual breadth. Her study of the Revolution showed a
more dispassionate appreciation of that convulsion than any of her
contemporaries were capable of forming. But her chef-d'oeuvre is her
study of Germany, De l'Allemagne, [Footnote: A.D. 1813.] which revealed
the existence of a world of art and thought, unsuspected by the French
public. Within the next twenty years Herder and Lessing, Kant and Hegel
were exerting their influence at Paris. She did in France what Coleridge
was doing in England for the knowledge of German thought.
Madame de Stael had raised anew the question which had been raised in
the seventeenth century and answered in the negative by Voltaire: is
there progress in aesthetic literature? Her early book on Literature had
clearly defined the issue. She did not propose the thesis that there is
any progress or improvement (as some of the Moderns had contended in the
famous Quarrel) in artistic form. Within the limits of their own thought
and emotional experience the ancients achieved perfection of expression,
and perfection cannot be surpassed. But as thought progresses, as the
sum of ideas increases and society changes, fresh material is supplied
to art, there is "a new development of sensibility" which enables
literary artists to compass new kinds of charm. The Genie du
Christianisme embodied a commentary on her contention, more arresting
than any she could herself have furnished. Here the reactionary joined
hands with the disciple of Condorcet, to prove that there is progress in
the domain of art. Madame de Stael's masterpiece, Germany, was a further
impressive illustration of the thesis that the literature of the modern
European nations represents an advance on classical literature, in the
sense that it sounds notes which the Greek and Roman masters had not
heard, reaches depths which they had not conjectured, unlocks chambers
which to them were closed,--as a result of the progressive experiences
of the human soul. [Footnote: German literature was indeed already
known, in some measure, to readers of the Decade philosophique, and Kant
had been studied in France long before 1813, the year of the publication
of De l'Allemagne. See Picavet, Les Ideologues, p. 99.] [Footnote: We
can see the effect of her doctrine in Guizot's remarks (Histoire de la
civilisation en Europe, 2e lecon) where he says of modern literatures
that "sous le point de vue du fond des sentiments et des idees elles
sont plus fortes et plus riches [than the ancient]. On voit que l'ame
humaine a ete remuee sur un plus grand nombre de points a une plus
grande profondeur"--and to this very fact he ascribes their comparative
imperfection in form.]
This view is based on the general propositions that all social phenomena
closely cohere and that literature is a social phenomenon; from which
it follows that if there is a progressive movement in society generally,
there is a progressive movement in literature. Her books were true to
the theory; they inaugurated the methods of modern criticism, which
studies literary works in relation to the social background of their
period.
4.
France, then, under the Bourbon Restoration began to seek new light from
the obscure profundities of German speculation which Madame de Stael
proclaimed. Herder's "Ideas" were translated by Edgar Quinet, Lessing's
Education by Eugene Rodrigues. Cousin sat at the feet of Hegel. At
the same time a new master, full of suggestiveness for those who were
interested in the philosophy of history, was discovered in Italy. The
"Scienza nuova" of Vico was translated by Michelet.
The book of Vico was now a hundred years old. I did not mention him in
his chronological place, because he exercised no immediate influence on
the world. His thought was an anachronism in the eighteenth century, it
appealed to the nineteenth. He did not announce or conceive any theory
of Progress, but his speculation, bewildering enough and confused in its
exposition, contained principles which seemed predestined to form
the basis of such a doctrine. His aim was that of Cabanis and the
ideologists, to set the study of society on the same basis of certitude
which had been secured for the study of nature through the work of
Descartes and Newton. [Footnote: Vico has sometimes been claimed as a
theorist of Progress, but incorrectly. See B. Croce, The Philosophy of
Giambattista Vico (Eng. tr., 1913), p. 132--an indispensable aid to the
study of Vico. The first edition of the Scienza nuova appeared in 1725;
the second, which was a new work, in 1730.
