1.
It is not easy for a new idea of the speculative order to penetrate and
inform the general consciousness of a community until it has assumed
some external and concrete embodiment or is recommended by some striking
material evidence. In the case of Progress both these conditions were
fulfilled in the period 1820 to 1850. In the Saint-Simonian Church, and
in the attempts of Owen and Cabet to found ideal societies, people saw
practical enterprises inspired by the idea. They might have no sympathy
with these enterprises, but their attention was attracted. And at the
same time they were witnessing a rapid transformation of the external
conditions of life, a movement to the continuation of which there seemed
no reason for setting any limit in the future. The spectacular results
of the advance of science and mechanical technique brought home to the
mind of the average man the conception of an indefinite increase of
man's power over nature as his brain penetrated her secrets. This
evident material progress which has continued incessantly ever since
has been a mainstay of the general belief in Progress which is prevalent
to-day.
England was the leader in this material progress, of which the
particulars are familiar and need not be enumerated here. The discovery
of the power of steam and the potentialities of coal revolutionised the
conditions of life. Men who were born at the beginning of the
century had seen, before they had passed the age of thirty, the rapid
development of steam navigation, the illumination of towns and houses by
gas, the opening of the first railway.
It was just before this event, the opening of the Liverpool and
Manchester railway, which showed how machinery would abbreviate space as
it had SIR THOMAS MORE, OR COLLOQUIES ON THE PROGRESS OF SOCIETY (1829).
There we see the effect of the new force on his imagination. "Steam," he
says, "will govern the world next,... and shake it too before its empire
is established." The biographer of Nelson devotes a whole conversation
to the subject of "steam and war." But the theme of the book is the
question of moral and social progress, on which the author inclines
to the view that "the world will continue to improve, even as it has
hitherto been continually improving; and that the progress of knowledge
and the diffusion of Christianity will bring about at last, when men
become Christian in reality as well as in name, something like that
Utopian state of which philosophers have loved to dream." This admission
of Progress, cautious though it was, circumscribed by reserves and
compromised by hesitations, coming from such a conservative pillar of
Church and State as Southey, is a notable sign of the times, when we
remember that the idea was still associated then with revolution and
heresy.
It is significant too that at the same time an octogenarian
mathematician of Aberdeen was composing a book on the same subject.
Hamilton's PROGRESS OF SOCIETY is now utterly forgotten, but it must
have contributed in its day to propagating the same moderate view of
Progress, consistent with orthodoxy, which Southey held. "The belief of
the perfectibility of human nature and the attainment of a golden age
in which vice and misery have no place, will only be entertained by an
enthusiast; but an inquiry into the means of improving our nature and
enlarging our happiness is consistent with sober reason, and is the
most important subject, merely human, that can engage the mind of
man." [Footnote: P. 13. The book was published posthumously by Murray
in 1830, a year after the author's death.] [Footnote: "Progress of
Society." The phrase was becoming common; e.g. Russell's History
of Modern Europe (1822) has the sub-title A view of the Progress of
Society, etc. The didactic poem of Payne Knight, The Progress of Civil
Society (1796), a very dull performance, was quite unaffected by
the dreams of Priestley or Godwin. It was towards the middle of the
nineteenth century that Progress, without any qualifying phrase, came
into use.]
2.
We have been told by Tennyson that when he went by the first train
from Liverpool to Manchester (1830) he thought that the wheels ran in
grooves.
"Then I made this line:
Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change."
[Footnote: See Tennyson, Memoir by his Son, vol. i. p. 195.]
LOCKSLEY HALL, which was published in 1842, illustrates how the idea of
Progress had begun to creep into the imagination of Englishmen. Though
subsidiary to a love story, it is the true theme of the poem. The
pulsation of eager interest in the terrestrial destinies of humanity,
the large excitement of living in a "wondrous Mother-age," dreams of the
future, quicken the passion of the hero's youth. His disappointment in
love disenchants him; he sees the reverse side of civilisation, but at
last he finds an anodyne for his palsied heart in a more sober version
of his earlier faith, a chastened belief in his Mother-age. He can at
least discern an increasing purpose in history, and can be sure that
"the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns." The
novelty of the poem lay in finding a cathartic cure for a private
sorrow, not in religion or in nature, but in the modern idea of
Progress. It may be said to mark a stage in the career of the idea.
The view of civilisation which Tennyson took as his MOTIF had no
revolutionary implications, suggested no impatience or anger with the
past. The startling prospect unfolding itself before "the long result of
time," and history is justified by the promise of to-day:
The centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed.
