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The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth

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Title: The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth

Author: J. B. Bury


        
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THE IDEA OF PROGRESS

AN INQUIRY INTO ITS ORIGIN AND GROWTH


By J. B. Bury

Regius Professor Of Modern History, And Fellow Of King's
College, In The University Of Cambridge


Dedicated to the memories of Charles Francois Castel de Saint-Pierre,
Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat de Condorcet, Auguste Comte, Herbert
Spencer, and other optimists mentioned in this volume.


     Tantane uos generis tenuit fiducia uestri?




PREFACE

We may believe in the doctrine of Progress or we may not, but in either
case it is a matter of interest to examine the origins and trace the
history of what is now, even should it ultimately prove to be no more
than an idolum saeculi, the animating and controlling idea of western
civilisation. For the earthly Progress of humanity is the general test
to which social aims and theories are submitted as a matter of course.
The phrase CIVILISATION AND PROGRESS has become stereotyped, and
illustrates how we have come to judge a civilisation good or bad
according as it is or is not progressive. The ideals of liberty and
democracy, which have their own ancient and independent justifications,
have sought a new strength by attaching themselves to Progress. The
conjunctions of "liberty and progress," "democracy and progress,"
meet us at every turn. Socialism, at an early stage of its modern
development, sought the same aid. The friends of Mars, who cannot bear
the prospect of perpetual peace, maintain that war is an indispensable
instrument of Progress. It is in the name of Progress that the
doctrinaires who established the present reign of terror in Russia
profess to act. All this shows the prevalent feeling that a social or
political theory or programme is hardly tenable if it cannot claim that
it harmonises with this controlling idea.

In the Middle Ages Europeans followed a different guiding star. The idea
of a life beyond the grave was in control, and the great things of
this life were conducted with reference to the next. When men's deepest
feelings reacted more steadily and powerfully to the idea of saving
their souls than to any other, harmony with this idea was the test by
which the opportuneness of social theories and institutions was judged.
Monasticism, for instance, throve under its aegis, while liberty of
conscience had no chance. With a new idea in control, this has been
reversed. Religious freedom has thriven under the aegis of Progress;
monasticism can make no appeal to it.

For the hope of an ultimate happy state on this planet to be enjoyed by
future generations--or of some state, at least, that may relatively be
considered happy--has replaced, as a social power, the hope of felicity
in another world. Belief in personal immortality is still very widely
entertained, but may we not fairly say that it has ceased to be a
central and guiding idea of collective life, a criterion by which social
values are measured? Many people do not believe in it; many more regard
it as so uncertain that they could not reasonably permit it to affect
their lives or opinions. Those who believe in it are doubtless the
majority, but belief has many degrees; and one can hardly be wrong
in saying that, as a general rule, this belief does not possess the
imaginations of those who hold it, that their emotions react to it
feebly, that it is felt to be remote and unreal, and has comparatively
seldom a more direct influence on conduct than the abstract arguments to
be found in treatises on morals.

Under the control of the idea of Progress the ethical code recognised in
the Western world has been reformed in modern times by a new principle
of far-reaching importance which has emanated from that idea. When
Isocrates formulated the rule of life, "Do unto others," he probably did
not mean to include among "others" slaves or savages. The Stoics and the
Christians extended its application to the whole of living humanity. But
in late years the rule has received a vastly greater extension by the
inclusion of the unborn generations of the future. This principle of
duty to posterity is a direct corollary of the idea of Progress. In
the recent war that idea, involving the moral obligation of making
sacrifices for the sake of future ages, was constantly appealed to;
just as in the Crusades, the most characteristic wars of our medieval
ancestors, the idea of human destinies then in the ascendant lured
thousands to hardship and death.