Vico influenced Ballanche, a writer who enjoyed a considerable repute
in his day. He taught the progressive development of man towards liberty
and equality within the four corners of the Christian religion, which he
regarded as final. His Palingenesie sociale appeared in 1823-30.]
His fundamental idea was that the explanation of the history of
societies is to be found in the human mind. The world at first is felt
rather than thought; this is the condition of savages in the state of
nature, who have no political organisation. The second mental state is
imaginative knowledge, "poetical wisdom"; to this corresponds the higher
barbarism of the heroic age. Finally, comes conceptual knowledge, and
with it the age of civilisation. These are the three stages through
which every society passes, and each of these types determines law,
institutions, language, literature, and the characters of men.
Vico's strenuous researches in the study of Homer and early Roman
history were undertaken in order to get at the point of view of the
heroic age. He insisted that it could not be understood unless we
transcended our own abstract ways of thinking and looked at the world
with primitive eyes, by a forced effort of imagination. He was convinced
that history had been vitiated by the habit of ignoring psychological
differences, by the failure to recapture the ancient point of view. Here
he was far in advance of his own times.
Concentrating his attention above all on Roman antiquity, he
adopted--not altogether advantageously for his system--the revolutions
of Roman history as the typical rule of social development. The
succession of aristocracy (for the early kingship of Rome and Homeric
royalty are merely forms of aristocracy in Vico's view), democracy, and
monarchy is the necessary sequence of political governments. Monarchy
(the Roman Empire) corresponds to the highest form of civilisation. What
happens when this is reached? Society declines into an anarchical state
of nature, from which it again passes into a higher barbarism or heroic
age, to be followed once more by civilisation. The dissolution of the
Roman Empire and the barbarian invasions are followed by the Middle
Ages, in which Dante plays the part of Homer; and the modern period with
its strong monarchies corresponds to the Roman Empire. This is Vico's
principle of reflux. If the theory were sound, it would mean that the
civilisation of his day must again relapse into barbarism and the
cycle begin again. He did not himself state this conclusion directly or
venture on any prediction. It is obvious how readily his doctrine could
be adapted to the conception of Progress as a spiral movement. Evidently
the corresponding periods in his cycles are not identical or really
homogeneous. Whatever points of likeness may be discovered between early
Greek or Roman and medieval societies, the points of unlikeness are
still more numerous and manifest. Modern civilisation differs in
fundamental and far-reaching ways from Greek and Roman. It is absurd to
pretend that the general movement brings man back again and again to
the point from which he started, and therefore, if there is any value
in Vico's reflux, it can only mean that the movement of society may be
regarded as a spiral ascent, so that each stage of an upward progress
corresponds, in certain general aspects, to a stage which has already
been traversed, this correspondence being due to the psychical nature of
man.
A conception of this kind could not be appreciated in Vico's day or by
the next generation. The "Scienza nuova" lay in Montesquieu's library,
and he made no use of it. But it was natural that it should arouse
interest in France at a time when the new idealistic philosophies
of Germany were attracting attention, and when Frenchmen, of the
ideological school, were seeking, like Vico himself, a synthetic
principle to explain social phenomena. Different though Vico was in
his point of departure as in his methods from the German idealists,
his speculations nevertheless had something in common with theirs.
Both alike explained history by the nature of mind which necessarily
determined the stages of the process; Vico as little as Fichte or Hegel
took eudaemonic considerations into account. The difference was that the
German thinkers sought their principle in logic and applied it a priori,
while Vico sought his in concrete psychology and engaged in laborious
research to establish it a posteriori by the actual data of history.
But both speculations suggested that the course of human development
corresponds to the fundamental character of mental processes and is not
diverted either by Providential intervention or by free acts of human
will.
5.
These foreign influences co-operated in determining the tendencies of
French speculation in the period of the restored monarchy, whereby the
idea of Progress was placed on new basements and became the headstone of
new "religions." Before we consider the founders of sects, we may glance
briefly at the views of some eminent savants who had gained the ear of
the public before the July Revolution--Jouffroy, Cousin, and Guizot.
