1.
In 1850 there appeared at Paris a small book by M. A. Javary, with the
title DE L'IDEE DU PROGRES. Its interest lies in the express recognition
that Progress was the characteristic idea of the age, ardently received
by some, hotly denounced by others. [Footnote: Lamartine denounced in
his monthly journal Le Conseiller du peuple, vol. i. (1849), all the
progressive gospels of the day, socialist, communist, Saint-Simonian,
Fourierist, Icarian--in fact every school of social reform since the
First Republic--as purely materialistic, sprung from the "cold seed of
the century of Helvetius" (pp. 224, 287).]
"If there is any idea," he says, "that belongs properly to one century,
at least by the importance accorded to it, and that, whether accepted or
not, is familiar to all minds, it is the idea of Progress conceived as
the general law of history and the future of humanity."
He observes that some, intoxicated by the spectacle of the material
improvements of modern civilisation and the results of science, set no
limits to man's power or his hopes; while others, unable to deny the
facts, say that this progress serves only the lower part of human
nature, and refuse to look with complacency on a movement which means,
they assert, a continuous decadence of the nobler part. To which it is
replied that, If moral decadence is a fact, it is only transient; it
is a necessary phase of a development which means moral progress in
the end, for it is due to the process by which the beliefs, ideas,
and institutions of the past disappear and make way for new and better
principles.
And Javary notes a prevailing tendency in France to interpret every
contemporary movement as progressive, while all the social doctrinaires
justify their particular reforms by invoking the law of Progress. It was
quite true that during the July monarchy nearly all serious speculations
on society and history were related to that idea. It was common to
Michelet and Quinet, who saw in the march of civilisation the gradual
triumph of liberty; to Leroux and Cabet, who preached humanitarian
communism; to Louis Blanc and to Proudhon; to the bourgeois, who were
satisfied with the regime of Louis Philippe and grew rich, following
the precept of Guizot, as well as to the workers who overthrew it. It is
significant that the journal of Louis Blanc, in which he published his
book on the ORGANISATION OF WORK (1839), was entitled REVUS DES PROGRES.
The political question as to the due limits between government and
individual freedom was discussed in terms of Progress: is personal
liberty or state authority the efficient means of progressing? The
metaphysical question of necessity and freewill acquired a new interest:
is Progress a fatality, independent of human purposes, determined
by general, ineluctable, historical laws? Quinet and Michelet argued
vigorously against the optimism of Cousin, who with Hegel held that
history is just what it ought to be and could not be improved.
2.
Among the competing theories of the time, and sharply opposed to the
views of Comte, was the idea, derived from the Revolution, that the
world is moving towards universal equality and the obliteration of class
distinctions, that this is the true direction of Progress. This view,
represented by leaders of the popular movement against the bourgeois
ascendency, derived powerful reinforcement from one of the most
enlightened political thinkers of the day. The appearance of de
Tocqueville's renowned study of American democracy was the event of
1834. He was convinced that he had discovered on the other side of the
Atlantic the answer to the question whither the world is tending. In
American society he found that equality of conditions is the generating
fact on which every other fact depends. He concluded that equality is
the goal of humanity, providentially designed.
"The gradual development of equality of conditions has the principal
characteristics of a providential fact. It is universal, it is
permanent, it eludes human power; all events and all men serve this
development.... This whole book has been written under the impression of
a sort of religious terror produced in the author's soul by the view
of this irresistible revolution which for so many centuries has been
marching across all obstacles, and which is to-day seen still advancing
in the midst of the ruins it has made.... If the men of our time were
brought to see that the gradual and progressive development of equality
is at once the past and the future of their history, this single
discovery would give that development the sacred character of the will
of the sovran master."
Here we have a view of the direction of Progress and the meaning of
history, pretending to be based upon the study of facts and announced
with the most intense conviction. And behind it is the fatalistic
doctrine that the movement cannot be arrested or diverted; that it is
useless to struggle against it; that men, whatever they may do, cannot
deflect the clock-like motion regulated by a power which de Tocqueville
calls Providence but to which his readers might give some other name.
3.