The present attempt to trace the genesis and growth of the idea in broad
outline is a purely historical inquiry, and any discussion of the
great issue which is involved lies outside its modest scope. Occasional
criticisms on particular forms which the creed of Progress assumed,
or on arguments which were used to support it, are not intended as a
judgment on its general validity. I may, however, make two observations
here. The doubts which Mr. Balfour expressed nearly thirty years ago,
in an Address delivered at Glasgow, have not, so far as I know, been
answered. And it is probable that many people, to whom six years ago the
notion of a sudden decline or break-up of our western civilisation, as
a result not of cosmic forces but of its own development, would have
appeared almost fantastic, will feel much less confident to-day,
notwithstanding the fact that the leading nations of the world have
instituted a league of peoples for the prevention of war, the measure to
which so many high priests of Progress have looked forward as meaning a
long stride forward on the road to Utopia.

The preponderance of France's part in developing the idea is an
outstanding feature of its history. France, who, like ancient Greece,
has always been a nursing-mother of ideas, bears the principal
responsibility for its growth; and if it is French thought that will
persistently claim our attention, this is not due to an arbitrary
preference on my part or to neglect of speculation in other countries.

J. B. BURY. January, 1920.




CONTENTS

               INTRODUCTION

    CHAPTER I  SOME INTERPRETATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY: BODIN AND
               LE ROY

   CHAPTER II  UTILITY THE END OF KNOWLEDGE: BACON

  CHAPTER III  CARTESIANISM

   CHAPTER IV  THE DOCTRINE OF DEGENERATION: THE ANCIENTS AND
               MODERNS

    CHAPTER V  THE PROGRESS OF KNOWLEDGE: FONTENELLE

   CHAPTER VI  THE GENERAL PROGRESS OF MAN: ABBE DE SAINT-PIERRE

  CHAPTER VII  NEW CONCEPTIONS OF HISTORY: MONTESQUIEU, VOLTAIRE,
               TURGOT

 CHAPTER VIII  THE ENCYCLOPAEDISTS AND ECONOMISTS

   CHAPTER IX  WAS CIVILISATION A MISTAKE? ROUSSEAU, CHASTELLUX

    CHAPTER X  THE YEAR 2440

   CHAPTER XI  THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: CONDORCET

  CHAPTER XII  THE THEORY OF PROGRESS IN ENGLAND

 CHAPTER XIII  GERMAN SPECULATIONS ON PROGRESS

  CHAPTER XIV  CURRENTS OF THOUGHT IN FRANCE AFTER THE REVOLUTION

   CHAPTER XV  THE SEARCH FOR A LAW OF PROGRESS: I. SAINT-SIMON

  CHAPTER XVI  SEARCH FOR A LAW OF PROGRESS: II. COMTE

 CHAPTER XVII  "PROGRESS" IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT
               (1830-1851)

CHAPTER XVIII MATERIAL PROGRESS: THE EXHIBITION OF 1851

  CHAPTER XIX  PROGRESS IN THE LIGHT OF EVOLUTION

               EPILOGUE

               APPENDIX: NOTES TO THE TEXT
               [Proofreaders note: these notes have been
               interspersed in the main text as Footnotes]




INTRODUCTION

When we say that ideas rule the world, or exercise a decisive power in
history, we are generally thinking of those ideas which express human
aims and depend for their realisation on the human will, such as
liberty, toleration, equality of opportunity, socialism. Some of these
have been partly realised, and there is no reason why any of them should
not be fully realised, in a society or in the world, if it were the
united purpose of a society or of the world to realise it. They are
approved or condemned because they are held to be good or bad, not
because they are true or false. But there is another order of ideas
that play a great part in determining and directing the course of man's
conduct but do not depend on his will--ideas which bear upon the mystery
of life, such as Fate, Providence, or personal immortality. Such ideas
may operate in important ways on the forms of social action, but they
involve a question of fact and they are accepted or rejected not because
they are believed to be useful or injurious, but because they are
believed to be true or false.

