I. SAINT-SIMON
Amid the intellectual movements in France described in the last chapter
the idea of Progress passed into a new phase of its growth. Hitherto it
had been a vague optimistic doctrine which encouraged the idealism of
reformers and revolutionaries, but could not guide them. It had waited
like a handmaid on the abstractions of Nature and Reason; it had hardly
realised an independent life. The time had come for systematic attempts
to probe its meaning and definitely to ascertain the direction in which
humanity is moving. Kant had said that a Kepler or a Newton was needed
to find the law of the movement of civilisation. Several Frenchmen
now undertook to solve the problem. They did not solve it; but the
new science of sociology was founded; and the idea of Progress, which
presided at its birth, has been its principal problem ever since.
1.
The three thinkers who claimed to have discovered the secret of social
development had also in view the practical object of remoulding society
on general scientific principles, and they became the founders of
sects, Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Comte. They all announced a new era
of development as a necessary sequel of the past, an inevitable and
desirable stage in the march of humanity, and delineated its features.
Comte was the successor of Saint-Simon, as Saint-Simon himself was the
successor of Condorcet. Fourier stands quite apart. He claimed that
he broke entirely new ground, and acknowledged no masters. He regarded
himself as a Newton for whom no Kepler or Galileo had prepared the
way. The most important and sanest part of his work was the scheme for
organising society on a new principle of industrial co-operation. His
general theory of the universe and man's destinies which lay behind
his practical plans is so fantastic that it sounds like the dream of a
lunatic. Yet many accepted it as the apocalypse of an evangelist.
Fourier was moved by the far-reaching effects of Newton's discovery
to seek a law which would coordinate facts in the moral world as the
principle of gravitation had co-ordinated facts in the physical world,
and in 1808 he claimed to have found the secret in what he called the
law of Passional Attraction. [Footnote: Theorie des quatre mouvements et
des destinees generales. General accounts of his theories will be
found in Charles Fourier, sa vie et sa theorie, by his disciple Dr. Ch.
Pellarin (2nd ed., 1843), and in Flint, Hist. of Philosophy of History
in France, etc., pp. 408 sqq.] The human passions have hitherto been
sources of misery; the problem for man is to make them sources of
happiness. If we know the law which governs them, we can make such
changes in our environment that none of the passions will need to be
curbed, and the free indulgence of one will not hinder or compromise the
satisfaction of the others.
His worthless law for harmonising the passions without restraining them
need not detain us. The structure of society, by which he proposed to
realise the benefits of his discovery, was based on co-operation, but
was not socialistic. The family as a social unit was to be replaced by
a larger unit (PHALANGE), economically self-sufficing, and consisting
of about 1800 persons, who were to live together in a vast building
(PHALANSTERE), surrounded by a domain sufficient to produce all they
required. Private property is not abolished; the community will include
both rich and poor; all the products of their work are distributed in
shares according to the labour, talents, and capital of each member, but
a fixed minimum is assured to every one. The scheme was actually tried
on a small scale near the forest of Rambouillet in 1832.
This transformation of society, which is to have the effect of
introducing harmony among the passions, will mark the beginning of a new
epoch. The duration of man's earthly career is 81,000 years, of which
5000 have elapsed. He will now enter upon a long period of increasing
harmony, which will be followed by an equal period of decline--like the
way up and the way down of Heraclitus. His brief past, the age of
his infancy, has been marked by a decline of happiness leading to the
present age of "civilisation" which is thoroughly bad--here we see the
influence of Rousseau--and from it Fourier's discovery is the clue to
lead humanity forth into the epoch in which harmony begins to emerge.
But men who have lived in the bad ages need not be pitied, and those
who live to-day need not be pessimistic. For Fourier believed in
metempsychosis, and could tell you, as if he were the private secretary
of the Deity calculating the arithmetical details of the cosmic plan,
how many very happy, tolerably happy, and unhappy lives fall to the lot
of each soul during the whole 81,000 years. Nor does the prospect end
with the life of the earth. The soul of the earth and the human souls
attached to it will live again in comets, planets, and suns, on a system
of which Fourier knew all the particulars. [Footnote: Details will be
found in the Theorie de l'unite universelle, originally published under
the title Association domestique-agricole in 1822.]
