1.
In the sixties of the nineteenth century the idea of Progress entered
upon the third period of its history. During the FIRST period, up to the
French Revolution, it had been treated rather casually; it was taken for
granted and received no searching examination either from philosophers
or from historians. In the SECOND period its immense significance was
apprehended, and a search began for a general law which would define and
establish it. The study of sociology was founded, and at the same time
the impressive results of science, applied to the conveniences of life,
advertised the idea. It harmonised with the notion of "development"
which had become current both in natural science and in metaphysics.
Socialists and other political reformers appealed to it as a gospel.
By 1850 it was a familiar idea in Europe, but was not yet universally
accepted as obviously true. The notion of social Progress had been
growing in the atmosphere of the notion of biological development,
but this development still seemed a highly precarious speculation.
The fixity of species and the creation of man, defended by powerful
interests and prejudices, were attacked but were not shaken. The
hypothesis of organic evolution was much in the same position as the
Copernican hypothesis in the sixteenth century. Then in 1859 Darwin
intervened, like Galileo. The appearance of the ORIGIN OF SPECIES
changed the situation by disproving definitely the dogma of fixity of
species and assigning real causes for "transformism." What might be
set aside before as a brilliant guess was elevated to the rank of a
scientific hypothesis, and the following twenty years were enlivened by
the struggle around the evolution of life, against prejudices chiefly
theological, resulting in the victory of the theory.
The ORIGIN OF SPECIES led to the THIRD stage of the fortunes of the idea
of Progress. We saw how the heliocentric astronomy, by dethroning man
from his privileged position in the universe of space and throwing him
back on his own efforts, had helped that idea to compete with the
idea of a busy Providence. He now suffers a new degradation within the
compass of his own planet. Evolution, shearing him of his glory as a
rational being specially created to be the lord of the earth, traces a
humble pedigree for him. And this second degradation was the decisive
fact which has established the reign of the idea of Progress.
2.
Evolution itself, it must be remembered, does not necessarily mean,
applied to society, the movement of man to a desirable goal. It is a
neutral, scientific conception, compatible either with optimism or with
pessimism. According to different estimates it may appear to be a cruel
sentence or a guarantee of steady amelioration. And it has been actually
interpreted in both ways.
In order to base Progress on Evolution two distinct arguments are
required. If it could be shown that social life obeys the same general
laws of evolution as nature, and also that the process involves an
increase of happiness, then Progress would be as valid a hypothesis as
the evolution of living forms. Darwin had concluded his treatise with
these words:
As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those
which lived long before the Silurian epoch, we may feel certain that the
ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that
no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence we may look with some
confidence to a secure future of equally inappreciable length. And as
natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being,
all corporeal and mental environments will tend to progress towards
perfection.
Here the evolutionist struck the note of optimism. And he suggested that
laws of Progress would be found in other quarters than those where they
had hitherto been sought.
The ablest and most influential development of the argument from
evolution to Progress was the work of Spencer. He extended the principle
of evolution to sociology and ethics, and was the most conspicuous
interpreter of it in an optimistic sense. He had been an evolutionist
long before Darwin's decisive intervention, and in 1851 he had published
his Social Statics, which, although he had not yet worked out the
evolutionary laws which he began to formulate soon afterwards and was
still a theist, exhibits the general trend of his optimistic philosophy.
Progress here appears as the basis of a theory of ethics. The title
indicates the influence of Comte, but the argument is sharply opposed to
the spirit of Comte's teaching, and sociology is treated in a new
way. [Footnote: Social Statics, or the Conditions Essential to Human
Happiness specified, and the first of them developed, is the full
title.]
Spencer begins by arguing that the constancy of human nature, so
frequently alleged, is a fallacy. For change is the law of all things,
of every single object as well as of the universe. "Nature in its
infinite complexity is ever growing to a new development." It would be
strange if, in this universal mutation, man alone were unchangeable,
and it is not true. "He also obeys the law of indefinite variation."