It has been conjectured, [Footnote: Georges Sorel, Les Illusions
du progres, pp. 247-8 (1908).] and seems probable enough, that de
Tocqueville's book was one of the influences which wrought upon the
mind of Proudhon. The speculations of this remarkable man, who, like
Saint-Simon and Comte, sought to found a new science of society,
attracted general attention in the middle of the century. [Footnote:
Compare the appreciation by Weill in Histoire du mouvement social
en France 1852-1910 (1911, ed. 2), p. 41: "Le grande ecrivain
revolutionnaire et anarchiste n'etait au fond ni un revolutionnaire
ni un anarchiste, mais un reformateur pratique et modere qui a
fait illusion par le ton vibrant de ses pamphlets centre la societe
capitaliste."]His hostility to religion, his notorious dictum that
"property is theft," his gospel of "anarchy," and the defiant,
precipitous phrases in which he clothed his ideas, created an impression
that he was a dangerous anti-social revolutionary. But when his ideas
are studied in their context and translated into sober language, they
are not so unreasonable. Notwithstanding his communistic theory of
property and his ideal of equality, he was a strong individualist.
He held that the future of civilisation depends on the energy of
individuals, that liberty is a condition of its advance, and that the
end to be kept in view is the establishment of justice, which means
equality. He saw the difficulty of reconciling liberty with complete
equality, but hoped that the incompatibility would be overcome by a
gradual reduction of the natural differences in men's capacities. He
said, "I am an anarchist," but his anarchy only meant that the time
would come when government would be superfluous, when every human
being could be trusted to act wisely and morally without a restraining
authority or external sanctions. Nor was he a Utopian. He comprehended
that such a transformation of society would be a long, slow process, and
he condemned the schools of Saint-Simon and Fourier for imagining that a
millennium might be realised immediately by a change of organisation.
He tells us that all his speculations and controversial activities are
penetrated with the idea of Progress, which he described as "the railway
of liberty"; and his radical criticism on current social theories,
whether conservative or democratic, was that they did not take Progress
seriously though they invoked it.
"What dominates in all my studies, what forms their beginning and end,
their summit and their base, their reason, what makes my originality
as a thinker (if I have any), is that I affirm Progress resolutely,
irrevocably, and everywhere, and deny the Absolute. All that I have
ever written, all I have denied or affirmed, I have written, denied or
affirmed in the name of one unique idea, Progress. My adversaries, on
the other hand, are all partisans of the Absolute, IN OMNI GENERE, CASU,
ET NUMERO, to use the phrase of Sganarelle." [Footnote: Philosophie du
progres, Premiere lettre (1851).]
4.
A vague confidence in Progress had lain behind and encouraged the
revolution of 1789, but in the revolution of 1848 the idea was
definitely enthroned as the regnant principle. It presided over the
session of the Committee which drew up the Constitution of the second
Republic. Armand Marrast, the most important of the men who framed that
document, based the measure of universal suffrage upon "the invisible
law which rules societies," the law of progress which has been so long
denied but which is rooted in the nature of man. His argument was
this: Revolutions are due to the repression of progress, and are the
expression and triumph of a progress which has been achieved. But such
convulsions are an undesirable method of progressing; how can they be
avoided? Only by organising elastic institutions in which new ideas
of amelioration can easily be incorporated, and laws which can be
accommodated without struggle or friction to the rise of new opinions.
What is needed is a flexible government open to the penetration of
ideas, and the key to such a government is universal suffrage.
[Footnote: Marrast, "the invisible law"; "Oui," he continues, "toute
societe est progressive, parce que tout individu est educable,
perfectible; on peut mesurer, limiter, peut-etre les facultes d'un
individu; on ne saurait limiter, mesurer ce que peuvent, dans l'ordre
des idees, les intelligences dont les produits ne s'ajoutent pas
seulement mais se fecondent et se multiplient dans une progression
indefinie." No. 393 Republique francoise. Assemblee nationale. Projet de
Constitution... precede par un rapport fait au nom de la Commission par
le citoyen Armand Marrast. Seance du 30 aout, 1848.]