The idea of the progress of humanity is an idea of this kind, and it
is important to be quite clear on the point. We now take it so much for
granted, we are so conscious of constantly progressing in knowledge,
arts, organising capacity, utilities of all sorts, that it is easy to
look upon Progress as an aim, like liberty or a world-federation, which
it only depends on our own efforts and good-will to achieve. But though
all increases of power and knowledge depend on human effort, the idea
of the Progress of humanity, from which all these particular progresses
derive their value, raises a definite question of fact, which man's
wishes or labours cannot affect any more than his wishes or labours can
prolong life beyond the grave.

This idea means that civilisation has moved, is moving, and will move
in a desirable direction. But in order to judge that we are moving in
a desirable direction we should have to know precisely what the
destination is. To the minds of most people the desirable outcome of
human development would be a condition of society in which all the
inhabitants of the planet would enjoy a perfectly happy existence. But
it is impossible to be sure that civilisation is moving in the right
direction to realise this aim. Certain features of our "progress" may be
urged as presumptions in its favour, but there are always offsets, and
it has always been easy to make out a case that, from the point of view
of increasing happiness, the tendencies of our progressive civilisation
are far from desirable. In short, it cannot be proved that the unknown
destination towards which man is advancing is desirable. The movement
may be Progress, or it may be in an undesirable direction and therefore
not Progress. This is a question of fact, and one which is at present as
insoluble as the question of personal immortality. It is a problem which
bears on the mystery of life.

Moreover, even if it is admitted to be probable that the course of
civilisation has so far been in a desirable direction, and such as would
lead to general felicity if the direction were followed far enough, it
cannot be proved that ultimate attainment depends entirely on the human
will. For the advance might at some point be arrested by an insuperable
wall. Take the particular case of knowledge, as to which it is generally
taken for granted that the continuity of progress in the future depends
altogether on the continuity of human effort (assuming that human brains
do not degenerate). This assumption is based on a strictly limited
experience. Science has been advancing without interruption during the
last three or four hundred years; every new discovery has led to new
problems and new methods of solution, and opened up new fields for
exploration. Hitherto men of science have not been compelled to halt,
they have always found means to advance further. But what assurance have
we that they will not one day come up against impassable barriers? The
experience of four hundred years, in which the surface of nature has
been successfully tapped, can hardly be said to warrant conclusions
as to the prospect of operations extending over four hundred or four
thousand centuries. Take biology or astronomy. How can we be sure that
some day progress may not come to a dead pause, not because knowledge
is exhausted, but because our resources for investigation are
exhausted--because, for instance, scientific instruments have reached
the limit of perfection beyond which it is demonstrably impossible to
improve them, or because (in the case of astronomy) we come into the
presence of forces of which, unlike gravitation, we have no terrestrial
experience? It is an assumption, which cannot be verified, that we shall
not soon reach a point in our knowledge of nature beyond which the human
intellect is unqualified to pass.

But it is just this assumption which is the light and inspiration of
man's scientific research. For if the assumption is not true, it means
that he can never come within sight of the goal which is, in the case
of physical science, if not a complete knowledge of the cosmos and
the processes of nature, at least an immeasurably larger and deeper
knowledge than we at present possess.

Thus continuous progress in man's knowledge of his environment, which is
one of the chief conditions of general Progress, is a hypothesis which
may or may not be true. And if it is true, there remains the further
hypothesis of man's moral and social "perfectibility," which rests on
much less impressive evidence. There is nothing to show that he may not
reach, in his psychical and social development, a stage at which the
conditions of his life will be still far from satisfactory, and beyond
which he will find it impossible to progress. This is a question of fact
which no willing on man's part can alter. It is a question bearing on
the mystery of life.

Enough has been said to show that the Progress of humanity belongs to
the same order of ideas as Providence or personal immortality. It is
true or it is false, and like them it cannot be proved either true or
false. Belief in it is an act of faith.