Contrast the houseless savages with Newtons and Shakespeares; between
these extremes there are countless degrees of difference. If then
humanity is indefinitely variable, perfectibility is possible.
In the second place, evil is not a permanent necessity. For all evil
results from the non-adaptation of the organism to its conditions;
this is true of everything that lives. And it is equally true that evil
perpetually tends to disappear. In virtue of an essential principle of
life, this non-adaptation of organisms to their conditions is ever being
rectified, and one or both continue to be modified until the adaptation
is perfect. And this applies to the mental as well as to the physical
sphere.
In the present state of the world men suffer many evils, and this shows
that their characters are not yet adjusted to the social state. Now the
qualification requisite for the social state is that each individual
shall have such desires only as may fully be satisfied without trenching
upon the ability of others to obtain similar satisfaction. This
qualification is not yet fulfilled, because civilised man retains some
of the characteristics which were suitable for the conditions of
his earlier predatory life. He needed one moral constitution for his
primitive state, he needs quite another for his present state. The
resultant is a process of adaptation which has been going on for a long
time, and will go on for a long time to come.
Civilisation represents the adaptations which have already been
accomplished. Progress means the successive steps of the process. That
by this process man will eventually become suited to his mode of life,
Spencer has no doubts. All excess and deficiency of suitable faculties
must disappear; in other words, all imperfection. "The ultimate
development of the ideal man is logically certain--as certain as any
conclusion in which we place the most implicit faith; for instance, that
all men will die." Here is the theory of perfectibility asserted, on new
grounds, with a confidence not less assured than that of Condorcet or
Godwin.
Progress then is not an accident, but a necessity. Civilisation is a
part of nature, being a development of man's latent capabilities under
the action of favourable circumstances which were certain at some time
or other to occur. Here Spencer's argument assumes a final cause. The
ultimate purpose of creation, he asserts, is to produce the greatest
amount of happiness, and to fulfil this aim it is necessary that each
member of the race should possess faculties enabling him to experience
the highest enjoyment of life, yet in such a way as not to diminish the
power of others to receive like satisfaction. Beings thus constituted
cannot multiply in a world tenanted by inferior creatures; these,
therefore, must be dispossessed to make room; and to dispossess them
aboriginal man must have an inferior constitution to begin with; he
must be predatory, he must have the desire to kill. In general, given
an unsubdued earth, and the human being "appointed" to overspread and
occupy it, then, the laws of life being what they are, no other series
of changes than that which has actually occurred could have occurred.
The argument might be put in a form free from the assumption of a final
cause, and without introducing the conception of a divine Providence
which in this work Spencer adopted, though in his later philosophy it
was superseded by the conception of the Unknowable existing behind all
phenomena. But the ROLE of the Divine ruler is simply to set in motion
immutable forces to realise his design. "In the moral as in the material
world accumulated evidence is gradually generating the conviction that
events are not at bottom fortuitous, but that they are wrought out in a
certain inevitable way by unchanging forces."
The optimism of Spencer's view could not be surpassed. "After patient
study," he writes, "this chaos of phenomena into the midst of which
he [man] was born has begun to generalise itself to him"; instead of
confusion he begins to discern "the dim outlines of a gigantic plan. No
accidents, no chance, but everywhere order and completeness One by one
exceptions vanish, and all becomes systematic."
Always towards perfection is the mighty movement--towards a complete
development and a more unmixed good; subordinating in its universality
all petty irregularities and fallings back, as the curvature of the
earth subordinates mountains and valleys. Even in evils the student
learns to recognise only a struggling beneficence. But above all he is
struck with the inherent sufficingness of things.