Cousin, the chief luminary in the sphere of pure philosophy in France
in the first half of the nineteenth century, drew his inspiration from
Germany. He was professedly an eclectic, but in the main his philosophy
was Hegelian. He might endow God with consciousness and speak of
Providence, but he regarded the world-process as a necessary evolution
of thought, and he saw, not in religion but in philosophy, the highest
expression of civilisation. In 1828 he delivered a course of lectures on
the philosophy of history. He divided history into three periods, each
governed by a master idea: the first by the idea of the infinite (the
Orient); the second by that of the finite (classical antiquity); the
third by that of the relation of finite to infinite (the modern age). As
with Hegel, the future is ignored, progress is confined within a closed
system, the highest circle has already been reached. As an opponent of
the ideologists and the sensational philosophy on which they founded
their speculations, Cousin appealed to the orthodox and all those
to whom Voltairianism was an accursed thing, and for a generation
he exercised a considerable influence. But his work--and this is
the important point for us--helped to diffuse the idea, which the
ideologists were diffusing on very different lines--that human history
has been a progressive development.
Progressive development was also the theme of Jouffroy in his slight but
suggestive introduction to the philosophy of history (1825),
[Footnote: "Reflexions sur la philosophie de l'histoire," in Melanges
philosophiques, 2nd edition, 1838.] in which he posed the same problem
which, as we shall see, Saint-Simon and Comte were simultaneously
attempting to solve. He had not fallen under the glamour of German
idealism, and his results have more affinity with Vico's than with
Hegel's.
He begins with some simple considerations which conduct to the doubtful
conclusion that all the historical changes in man's condition are due to
the operation of his intelligence. The historian's business is to trace
the succession of the actual changes. The business of the philosopher of
history is to trace the succession of ideas and study the correspondence
between the two developments. This is the true philosophy of history:
"the glory of our age is to understand it."
Now it is admitted to-day, he says, that the human intelligence
obeys invariable laws, so that a further problem remains. The actual
succession of ideas has to be deduced from these necessary laws. When
that deduction is effected--a long time hence--history will disappear;
it will be merged in science.
Jouffroy then presented the world with what he calls the FATALITY OF
INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT, to take the place of Providence or Destiny.
It is a fatality, he is careful to explain, which, so far from
compromising, presupposes individual liberty. For it is not like the
fatality of sensual impulse which guides the brute creation. What it
implies is this: if a thousand men have the same idea of what is good,
this idea will govern their conduct in spite of their passions, because,
being reasonable and free, they are not blindly submissive to passion,
but can deliberate and choose.
This explanation of history as a necessary development of society
corresponding to a necessary succession of ideas differs in two
important points from the explanations of Hegel and Cousin. The
succession of ideas is not conceived as a transcendent logic, but is
determined by the laws of the HUMAN mind and belongs to the domain of
psychology. Here Jouffroy is on the same ground as Vico. In the second
place, it is not a closed system; room remains for an indefinite
development in the future.
6.
While Cousin was discoursing on philosophy at Paris in the days of the
last Bourbon king, Guizot was drawing crowded audiences to his lectures
on the history of European civilisation, [Footnote: Histoire de la
civilisation en Europe.] and the keynote of these lectures was Progress.
He approached it with a fresh mind, unencumbered with any of the
philosophical theories which had attended and helped its growth.
Civilisation, he said, is the supreme fact so far as man is concerned,
"the fact par excellence, the general and definite fact in which all
other facts merge." And "civilisation" means progress or development.
The word "awakens, when it is pronounced, the idea of a people which
is in motion, not to change its place but to change its state, a people
whose condition is expanding and improving. The idea of progress,
development, seems to me to be the fundamental idea contained in the
word CIVILISATION."