The idea of human Progress then is a theory which involves a
synthesis of the past and a prophecy of the future. It is based on
an interpretation of history which regards men as slowly
advancing--pedetemtim progredientes--in a definite and desirable
direction, and infers that this progress will continue indefinitely. And
it implies that, as


   The issue of the earth's great business,


a condition of general happiness will ultimately be enjoyed, which will
justify the whole process of civilisation; for otherwise the direction
would not be desirable. There is also a further implication. The process
must be the necessary outcome of the psychical and social nature of man;
it must not be at the mercy of any external will; otherwise there
would be no guarantee of its continuance and its issue, and the idea of
Progress would lapse into the idea of Providence.

As time is the very condition of the possibility of Progress, it is
obvious that the idea would be valueless if there were any cogent
reasons for supposing that the time at the disposal of humanity is
likely to reach a limit in the near future. If there were good cause for
believing that the earth would be uninhabitable in A.D. 2000 or 2100
the doctrine of Progress would lose its meaning and would automatically
disappear. It would be a delicate question to decide what is the minimum
period of time which must be assured to man for his future development,
in order that Progress should possess value and appeal to the emotions.
The recorded history of civilisation covers 6000 years or so, and if we
take this as a measure of our conceptions of time-distances, we might
assume that if we were sure of a period ten times as long ahead of us
the idea of Progress would not lose its power of appeal. Sixty thousand
years of HISTORICAL time, when we survey the changes which have come to
pass in six thousand, opens to the imagination a range vast enough to
seem almost endless.

This psychological question, however, need not be decided. For science
assures us that the stability of the present conditions of the solar
system is certified for many myriads of years to come. Whatever gradual
modifications of climate there may be, the planet will not cease to
support life for a period which transcends and flouts all efforts of
imagination. In short, the POSSIBILITY of Progress is guaranteed by the
high probability, based on astro-physical science, of an immense time to
progress in.

It may surprise many to be told that the notion of Progress, which now
seems so easy to apprehend, is of comparatively recent origin. It has
indeed been claimed that various thinkers, both ancient (for instance,
Seneca) and medieval (for instance, Friar Bacon), had long ago conceived
it. But sporadic observations--such as man's gradual rise from primitive
and savage conditions to a certain level of civilisation by a series of
inventions, or the possibility of some future additions to his knowledge
of nature--which were inevitable at a certain stage of human reflection,
do not amount to an anticipation of the idea. The value of such
observations was determined, and must be estimated, by the whole context
of ideas in which they occurred. It is from its bearings on the future
that Progress derives its value, its interest, and its power. You may
conceive civilisation as having gradually advanced in the past, but you
have not got the idea of Progress until you go on to conceive that it
is destined to advance indefinitely in the future. Ideas have
their intellectual climates, and I propose to show briefly in this
Introduction that the intellectual climates of classical antiquity and
the ensuing ages were not propitious to the birth of the doctrine of
Progress. It is not till the sixteenth century that the obstacles to
its appearance definitely begin to be transcended and a favourable
atmosphere to be gradually prepared.

[Footnote: The history of the idea of Progress has been treated
briefly and partially by various French writers; e.g. Comte, Cours de
philosophie positive, vi. 321 sqq.; Buchez, Introduction a la science
de l'histoire, i. 99 sqq. (ed. 2, 1842); Javary, De l'idee de progres
(1850); Rigault, Histoire de la querelle des Anciens et des Modernes
(1856); Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartesienne (1854); Caro,
Problemes de la morale sociale (1876); Brunetiere, La Formation de
l'idee de progres, in Etudes critiques, 5e serie. More recently M. Jules
Delvaille has attempted to trace its history fully, down to the end
of the eighteenth century. His Histoire de l'idee de progres (1910) is
planned on a large scale; he is erudite and has read extensively. But
his treatment is lacking in the power of discrimination. He strikes one
as anxious to bring within his net, as theoriciens du progres, as many
distinguished thinkers as possible; and so, along with a great deal
that is useful and relevant, we also find in his book much that is
irrelevant. He has not clearly seen that the distinctive idea of
Progress was not conceived in antiquity or in the Middle Ages, or even
in the Renaissance period; and when he comes to modern times he fails to
bring out clearly the decisive steps of its growth. And he does not seem
to realise that a man might be "progressive" without believing in, or
even thinking about, the doctrine of Progress. Leonardo da Vinci and
Berkeley are examples. In my Ancient Greek Historians (1909) I dwelt on
the modern origin of the idea (p. 253 sqq.). Recently Mr. R. H. Murray,
in a learned appendix to his Erasmus and Luther, has developed the
thesis that Progress was not grasped in antiquity (though he makes an
exception of Seneca),--a welcome confirmation.]