But the movement towards harmony, the elimination of evil, will not be
effected by idealists imposing their constructions upon the world or
by authoritarian governments. It means gradual adaptation, gradual
psychological change, and its life is individual liberty. It proceeds by
the give and take of opposed opinions. Guizot had said, "Progress, and
at the same time resistance." And Spencer conceives that resistance is
beneficial, so long as it comes from those who honestly think that
the institutions they defend are really the best and the proposed
innovations absolutely wrong.
It will be observed that Spencer's doctrine of perfectibility rests on
an entirely different basis from the doctrine of the eighteenth century.
It is one thing to deduce it from an abstract psychology which
holds that human nature is unresistingly plastic in the hands of the
legislator and the instructor. It is another to argue that human nature
is subject to the general law of change, and that the process by which
it slowly but continuously tends to adapt itself more and more to the
conditions of social life--children inheriting the acquired aptitudes
of their parents--points to an ultimate harmony. Here profitable
legislation and education are auxiliary to the process of unconscious
adaptation, and respond to the psychological changes in the community,
changes which reveal themselves in public opinion.
3.
During the following ten years Spencer was investigating the general
laws of evolution and planning his Synthetic Philosophy which was to
explain the development of the universe. [Footnote: In an article on
"Progress: its Law and Cause," in the Westminster Review, April 1857,
Spencer explained that social progress, rightly understood, is not the
increase of material conveniences or widening freedom of action,
but changes of structure in the social organism which entail such
consequences, and proceeded to show that the growth of the individual
organism and the growth of civilisation obey the same law of advance
from homogeneity to heterogeneity of structure. Here he used progress
in a neutral sense; but recognising that a word is required which has no
teleological implications (Autobiography, i. 500), he adopted evolution
six months later in an article on "Transcendental Physiology" (National
Review, Oct. 1857). In his study of organic laws Spencer was indirectly
influenced by the ideas of Schelling through von Baer.] He aimed at
showing that laws of change are discoverable which control all phenomena
alike, inorganic, biological, psychical, and social. In the light of
this hypothesis the actual progression of humanity is established as a
necessary fact, a sequel of the general cosmic movement and governed
by the same principles; and, if that progression is shown to involve
increasing happiness, the theory of Progress is established. The first
section of the work, FIRST PRINCIPLES, appeared in 1862. The BIOLOGY,
the PSYCHOLOGY, and finally the SOCIOLOGY, followed during the next
twenty years; and the synthesis of the world-process which these volumes
lucidly and persuasively developed, probably did more than any other
work, at least in England, both to drive home the significance of the
doctrine of evolution and to raise the doctrine of Progress to the
rank of a commonplace truth in popular estimation, an axiom to which
political rhetoric might effectively appeal.
Many of those who were allured by Spencer's gigantic synthesis hardly
realised that his theory of social evolution, of the gradual psychical
improvement of the race, depends upon the validity of the assumption
that parents transmit to their children faculties and aptitudes which
they have themselves acquired. On this question experts notoriously
differ. Some day it will probably be definitely decided, and perhaps in
Spencer's favour. But the theory of continuous psychical improvement
by a process of nature encounters an obvious difficulty, which did not
escape some critics of Spencer, in the prominent fact of history that
every great civilisation of the past progressed to a point at which
instead of advancing further it stood still and declined, to become
the prey of younger societies, or, if it survived, to stagnate. Arrest,
decadence, stagnation has been the rule. It is not easy to reconcile
this phenomenon with the theory of mental improvement.
The receptive attitude of the public towards such a philosophy as
Spencer's had been made possible by Darwin's discoveries, which were
reinforced by the growing science of palaeontology and the accumulating
material evidence of the great antiquity of man. By the simultaneous
advances of geology and biology man's perspective in time was
revolutionised, just as the Copernican astronomy had revolutionised his
perspective in space. Many thoughtful and many thoughtless people were
ready to discern--as Huxley suggested--in man's "long progress through
the past, a reasonable ground of faith in his attainment of a nobler
future." and Winwood Reade, a young African traveller, exhibited it in
a vivid book as a long-drawn-out martyrdom. But he was a disciple of
Spencer, and his hopes for the future were as bright as his picture
of the past was dark. THE MARTYRDOM OF MAN, published in 1872, was so
widely read that it reached an eighth edition twelve years later,
and may be counted as one of the agencies which popularised Spencer's
optimism.