Very different was the spirit in which another great poet composed,
nearly twenty years later, a wonderful hymn of Progress. Victor Hugo's
PLEIN CEIL, in his epic LA LEGENDE DES SIECLES,[Footnote: A.D. 1859.]
announces a new era of the world in which man, the triumphant rebel,
delivered from his past, will move freely forward on a glorious way. The
poet is inspired not by faith in a continuous development throughout the
ages, but by the old spirit of the Revolution, and he sees in the past
only a heavy chain which the race at last flings off. The horrible past
has gone, not to return: "ce monde est mort"; and the poem is at once
a paean on man's victorious rebellion against it and a dithyramb on the
prospect of his future.
Man is imagined as driving through the heavens an aerial car to which
the four winds are harnessed, mounting above the clouds, and threatening
to traverse the ether.
Superbe, il plane, avec un hymne en ses agres;
Et l'on voit voir passer la strophe du progres.
Il est la nef, il est le phare!
L'homme enfin prend son sceptre et jette son baton.
Et l'on voit s'envoler le calcul de Newton
Monte sur l'ode de Pindare.
But if this vision foreshadows the conquest of the air, its significance
is symbolic rather than literal, and, like Pindar checking the steeds of
his song, Hugo returns to earth:
Pas si loin! pas si haut! redescendons.
Restons L'homme, restons Adam; mais non l'homme a tatons,
Mais non l'Adam tombe! Tout autre reve altere
L'espece d'ideal qui convient a la terre.
Contentons-nous du mot: meilleur! ecrit partout.
Dawn has appeared, after six thousand years in the fatal way, and
man, freed by "the invisible hand" from the weight of his chains, has
embarked for new shores:
Ou va-t-il ce navire? II va, de jour vetu,
A l'avenir divin et pur, a la vertu,
A la science qu'on voit luire,
A la mort des fleaux, a l'oubli genereux,
A l'abondance, au caime, au rire, a l'homme heureux,
Il va, ce glorieux navire.
Oh! ce navire fait le voyage sacre!
C'est l'ascension bleue a son premier degre;
Hors de l'antique et vil decombre,
Hors de la pesanteur, c'est l'avenir fonde;
C'est le destin de l'homme a la fin evade,
Qui leve l'ancre et sort de l'ombre!
The union of humanity in a universal commonwealth, which Tennyson had
expressed as "the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World,"
the goal of many theorists of Progress, becomes in Hugo's imagination
something more sublime. The magic ship of man's destiny is to compass
the cosmopolis of the Stoics, a terrestrial order in harmony with the
whole universe.
Nef magique et supreme! elle a, rien qu'eri marchant,
Change le cri terrestre en pur et joyeux chant,
Rajeuni les races fletries,
Etabli l'ordre vrai, montre le chemin sur,
Dieu juste! et fait entrer dans l'homme tant d'azur
Qu'elle a supprime les patries!
Faisant a l'homme avec le ciel une cite,
Une pensee avec toute l'immensite,
Elle abolit les vieilles regles;
Elle abaisse les monts, elle annule les tours;
Splendide, elle introduit les peuples, marcheurs lourds,
Dans la communion des aigles.
3.
Between 1830 and 1850 railway transport spread throughout Great Britain
and was introduced on the Continent, and electricity was subdued to
man's use by the invention of telegraphy. The great Exhibition of London
in 1851 was, in one of its aspects, a public recognition of the material
progress of the age and the growing power of man over the physical
world. Its aim, said a contemporary, was "to seize the living scroll
of human progress, inscribed with every successive conquest of man's
intellect."[Footnote: Edinburgh Review (October 1851), p. 562, in a
review of the Official Catalogue of the Exhibition.] The Prince Consort,
who originated the Exhibition, explained its significance in a public
speech:
"Nobody who has paid any attention to the peculiar features of our
present era will doubt for a moment that we are living at a period of
most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to accomplish that great
end to which indeed all history points--THE REALISATION OF THE UNITY
OF MANKIND.... The distances which separated the different nations and
parts of the globe are rapidly vanishing before the achievements of
modern invention, and we can traverse them with incredible ease; the
languages of all nations are known, and their acquirements placed within
the reach of everybody; thought is communicated with the rapidity, and
even by the power, of lightning. On the other hand, the GREAT PRINCIPLE
OF DIVISION OF LABOUR, which may be called the moving power of
civilisation, is being extended to all branches of science, industry,
and art... Gentlemen, the Exhibition of 1851 is to give us a true test
and a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of
mankind has arrived in this great task, and a new starting-point from
which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions."
[Footnote: Martin, Life of the Prince Consort (ed. 3), iii. p. 247.
The speech was delivered at a banquet at the Mansion House on March 21,
1850.]
The point emphasised here is the "solidarity" of the world. The
Exhibition is to bring home to men's consciousness the community of all
the inhabitants of the earth. The assembled peoples, wrote Thackeray,
in his "May-day Ode," [Footnote: Published in the Times, April 30, 1851.
The Exhibition was opened on May I.] See the sumptuous banquet set, The
brotherhood of nations met Around the feast.