I

It may, in particular, seem surprising that the Greeks, who were so
fertile in their speculations on human life, did not hit upon an idea
which seems so simple and obvious to us as the idea of Progress. But if
we try to realise their experience and the general character of their
thought we shall cease to wonder. Their recorded history did not go back
far, and so far as it did go there had been no impressive series of new
discoveries suggesting either an indefinite increase of knowledge or a
growing mastery of the forces of nature. In the period in which their
most brilliant minds were busied with the problems of the universe
men might improve the building of ships, or invent new geometrical
demonstrations, but their science did little or nothing to transform the
conditions of life or to open any vista into the future. They were
in the presence of no facts strong enough to counteract that profound
veneration of antiquity which seems natural to mankind, and the
Athenians of the age of Pericles or of Plato, though they were
thoroughly, obviously "modern" compared with the Homeric Greeks, were
never self-consciously "modern" as we are.

1.

The indications that human civilisation was a gradual growth, and that
man had painfully worked his way forward from a low and savage state,
could not, indeed, escape the sharp vision of the Greeks. For instance,
Aeschylus represents men as originally living at hazard in sunless
caves, and raised from that condition by Prometheus, who taught them the
arts of life. In Euripides we find a similar recognition of the ascent
of mankind to a civilised state, from primitive barbarism, some god or
other playing the part of Prometheus. In such passages as these we have,
it may be said, the idea that man has progressed; and it may fairly be
suggested that belief in a natural progress lay, for Aeschylus as
well as for Euripides, behind the poetical fiction of supernatural
intervention. But these recognitions of a progress were not incompatible
with the widely-spread belief in an initial degeneration of the human
race; nor did it usually appear as a rival doctrine. The old legend of
a "golden age" of simplicity, from which man had fallen away, was
generally accepted as truth; and leading thinkers combined it with
the doctrine of a gradual sequence of social and material improvements
[Footnote: In the masterly survey of early Greek history which
Thucydides prefixed to his work, he traces the social progress of the
Greeks in historical times, and finds the key to it in the increase of
wealth.] during the subsequent period of decline. We find the two
views thus combined, for instance, in Plato's Laws, and in the earliest
reasoned history of civilisation written by Dicaearchus, a pupil of
Aristotle. [Footnote: Aristotle's own view is not very clear. He thinks
that all arts, sciences, and institutions have been repeatedly, or
rather an infinite number of times (word in Greek) discovered in the
past and again lost. Metaphysics, xi. 8 ad fin.; Politics, iv. 10,
cp. ii. 2. An infinite number of times seems to imply the doctrine of
cycles.] But the simple life of the first age, in which men were not
worn with toil, and war and disease were unknown, was regarded as
the ideal State to which man would lie only too fortunate if he could
return. He had indeed at a remote time ill the past succeeded in
ameliorating some of the conditions of his lot, but such ancient
discoveries as fire or ploughing or navigation or law-giving did
not suggest the guess that new inventions might lead ultimately to
conditions in which life would be more complex but as happy as the
simple life of the primitive world.