Universal suffrage was practical politics, but the success of the
revolution fluttered agreeably all the mansions of Utopia, and social
reformers of every type sought to improve the occasion. In the history
of the political struggles of 1848 the names are written of Proudhon,
of Victor Considerant the disciple of Fourier, of Pierre Leroux the
humanitarian communist, and his devoted pupil George Sand. The chief
title of Leroux to be remembered is just his influence over the soul
of the great novelist. Her later romances are pervaded by ideas derived
from his teaching. His communism was vague and ineffectual, but he was
one of the minor forces in the thought of the period, and there are some
features in his theory which deserve to be pointed out.
Leroux had begun as a member of the Saint-Simonian school, but he
diverged into a path of his own. He reinstated the ideal of equality
which Saint-Simon rejected, and made the approach to that ideal the
measure of Progress. The most significant process in history, he held,
is the gradual breaking down of caste and class: the process is now
approaching its completion; "today MAN is synonymous with EQUAL."
In order to advance to the city of the future we must have a force and
a lever. Man is the force, and the lever is the idea of Progress. It is
supplied by the study of history which displays the improvement of our
faculties, the increase of our power over nature, the possibility of
organising society more efficaciously. But the force and the lever are
not enough. A fulcrum is also required, and this is to be found in the
"solidarity" of the human race. But this conception meant for Leroux
something different from what is ordinarily meant by the phrase, a
deeper and even mystical bond. Human "solidarity" was a corollary from
the pantheistic religion of the Saint-Simonians, but with Leroux,
as with Fourier, it was derived from the more difficult doctrine of
palingenesis. We of this generation, he believed, are not merely the
sons and descendants of past generations, we are the past generations
themselves, which have come to birth again in us.
Through many pages of the two volumes [Footnote: De l'humanite, 1840
(dedicated to Beranger).] in which he set forth his thesis, Leroux
expended much useless learning in endeavouring to establish this
doctrine, which, were it true, might be the central principle in a
new religion of humanity, a transformed Pythagoreanism. It is easy to
understand the attractiveness of palingenesis to a believer in Progress:
for it would provide a solution of the anomaly that generations after
generations are sacrificed for the sake of posterity, and so appear to
have no value in themselves. Believers in Progress, who are sensitive to
the sufferings of mankind, past and present, need a stoical resolution
to face this fact. We saw how Herder refused to accept it. A pantheistic
faith, like that of the Saint-Simonian Church, may help some, it cannot
do more, to a stoical acquiescence. The palingenesis of Leroux or
Fourier removes the radical injustice. The men of each generation are
sacrificed and suffer for the sake of their descendants, but as their
descendants are themselves come to life again, they are really suffering
in their own interests. They will themselves reach the desirable state
to which the slow, painful process of history is tending.
But palingenesis, notwithstanding all the ancient opinions and
traditions that the researches of Leroux might muster, could carry
little conviction to those who were ceasing to believe in the familiar
doctrine of a future life detached from earth, and Madame Dudevant was
his only distinguished convert.
5.
The ascendency of the idea of Progress among thoughtful people in France
in the middle of the last century is illustrated by the work which
Ernest Renan composed under the immediate impression of the events
of 1848. He desired to understand the significance of the current
revolutionary doctrines, and was at once involved in speculation on
the future of humanity. This is the purport of L'AVENIR DE LA SCIENCE.
[Footnote: L'Avenir de la science--Pensees de (1848). Published in
1890.]
[Footnote: The ascendency of the idea of Progress at this epoch may be
further illustrated by E. Pelletan's Profession de foi du dix-neuvieme
siecle, 1852 (4th ed., 1857), where Progress is described as the general
law of the universe; and by Jean Reynaud's Philosophie religieuse:
Terre et ciel (3rd ed., 1858), a religious but not orthodox book, which
acclaims the "sovran principle of perfectibility" (cp. p. 138). I may
refer also to the rhetorical pages of E. Vacherot on the Doctrine du
progres, printed (as part of an essay on the Philosophy of History) in
his Essais de philosophie critique (1864).]