These silly speculations would not deserve even this slight indication
of their purport were it not that Fourier founded a sect and had a
considerable body of devoted followers. His "discovery" was acclaimed by
Beranger:
Fourier nous dit: Sors de la fange,
Peuple en proie aux deceptions,
Travaille, groupe par phalange,
Dans un cercle d'attractions;
La terre, apres tant de desastres,
Forme avec le ciel un hymen,
Et la loi qui regit les astres,
Donne la paix au genre humain.
Ten years after his death (1837) an English writer tells us that
"the social theory of Fourier is at the present moment engrossing the
attention and exciting the apprehensions of thinking men, not only in
France but in almost every country in Europe." [Footnote: R. Blakey,
History of the Philosophy of Mind, vol. iv. p. 293 (1848). Fourier,
born 1772, died in 1837. His principal disciple was Victor Considerant.]
Grotesque as was the theoretical background of his doctrines, he helped
to familiarise the world with the idea of indefinite Progress.
2.
"The imagination of poets has placed the golden age in the cradle of the
human race. It was the age of iron they should have banished there. The
golden age is not behind us, but in front of us. It is the perfection
of social order. Our fathers have not seen it; our children will arrive
there one day, and it is for us to clear the way for them."
The Comte de Saint-Simon, who wrote these words in 1814, was one of
the liberal nobles who had imbibed the ideas of the Voltairian age and
sympathised with the spirit of the Revolution. In his literary career
from 1803 to his death in 1825 he passed through several phases of
thought, [Footnote: They are traced in G. Weill's valuable monograph,
Saint-Simon et son oeuvre, 1894.] but his chief masters were always
Condorcet and the physiologists, from whom he derived his two guiding
ideas that ethics and politics depend ultimately on physics and that
history is progress.
Condorcet had interpreted history by the progressive movement of
knowledge. That, Saint-Simon said, is the true principle, but Condorcet
applied it narrowly, and committed two errors. He did not understand
the social import of religion, and he represented the Middle Ages as a
useless interruption of the forward movement. Here Saint-Simon learned
from the religious reaction. He saw that religion has a natural and
legitimate social role and cannot be eliminated as a mere perversity.
He expounded the doctrine that all social phenomena cohere. A religious
system, he said, always corresponds to the stage of science which the
society wherein it appears has reached; in fact, religion is merely
science clothed in a form suitable to the emotional needs which it
satisfies. And as a religious system is based on the contemporary
phase of scientific development, so the political system of an epoch
corresponds to the religious system. They all hang together. Medieval
Europe does not represent a temporary triumph of obscurantism, useless
and deplorable, but a valuable and necessary stage in human progress. It
was a period in which an important principle of social organisation was
realised, the right relation of the spiritual and temporal powers.
It is evident that these views transformed the theory of Condorcet into
a more acceptable shape. So long as the medieval tract of time appeared
to be an awkward episode, contributing nothing to the forward movement
but rather thwarting and retarding it, Progress was exposed to the
criticism that it was an arbitrary synthesis, only partly borne out by
historical facts and supplying no guarantees for the future. And so
long as rationalists of the Encyclopaedic school regarded religion as
a tiresome product of ignorance and deceit, the social philosophy
which lay behind the theory of Progress was condemned as unscientific;
because, in defiance of the close cohesion of social phenomena, it
refused to admit that religion, as one of the chief of those phenomena,
must itself participate and co-operate in Progress.
Condorcet had suggested that the value of history lies in affording
data for foreseeing the future. Saint-Simon raised this suggestion to a
dogma. But prevision was impossible on Condorcet's unscientific method.