And this was the note struck in the leading article of the Times on the
opening day: "The first morning since the creation that all peoples have
assembled from all parts of the world and done a common act." It was
claimed that the Exhibition signified a new, intelligent, and moral
movement which "marks a great crisis in the history of the world," and
foreshadows universal peace.
England, said another writer, produced Bacon and Newton, the two
philosophers "who first lent direction and force to the stream of
industrial science; we have been the first also to give the widest
possible base to the watch-tower of international progress, which seeks
the formation of the physical well-being of man and the extinction of
the meaner jealousies of commerce."[Footnote: Edinburgh Review, loc.
cit.]
These quotations show that the great Exhibition was at the time
optimistically regarded, not merely as a record of material
achievements, but as a demonstration that humanity was at last well on
its way to a better and happier state, through the falling of barriers
and the resulting insight that the interests of all are closely
interlocked. A vista was suggested, at the end of which far-sighted
people might think they discerned Tennyson's "Federation of the World."
4.
Since the Exhibition, western civilisation has advanced steadily, and
in some respects more rapidly than any sober mind could have
predicted--civilisation, at least, in the conventional sense, which
has been not badly defined as "the development of material ease, of
education, of equality, and of aspirations to rise and succeed in life."
[Footnote: B. Kidd, Social Evolution, p. 368.] The most striking advance
has been in the technical conveniences of life--that is, in the
control over natural forces. It would be superfluous to enumerate
the discoveries and inventions since 1850 which have abridged space,
economised time, eased bodily suffering, and reduced in some ways
the friction of life, though they have increased it in others. This
uninterrupted series of technical inventions, proceeding concurrently
with immense enlargements of all branches of knowledge, has gradually
accustomed the least speculative mind to the conception that
civilisation is naturally progressive, and that continuous improvement
is part of the order of things.
So far the hopes of 1851 have been fulfilled. But against all this
technical progress, with the enormous expansion of industry and
commerce, dazzling to the man in the market-place when he pauses to
reflect, have to be set the exploitation and sufferings of industrial
workers, the distress of intense economic competition, the heavier
burdens of preparation for modern war. The very increase of "material
ease" seemed unavoidably to involve conditions inconsistent with
universal happiness; and the communications which linked the peoples of
the world together modified the methods of warfare instead of bringing
peace. "Toutes nos merveilleuses inventions sont aussi puissantes pour
le mal que pour le bien." [Footnote: H. de Ferron, Theorie du progres
(1867), ii. 439.] One fact indeed might be taken as an index that
humanity was morally advancing--the abolition of slavery in America
at the price of a long and sanguinary war. Yet some triumphs of
philanthropy hardly seemed to endanger the conclusion that, while
knowledge is indefinitely progressive, there is no good reason for
sanguine hopes that man is "perfectible" or that universal happiness is
attainable. A thoughtful writer observed, discussing Progress in 1864,
that the innumerable individual steps in the growth of knowledge and
business organisation have not been combined, so far, to produce a
general advance in the happiness of life; each step brings increase of
pressure. [Footnote: Lotze, Microcosmus (Eng. tr.), vol. ii. p. 396.]
Yet in spite of all adverse facts and many eminent dissenters the belief
in social Progress has on the whole prevailed. This triumph of optimism
was promoted by the victory of a revolutionary hypothesis in another
field of inquiry, which suddenly electrified the world. [Footnote:
Against Lotze we might set many opinions which do not seem to have been
influenced by the doctrine of evolution. For instance, the optimism of
M. Marcellin-Berthelot in a letter to Renan in 1863. He says (Renan,
Dialogues, p. 233) that one of the general results of historical study
is "the fact of the incessant progress of human societies in science, in
material conditions, and in morality, three correlatives.... Societies
become more and more civilised, and I will venture to say more and more
virtuous. The sum of good is always increasing, and the sum of evil
diminishing, in the same measure as the sum of truth increases and the
sum of ignorance diminishes."
In 1867 Emerson delivered an address at Harvard on the "Progress
of Culture" (printed in his Letters and Social Aims), in which he
enumerates optimistically the indications of social advance: "the new
scope of social science; the abolition of capital punishment and of
imprisonment for debt: the improvement of prisons; the efforts for the
suppression of intemperance, vice, etc.," and asks: "Who would live in
the stone age, or the bronze, or the iron, or the lacustrine? Who does
not prefer the age of steel, of gold, of coal, petroleum, cotton, steam,
electricity, and the spectroscope?"
The discursive Thoughts on the Future of the Human Race, published in
1866, by W. Ellis (1800-81), a disciple of J. S. Mill, would have been
remarkable if it had appeared half a century earlier. He is untouched
by the theory of evolution, and argues on common-sense grounds that
Progress is inevitable.]