But, if some relative progress might be admitted, the general view of
Greek philosophers was that they were living in a period of inevitable
degeneration and decay--inevitable because it was prescribed by the
nature of the universe. We have only an imperfect knowledge of the
influential speculations of Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and Empedocles, but
we may take Plato's tentative philosophy of history to illustrate the
trend and the prejudices of Greek thought on this subject. The world was
created and set going by the Deity, and, as his work, it was perfect;
but it was not immortal and had in it the seeds of decay. The period of
its duration is 72,000 solar years. During the first half of this period
the original uniformity and order, which were impressed upon it by the
Creator, are maintained under his guidance; but then it reaches a point
from which it begins, as it were, to roll back; the Deity has loosened
his grip of the machine, the order is disturbed, and the second 36,000
years are a period of gradual decay and degeneration. At the end of this
time, the world left to itself would dissolve into chaos, but the Deity
again seizes the helm and restores the original conditions, and
the whole process begins anew. The first half of such a world-cycle
corresponds to the Golden Age of legend in which men lived happily and
simply; we have now unfortunately reached some point in the period of
decadence.

Plato applies the theory of degradation in his study of political
communities. [Footnote: Plato's philosophy of history. In the myth of
the Statesman and the last Books of the Republic. The best elucidation
of these difficult passages will be found in the notes and appendix to
Book viii. in J. Adam's edition of the Republic (1902).] He conceives
his own Utopian aristocracy as having existed somewhere towards the
beginning of the period of the world's relapse, when things were not so
bad, [Footnote: Similarly he places the ideal society which he describes
in the Critias 9000 years before Solon. The state which he plans in the
Laws is indeed imagined as a practicable project in his own day, but
then it is only a second-best. The ideal state of which Aristotle
sketched an outline (Politics, iv. v.) is not set either in time or in
place.] and exhibits its gradual deterioration, through the successive
stages of timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and despotism. He explains
this deterioration as primarily caused by a degeneration of the race,
due to laxity and errors in the State regulation of marriages, and the
consequent birth of biologically inferior individuals.

The theories of Plato are only the most illustrious example of the
tendency characteristic of Greek philosophical thinkers to idealise
the immutable as possessing a higher value than that which varies. This
affected all their social speculations. They believed in the ideal of an
absolute order in society, from which, when it is once established, any
deviation must be for the worse. Aristotle, considering the subject
from a practical point of view, laid down that changes in an established
social order are undesirable, and should be as few and slight as
possible. [Footnote: Politics, ii. 5.] This prejudice against change
excluded the apprehension of civilisation as a progressive movement.
It did not occur to Plato or any one else that a perfect order might be
attainable by a long series of changes and adaptations. Such an order,
being an embodiment of reason, could be created only by a deliberate and
immediate act of a planning mind. It might be devised by the wisdom of a
philosopher or revealed by the Deity. Hence the salvation of a community
must lie in preserving intact, so far as possible, the institutions
imposed by the enlightened lawgiver, since change meant corruption and
disaster. These a priori principles account for the admiration of the
Spartan state entertained by many Greek philosophers, because it was
supposed to have preserved unchanged for an unusually long period a
system established by an inspired legislator.

2.

Thus time was regarded as the enemy of humanity. Horace's verse,


  Damnosa quid non imminuit dies?


"time depreciates the value of the world," expresses the pessimistic
axiom accepted in most systems of ancient thought.

The theory of world-cycles was so widely current that it may almost be
described as the orthodox theory of cosmic time among the Greeks, and it
passed from them to the Romans.

[Footnote: Plato's world-cycle. I have omitted details not essential;
e.g. that in the first period men were born from the earth and only in
the second propagated themselves. The period of 36,000 years, known as
the Great Platonic Year, was probably a Babylonian astronomical period,
and was in any case based on the Babylonian sexagesimal system and
connected with the solar year conceived as consisting of 360 days.
Heraclitus seems to have accepted it as the duration of the world
between his periodic universal conflagrations. Plato derived the number
from predecessors, but based it on operations with the numbers 3, 4, 5,
the length of the sides of the Pythagorean right-angled triangle. The
Great Year of the Pythagorean Philolaus seems to have been different,
and that of the Stoics was much longer (6,570,000 years).