There we have the most important positive idea of eighteenth century
speculation, standing forth detached and independent, no longer bound
to a system. Fifty years before, no one would have dreamed of defining
civilisation like that and counting on the immediate acquiescence of his
audience. But progress has to be defined. It does not merely imply the
improvement of social relations and public well-being. France in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was behind Holland and England in
the sum and distribution of well-being among individuals, and yet she
can claim that she was the most "civilised" country in those ages.
The reason is that civilisation also implies the development of the
individual life, of men's private faculties, sentiments, and ideas. The
progress of man therefore includes both these developments. But they
are intimately connected. We may observe how moral reformers generally
recommend their proposals by promising social amelioration as a result,
and that progressive politicians maintain that the progress of society
necessarily induces moral improvement. The connection may not always
be apparent, and at different times one or other kind of progress
predominates. But one is followed by the other ultimately, though it may
be after a long interval, for "la Providence a ses aises dans le temps."
The rise of Christianity was one of the crises of civilisation, yet it
did not in its early stages aim at any improvement of social conditions;
it did not attack the great injustices which were wrought in the world.
It meant a great crisis because it changed the beliefs and sentiments of
individuals; social effects came afterwards.
The civilisation of modern Europe has grown through a period of fifteen
centuries and is still progressing. The rate of progress has been slower
than that of Greek civilisation, but on the other hand it has been
continuous, uninterrupted, and we can see "the vista of an immense
career."
The effects of Guizot's doctrine in propagating the idea of Progress
were all the greater for its divorce from philosophical theory. He did
not touch perplexing questions like fatality, or discuss the general
plan of the world; he did not attempt to rise above common-sense; and he
did not essay any premature scheme of the universal history of man. His
masterly survey of the social history of Europe exhibited progressive
movement as a fact, in a period in which to the thinkers of the
eighteenth century it had been almost invisible. This of course was far
from proving that Progress is the key to the history of the world and
human destinies. The equation of civilisation with progress remains an
assumption. For the question at once arises: Can civilisation reach a
state of equilibrium from which no further advance is possible; and
if it can, does it cease to be civilisation? Is Chinese civilisation
mis-called, or has there been here too a progressive movement all the
time, however slow? Such questions were not raised by Guizot. But his
view of history was effective in helping to establish the association
of the two ideas of civilisation and progress, which to-day is taken for
granted as evidently true.
7.
The views of these eminent thinkers Cousin, Jouffroy, and Guizot
show that--quite apart from the doctrines of ideologists and of
the "positivists," Saint-Simon and Comte, of whom I have still to
speak--there was a common trend in French thought in the Restoration
period towards the conception of history as a progressive movement.
Perhaps there is no better illustration of the infectiousness of this
conception than in the Historical Studies which Chateaubriand gave
to the world in 1831. He had learned much, from books as well as from
politics, since he wrote the GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY. He had gained some
acquaintance with German philosophy and with Vico. And in this work of
his advanced age he accepts the idea of Progress, so far as it could be
accepted by an orthodox son of the Church. He believes that the advance
of knowledge will lead to social progress, and that society, if it seems
sometimes to move backward, is always really moving forward. Bossuet,
for whom he had no word of criticism thirty years before, he now
convicts of "an imposing error." That great man, he writes, "has
confined historical events in a circle as rigorous as his genius. He has
imprisoned them in an inflexible Christianity--a terrible hoop in which
the human race would turn in a sort of eternity, without progress or
improvement." The admission from such a quarter shows eloquently how the
wind was setting.
The notions of development and continuity which were to control all
departments of historical study in the later nineteenth century were
at the same time being independently promoted by the young historical
school in Germany which is associated with the names of Eichhorn,
Savigny, and Niebuhr. Their view that laws and institutions are a
natural growth or the expression of a people's mind, represents another
departure from the ideas of the eighteenth century. It was a repudiation
of that "universal reason" which desired to reform the world and its
peoples indiscriminately without taking any account of their national
histories.