That optimism was not endorsed by all the contemporary leaders of
thought. Lotze had asserted emphatically in 1864 that "human nature will
not change," and afterwards he saw no reason to alter his conviction.
Never one fold and one shepherd, never one uniform culture for all
mankind, never universal nobleness. Our virtue and happiness can only
flourish amid an active conflict with wrong. If every stumbling-block
were smoothed away, men would no longer be like men, but like a flock
of innocent brutes, feeding on good things provided by nature as at the
very beginning of their course. [Footnote: Microcosmus, Bk. vii. 5
ad fin. (Eng. trans. p. 300). The first German edition (three vols.)
appeared in 1856-64, the third, from which the English translation
was made, in 1876. Lotze was optimistic as to the durability of modern
civilisation: "No one will profess to foreknow the future, but as far
as men may judge it seems that in our days there arc greater safeguards
than there were in antiquity against unjustifiable excesses and against
the external forces which might endanger the continued existence of
civilisation."]
But even if we reject with Spencer the old dictum, endorsed by Lotze as
by Fontenelle, that human nature is immutable, the dictum of ultimate
harmony encounters the following objection. "If the social environment
were stable," it is easy to argue, "it could be admitted that man's
nature, variable EX HYPOTHESI, could gradually adapt itself to it,
and that finally a definite equilibrium would be established. But the
environment is continually changing as the consequence of man's very
efforts to adapt himself; every step he takes to harmonise his needs
and his conditions produces a new discord and confronts him with a
new problem. In other words, there is no reason to believe that the
reciprocal process which goes on in the growth of society between men's
natures and the environment they are continually modifying will ever
reach an equilibrium, or even that, as the character of the discords
changes, the suffering which they cause diminishes."
In fact, upon the neutral fact of evolution a theory of pessimism may
be built up as speciously as a theory of optimism. And such a theory was
built up with great power and ability by the German philosopher E. von
Hartmann, whose PHILOSOPHY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS appeared in 1869. Leaving
aside his metaphysics and his grotesque theory of the destiny of the
universe, we see here and in his subsequent works how plausibly
a convinced evolutionist could revive the view of Rousseau that
civilisation and happiness are mutually antagonistic, and that Progress
means an increase of misery.
Huxley himself, [Footnote: See Agnosticism in Nineteenth Century (Feb.
1889); Government: Anarchy or Regimentation, ib. (May 1890); Essays on
Evolution and Ethics (1894).] one of the most eminent interpreters
of the doctrine of evolution, did not, in his late years at least,
entertain very sanguine views of mankind. "I know of no study which is
so saddening as that of the evolution of humanity as it is set forth
in the annals of history.... Man is a brute, only more intelligent than
other brutes"; and "even the best of modern civilisations appears to
me to exhibit a condition of mankind which neither embodies any worthy
ideal nor even possesses the merit of stability." There may be some hope
of a large improvement, but otherwise he would "welcome a kindly comet
to sweep the whole affair away." And he came to the final conclusion
that such an improvement could only set in by deliberately resisting,
instead of co-operating with, the processes of nature. "Social
progress means the checking of the cosmic process at every step and the
substitution for it of another which may be called the ethical process."
[Footnote: Huxley considers progress exclusively from an ethical, not
from an eudaemonic point of view.] How in a few centuries can man hope
to gain the mastery over the cosmic process which has been at work for
millions of years? "The theory of evolution encourages no millennial
anticipations."