I may refer here to Tacitus, Dialogus c. 16, as an appreciation of
historical perspective unusual in ancient writers: "The four hundred
years which separate us from the ancients are almost a vanishing
quantity if you compare them with the duration of the ages." See the
whole passage, where the Magnus Annus of 12,954 years is referred to.]

According to some of the Pythagoreans [Footnote: See Simplicius, Phys.
732, 26.] each cycle repeated to the minutest particular the course and
events of the preceding. If the universe dissolves into the original
chaos, there appeared to them to be no reason why the second chaos
should produce a world differing in the least respect from its
predecessor. The nth cycle would be indeed numerically distinct from
the first, but otherwise would be identical with it, and no man could
possibly discover the number of the cycle in which he was living. As no
end seems to have been assigned to the whole process, the course of
the world's history would contain an endless number of Trojan Wars, for
instance; an endless number of Platos would write an endless number
of Republics. Virgil uses this idea in his Fourth Eclogue, where he
meditates a return of the Golden Age:


  Alter erit tum Tiphys, et altera quae uehat Argo
   Delectos heroas; erunt etiam altera bella,
   Atque iterum ad Troiam magnus mittetur Achilles.


The periodic theory might be held in forms in which this uncanny
doctrine of absolute identity was avoided; but at the best it meant an
endless monotonous iteration, which was singularly unlikely to stimulate
speculative interest in the future. It must be remembered that no
thinker had any means of knowing how near to the end of his cycle the
present hour might be. The most influential school of the later
Greek age, the Stoics, adopted the theory of cycles, and the natural
psychological effect of the theory is vividly reflected in Marcus
Aurelius, who frequently dwells on it in his Meditations. "The
rational soul," he says, "wanders round the whole world and through
the encompassing void, and gazes into infinite time, and considers the
periodic destructions and rebirths of the universe, and reflects that
our posterity will see nothing new, and that our ancestors saw nothing
greater than we have seen. A man of forty years, possessing the most
moderate intelligence, may be said to have seen all that is past and
all that is to come; so uniform is the world." [Footnote: xi. I. The
cyclical theory was curiously revived in the nineteenth; century by
Nietzsche, and it is interesting to note his avowal that it took him
a long time to overcome the feeling of pessimism which the doctrine
inspired.]

3.

And yet one Stoic philosopher saw clearly, and declared emphatically,
that increases in knowledge must be expected in the future.

"There are many peoples to-day," Seneca wrote, "who are ignorant of
the cause of eclipses of the moon, and it has only recently been
demonstrated among ourselves. The day will come when time and human
diligence will clear up problems which are now obscure. We divide the
few years of our lives unequally between study and vice, and it will
therefore be the work of many generations to explain such phenomena as
comets. One day our posterity will marvel at our ignorance of causes so
clear to them.

"How many new animals have we first come to know in the present age? In
time to come men will know much that is unknown to us. Many discoveries
are reserved for future ages, when our memory will have faded from men's
minds. We imagine ourselves initiated in the secrets of nature; we are
standing on the threshold of her temple."

[Footnote: The quotations from Seneca will be found in Naturales
Quaestiones, vii. 25 and 31. See also Epist. 64. Seneca implies
continuity in scientific research. Aristotle had stated this expressly,
pointing out that we are indebted not only to the author of the
philosophical theory which we accept as true, but also to the
predecessors whose views it has superseded (Metaphysics, i. ii. chap.
1). But he seems to consider his own system as final.]

But these predictions are far from showing that Seneca had the least
inkling of a doctrine of the Progress of humanity. Such a doctrine is
sharply excluded by the principles of his philosophy and his profoundly
pessimistic view of human affairs. Immediately after the passage which
I have quoted he goes on to enlarge on the progress of vice. "Are you
surprised to be told that human knowledge has not yet completed its
whole task? Why, human wickedness has not yet fully developed."