In order to foretell, the law of the movement must be discovered, and
Condorcet had not found or even sought a law. The eighteenth
century thinkers had left Progress a mere hypothesis based on a very
insufficient induction; their successors sought to lift it to the rank
of a scientific hypothesis, by discovering a social law as valid as the
physical law of gravitation. This was the object both of Saint-Simon and
of Comte.
The "law" which Saint-Simon educed from history was that epochs of
organisation or construction, and epochs of criticism or revolution,
succeed each other alternately. The medieval period was a time of
organisation, and was followed by a critical, revolutionary period,
which has now come to an end and must be succeeded by another epoch of
organisation. Having discovered the clew to the process, Saint-Simon
is able to predict. As our knowledge of the universe has reached or
is reaching a stage which is no longer conjectural but POSITIVE in all
departments, society will be transformed accordingly; a new PHYSICIST
religion will supersede Christianity and Deism; men of science will play
the role of organisers which the clergy played in the Middle Ages.
As the goal of the development is social happiness, and as the working
classes form the majority, the first step towards the goal will be
the amelioration of the lot of the working classes. This will be
the principal problem of government in reorganising society, and
Saint-Simon's solution of the problem was socialism. He rejected the
watchwords of liberalism--democracy, liberty, and equality--with as much
disdain as De Maistre and the reactionaries.
The announcement of a future age of gold, which I quoted above, is taken
from a pamphlet which he issued, in conjunction with his secretary,
Augustin Thierry the historian, after the fall of Napoleon. [Footnote:
De la reorganisation de la societe europeenne, p. 111 (1814).] In it he
revived the idea of the Abbe de Saint-Pierre for the abolition of war,
and proposed a new organisation of Europe more ambitious and Utopian
than the Abbe's league of states. At this moment he saw in parliamentary
government, which the restored Bourbons were establishing in France,
a sovran remedy for political disorder, and he imagined that if this
political system were introduced in all the states of Europe a long step
would have been taken to the perpetuation of peace. If the old enemies
France and England formed a close alliance there would be little
difficulty in creating ultimately a European state like the American
Commonwealth, with a parliamentary government supreme over the state
governments. Here is the germ of the idea of a "parliament of man."
3.
Saint-Simon, however, did not construct a definite system for the
attainment of social perfection. He left it to disciples to develop
the doctrine which he sketched. In the year of his death (1825) Olinde
Rodrigues and Enfantin founded a journal, the Producteur, to present to
humanity the one thing which humanity, in the opinion of their master,
then most needed, a new general doctrine. [Footnote: The best study of
the Saint-Simonian school is that of G. Weill, L'Ecole saint-simonienne,
son histoire, son influence jusqu'a nos jours (1896), to which I am much
indebted.]
History shows that peoples have been moving from isolation to union,
from war to peace, from antagonism to association. The programme for the
future is association scientifically organised. The Catholic Church
in the Middle Ages offered the example of a great social organisation
resting on a general doctrine. The modern world must also be a
social organisation, but the general doctrine will be scientific,
not religious. The spiritual power must reside, not in priests but in
savants, who will direct the progress of science and public education.
Each member of the community will have his place and duties assigned to
him. Society consists of three classes of workers--industrial workers,
savants, and artists. A commission of eminent workers of each class will
determine the place of every individual according to his capacities.
Complete equality is absurd; inequality, based on merit, is reasonable
and necessary. It is a modern error to distrust state authority. A power
directing national forces is requisite, to propose great ideas and to
make the innovations necessary for Progress. Such an organisation will
promote progress in all domains: in science by co-operation, in industry
by credit, and in art too, for artists will learn to express the ideas
and sentiments of their own age. There are signs already of a tendency
towards something of this kind; its realisation must be procured, not by
revolution but by gradual change.
In the authoritarian character of the organisation to which these
apostles of Progress wished to entrust the destinies of man we may see
the influence of the great theocrat and antagonist of Progress, Joseph
de Maistre. He taught them the necessity of a strong central power and
the danger of liberty.