I have quoted these views to illustrate that evolution lends itself to
a pessimistic as well as to an optimistic interpretation. The question
whether it leads in a desirable direction or not is answered according
to the temperament of the inquirer. In an age of prosperity and
self-complacency the affirmative answer was readily received, and the
term evolution attracted to itself in common speech the implications of
value which belong to Progress.
It may be noticed that the self-complacency of the age was promoted by
the popularisation of scientific knowledge. A rapidly growing demand
(especially in England) for books and lectures, making the results of
science accessible and interesting to the lay public, is a remarkable
feature of the second half of the nineteenth century; and to supply this
demand was a remunerative enterprise. This popular literature explaining
the wonders of the physical world was at the same time subtly flushing
the imaginations of men with the consciousness that they were living in
an era which, in itself vastly superior to any age of the past, need
be burdened by no fear of decline or catastrophe, but trusting in the
boundless resources of science might securely defy fate.
4.
[It was said in 1881 by an American writer (who strongly dissented from
Spencer's theory) that the current view was "fatalistic." See Henry
George, Progress and Poverty. But it may be doubted whether those of the
general public who optimistically accepted evolution without going very
deeply into the question really believed that the future of man is taken
entirely out of his hands and is determined exclusively by the nature
of the cosmic process. Bagehot was a writer who had a good deal of
influence in his day; and in Physics and Politics (1872), where he
discusses Progress, there is no suggestion of fatalism. In France, the
chief philosophical writers who accepted Progress as a fact protested
against a fatalistic interpretation (Renouvier, Cournot, Caro; and cf. L.
Carrau's article on Progress in the Revue des deux Mondes (Oct. 1875)).
Progress was discussed by Fiske in his Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy
(1874), vol. ii. 192 sqq. For him (p. 201) "the fundamental
characteristic of social progress is the continuous weakening of
selfishness and the continuous strengthening of sympathy."]
Thus in the seventies and eighties of the last century the idea of
Progress was becoming a general article of faith. Some might hold it
in the fatalistic form that humanity moves in a desirable direction,
whatever men do or may leave undone; others might believe that the
future will depend largely on our own conscious efforts, but that there
is nothing in the nature of things to disappoint the prospect of steady
and indefinite advance. The majority did not inquire too curiously
into such points of doctrine, but received it in a vague sense as a
comfortable addition to their convictions. But it became a part of the
general mental outlook of educated people.
When Mr. Frederic Harrison delivered in 1889 at Manchester an eloquent
discourse on the "New Era," in which the dominant note is "the faith in
human progress in lieu of celestial rewards of the separate soul,"
his general argument could appeal to immensely wider circles than the
Positivists whom he was specially addressing.
The dogma--for a dogma it remains, in spite of the confidence of Comte
or of Spencer that he had made it a scientific hypothesis--has produced
an important ethical principle. Consideration for posterity has
throughout history operated as a motive of conduct, but feebly,
occasionally, and in a very limited sense. With the doctrine of Progress
it assumes, logically, a preponderating importance; for the centre of
interest is transferred to the life of future generations who are to
enjoy conditions of happiness denied to us, but which our labours and
sufferings are to help to bring about. If the doctrine is held in an
extreme fatalistic form, then our duty is to resign ourselves cheerfully
to sacrifices for the sake of unknown descendants, just as ordinary
altruism enjoins the cheerful acceptance of sacrifices for the sake of
living fellow-creatures. Winwood Reade indicated this when he wrote,
"Our own prosperity is founded on the agonies of the past. Is it
therefore unjust that we also should suffer for the benefit of those
who are to come?" But if it is held that each generation can by its own
deliberate acts determine for good or evil the destinies of the race,
then our duties towards others reach out through time as well as through
space, and our contemporaries are only a negligible fraction of the
"neighbours" to whom we owe obligations. The ethical end may still be
formulated, with the Utilitarians, as the greatest happiness of the
greatest number; only the greatest number includes, as Kidd observed,
"the members of generations yet unborn or unthought of." This extension
of the moral code, if it is not yet conspicuous in treatises on Ethics,
has in late years been obtaining recognition in practice.