The author was then convinced that history has a goal, and that mankind
tends perpetually, though in an oscillating line, towards a more perfect
state, through the growing dominion of reason over instinct and caprice.
He takes the French Revolution as the critical moment in which humanity
first came to know itself. That revolution was the first attempt of man
to take the reins into his own hands. All that went before we may call,
with Owen, the irrational period of human existence.
We have now come to a point at which we must choose between two faiths.
If we despair of reason, we may find a refuge from utter scepticism in
a belief in the external authority of the Roman Church. If we trust
reason, we must accept the march of the human mind and justify the
modern spirit. And it can be justified only by proving that it is a
necessary step towards perfection. Renan affirmed his belief in
the second alternative, and felt confident that science--including
philology, on the human bearings of which he enlarged,--philosophy, and
art would ultimately enable men to realise an ideal civilisation,
in which all would be equal. The state, he said, is the machine of
Progress, and the Socialists are right in formulating the problem which
man has to solve, though their solution is a bad one. For individual
liberty, which socialism would seriously limit, is a definite conquest,
and ought to be preserved inviolate.
Renan wrote this work in 1848 and 1849, but did not publish it at the
time. He gave it to the world forty years later. Those forty years
had robbed him of his early optimism. He continues to believe that the
unfortunate conditions of our race might be ameliorated by science, but
he denounces the view that men can ever be equal. Inequality is written
in nature; it is not only a necessary consequence of liberty, but
a necessary postulate of Progress. There will always be a superior
minority. He criticises himself too for having fallen into the error of
Hegel, and assigned to man an unduly important place in the universe.
[Footnote: Renan, speaking of the Socialists, paid a high tribute
to Bazard (L'Avenir de la science, p. 104). On the other hand, he
criticised Comte severely (p. 149).
Renan returned to speculation on the future in 1863, in a letter to M.
Marcellin-Berthelot (published in Dialogues et fragments philosophiques,
1876): "Que sera Ie monde quand un million de fois se sera reproduit ce
qui s'est passe depuis 1763 quand la chimie, au lieu de quatre-vingt ans
de progres, en aura cent millions?" (p. 183). And again in the Dialogues
written in 1871 (ib.), where it is laid down that the end of humanity is
to produce great men: "le grand oeuvre s'accomplira par la science, non
par la democratic. Rien sans grands hommes; le salut se fera par des
grands hommes" (p. 103).]
In 1890 there was nothing left of the sentimental socialism which he had
studied in 1848; it had been blown away by the cold wind of scientific
socialism which Marx and Engels created. And Renan had come to think
that in this new form socialism would triumph. [Footnote: He reckoned
without the new forces, opposed to socialism as well as to parliamentary
democracy, represented by Bakunin and men like Georges Sorel.] He had
criticised Comte for believing that "man lives exclusively by science,
or rather little verbal tags, like geometrical theorems, dry formulae."
Was he satisfied by the concrete doctrine of Marx that all the phenomena
of civilisation at a given period are determined by the methods of
production and distribution which then prevail? But the future of
socialism is a minor issue, and the ultimate goal of humanity is quite
uncertain. "Ce qu'il y a de consolant, c'est qu'on arrive necessairement
quelque part." We may console ourselves with the certainty that we must
get somewhere.
6.
Proudhon described the idea of Progress as the railway of liberty. It
certainly supplied motive power to social ideals which were repugnant
and alarming to the authorities of the Catholic Church. At the Vatican
it was clearly seen that the idea was a powerful engine driven by an
enemy; and in the famous SYLLABUS of errors which Pope Pius IX. flung in
the face of the modern world at the end of 1864, Progress had the honour
of being censured. The eightieth error, which closes the list, runs
thus:
Romanus Pontifex potest ac debet cum progressu, cum liberalismo et cum
recenti civilitate sese reconciliare et componere.
"The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, be reconciled and come to terms
with progress, with liberalism, and with modern civilisation."
No wonder, seeing that Progress was invoked to justify every movement
that offended the nostrils of the Vatican--liberalism, toleration,
democracy, and socialism. And the Roman Church well understood the
intimate connection of the idea with the advance of rationalism.