But the fullest exposition of the Saint-Simonian doctrine of development
was given by Bazard, one of the chief disciples, a few years later.
[Footnote: Exposition de la doctrine saint-simonienne, 2 vols., 1830-1.]
The human race is conceived as a collective being which unfolds its
nature in the course of generations, according to a law--the law
of Progress--which may be called the physiological law of the human
species, and was discovered by Saint-Simon. It consists in the
alternation of ORGANIC and CRITICAL epochs. [Footnote: In the Globe,
which became an organ of Saint-Simonism in 1831, Enfantin announced a
new principle (Weill, op. cit. 107). He defined the law of history as
"the harmony, ceaselessly progressive, of flesh and spirit, of industry
and science, of east and west, of woman and man." The role of woman
played a large part in the teaching of the sect.
Saint-Simon's law of organic and critical ages was definitely accepted
by H. de Ferron, a thinker who did not belong to the school, as late as
1867. See his Theorie du progres, vol. ii. p. 433.]
In an organic epoch men discern a destination and harmonise all their
energies to reach it. In a critical epoch they are not conscious of
a goal, and their efforts are dispersed and discordant. There was an
organic period in Greece before the age of Socrates. It was succeeded
by a critical epoch lasting to the barbarian invasions. Then came an
organic period in the homogeneous societies of Europe from Charlemagne
to the end of the fifteenth century, and a new critical period opened
with Luther and has lasted till to-day. Now it is time to prepare the
advent of the organic age which must necessarily follow.
The most salient fact observable in history is the continual extension
of the principle of association, in the series of family, city, nation,
supernational Church. The next term must be a still vaster association
comprehending the whole race.
In consequence of the incompleteness of association, the exploitation
of the weak by the strong has been a capital feature in human societies,
but its successive forms exhibit a gradual mitigation. Cannibalism is
followed by slavery, slavery by serfdom, and finally comes industrial
exploitation by the capitalist. This latest form of the oppression of
the weak depends on the right of property, and the remedy is to transfer
the right of inheriting the property of the individual from the family
to the state. The society of the future must be socialistic.
The new social doctrine must not only be diffused by education and
legislation, it must be sanctioned by a new religion. Christianity will
not serve, for Christianity is founded on a dualism between matter
and spirit, and has laid a curse on matter. The new religion must be
monistic, and its principles are, briefly: God is one, God is all that
is, all is God. He is universal love, revealing itself as mind and
matter. And to this triad correspond the three domains of religion,
science, and industry.
In combining their theory with a philosophical religion the
Saint-Simonian school was not only true to its master's teaching
but obeying an astute instinct. As a purely secular movement for the
transformation of society, their doctrine would not have reaped the same
success or inspired the same enthusiasm. They were probably influenced
too by the pamphlet of Lessing to which Madame de Stael had invited
attention, and which one of Saint-Simon's disciples translated.
The fortunes of the school, the life of the community at Menilmontant
under the direction of Enfantin, the persecution, the heresies,
the dispersion, the attempt to propagate the movement in Egypt, the
philosophical activity of Enfantin and Lemonnier under the Second
Empire, do not claim our attention; the curious story is told in
M. Weill's admirable monograph. [Footnote: It may be noticed that
Saint-Simonians came to the front in public careers after the revolution
of 1848; e.g. Carnot, Reynaud, Charton.] The sect is now extinct, but
its influence was wide in its day, and it propagated faith in Progress
as the key to history and the law of collective life.[Footnote: Two able
converts to the ideas of Saint-Simon seceded from the school at an early
stage in consequence of Enfantin's aberrations: Pierre Leroux, whom
we shall meet again, and P. J. B. Buchez, who in 1833 published a
thoughtful "Introduction a la science de l'histoire," where history is
defined as "a science whose end is to foresee the social future of the
human species in the order of its free activity" (vol. i. p. 60,. ed. 2,
1842).]