5.
Within the last forty years nearly every civilised country has produced
a large literature on social science, in which indefinite Progress is
generally assumed as an axiom. But the "law" whose investigation Kant
designated as the task for a Newton, which Saint-Simon and Comte did
not find, and to which Spencer's evolutionary formula would stand in
the same relation as it stands to the law of gravitation, remains
still undiscovered. To examine or even glance at this literature, or
to speculate how theories of Progress may be modified by recent
philosophical speculation, lies beyond the scope of this volume, which
is only concerned with tracing the origin of the idea and its growth up
to the time when it became a current creed.
Looking back on the course of the inquiry, we note how the history of
the idea has been connected with the growth of modern science, with the
growth of rationalism, and with the struggle for political and religious
liberty. The precursors (Bodin and Bacon) lived at a time when the world
was consciously emancipating itself from the authority of tradition and
it was being discovered that liberty is a difficult theoretical problem.
The idea took definite shape in France when the old scheme of the
universe had been shattered by the victory of the new astronomy and the
prestige of Providence, CUNCTA SUPERCILIO MOUENTIS, was paling before
the majesty of the immutable laws of nature. There began a slow but
steady reinstatement of the kingdom of this world. The otherworldly
dreams of theologians,
ceux qui reniaient la terre pour patrie,
which had ruled so long lost their power, and men's earthly home again
insinuated itself into their affections, but with the new hope of its
becoming a place fit for reasonable beings to live in. We have seen how
the belief that our race is travelling towards earthly happiness was
propagated by some eminent thinkers, as well as by some "not very
fortunate persons who had a good deal of time on their hands." And
all these high-priests and incense-bearers to whom the creed owes its
success were rationalists, from the author of the Histoire des oracles
to the philosopher of the Unknowable.
EPILOGUE
In achieving its ascendency and unfolding its meaning, the Idea of
Progress had to overcome a psychological obstacle which may be described
as THE ILLUSION OF FINALITY.
It is quite easy to fancy a state of society, vastly different from
ours, existing in some unknown place like heaven; it is much more
difficult to realise as a fact that the order of things with which we
are familiar has so little stability that our actual descendants may
be born into a world as different from ours as ours is from that of our
ancestors of the pleistocene age.
The illusion of finality is strong. The men of the Middle Ages would
have found it hard to imagine that a time was not far off in which the
Last Judgement would have ceased to arouse any emotional interest.
In the sphere of speculation Hegel, and even Comte, illustrate this
psychological limitation: they did not recognise that their own
systems could not be final any more than the system of Aristotle or
of Descartes. It is science, perhaps, more than anything else--the
wonderful history of science in the last hundred years--that has helped
us to transcend this illusion.
But if we accept the reasonings on which the dogma of Progress is based,
must we not carry them to their full conclusion? In escaping from the
illusion of finality, is it legitimate to exempt that dogma itself?
Must not it, too, submit to its own negation of finality? Will not that
process of change, for which Progress is the optimistic name, compel
"Progress" too to fall from the commanding position in which it is now,
with apparent security, enthroned? [words in Greek]... A day will come,
in the revolution of centuries, when a new idea will usurp its place
as the directing idea of humanity. Another star, unnoticed now or
invisible, will climb up the intellectual heaven, and human emotions
will react to its influence, human plans respond to its guidance. It
will be the criterion by which Progress and all other ideas will be
judged. And it too will have its successor.
In other words, does not Progress itself suggest that its value as a
doctrine is only relative, corresponding to a certain not very advanced
stage of civilisation; just as Providence, in its day, was an idea of
relative value, corresponding to a stage somewhat less advanced? Or
will it be said that this argument is merely a disconcerting trick of
dialectic played under cover of the darkness in which the issue of the
future is safely hidden by Horace's prudent god?