Yet, at least, it may be said, Seneca believed in a progress of
knowledge and recognised its value. Yes, but the value which he
attributed to it did not lie in any advantages which it would bring
to the general community of mankind. He did not expect from it any
improvement of the world. The value of natural science, from his point
of view, was this, that it opened to the philosopher a divine region, in
which, "wandering among the stars," he could laugh at the earth and all
its riches, and his mind "delivered as it were from prison could return
to its original home." In other words, its value lay not in its results,
but simply in the intellectual activity; and therefore it concerned not
mankind at large but a few chosen individuals who, doomed to live in a
miserable world, could thus deliver their souls from slavery.

For Seneca's belief in the theory of degeneration and the hopeless
corruption of the race is uncompromising. Human life on the earth is
periodically destroyed, alternately by fire and flood; and each period
begins with a golden age in which men live in rude simplicity,
innocent because they are ignorant not because they are wise. When they
degenerate from this state, arts and inventions promote deterioration by
ministering to luxury and vice.

Interesting, then, as Seneca's observations on the prospect of some
future scientific discoveries are, and they are unique in ancient
literature, [Footnote: They are general and definite. This distinguishes
them, for instance, from Plato's incidental hint in the Republic as to
the prospect of the future development of solid geometry.] they were
far from adumbrating a doctrine of the Progress of man. For him, as for
Plato and the older philosophers, time is the enemy of man. [Footnote:
The quotations and the references here will be found in Nat. Quaest. i.
Praef.; Epist. 104, Sec. 16 (cp. 110, Sec. 8; 117, Sec. 20, and the fine
passage in 65, Sec. 16-21); Nat. Quaest. iii. 28-30; and finally Epist.
90, Sec. 45, cp. Sec. 17. This last letter is a criticism on Posidonius,
who asserted that the arts invented in primitive times were due to
philosophers. Seneca repudiates this view: omnia enim ista sagacitas
hominum, non sapientia inuenit.

Seneca touches on the possibility of the discovery of new lands beyond
the ocean in a passage in his Medea (374 sqq.) which has been often
quoted:


        uenient annis
 secula seris, quibus oceanus
 uincula rerum laxet et ingens
 pateat tellus Tiphysque novos
 detegat orbes,...
 nec sit terris ultima Thule.]

4.

There was however a school of philosophical speculation, which might
have led to the foundation of a theory of Progress, if the historical
outlook of the Greeks had been larger and if their temper had been
different. The Atomic theory of Democritus seems to us now, in many
ways, the most wonderful achievement of Greek thought, but it had a
small range of influence in Greece, and would have had less if it had
not convinced the brilliant mind of Epicurus. The Epicureans developed
it, and it may be that the views which they put forward as to the
history of the human race are mainly their own superstructure. These
philosophers rejected entirely the doctrine of a Golden Age and a
subsequent degeneration, which was manifestly incompatible with their
theory that the world was mechanically formed from atoms without
the intervention of a Deity. For them, the earliest condition of men
resembled that of the beasts, and from this primitive and miserable
condition they laboriously reached the existing state of civilisation,
not by external guidance or as a consequence of some initial design, but
simply by the exercise of human intelligence throughout a long
period. [Footnote: Lucretius v. 1448 sqq. (where the word PROGRESS is
pronounced):

 Usus et impigrae simul experientia mentis
 Paulatim docuit pedetemtim progredientis.
 Sic unum quicquid paulatim protrahit aetas
 In medium ratioque in luminis erigit oras.
 Namque alid ex alio clarescere et ordine debet
 Artibus, ad summum donee uenere cacumen.]

The gradual amelioration of their existence was marked by the discovery
of fire and the use of metals, the invention of language, the invention
of weaving, the growth of arts and industries, navigation, the
development of family life, the establishment of social order by means
of kings, magistrates, laws, the foundation of cities. The last great
step in the amelioration of life, according to Lucretius, was the
illuminating philosophy of Epicurus, who dispelled the fear of invisible
powers and guided man from intellectual darkness to light.

But Lucretius and the school to which he belonged did not look forward
to a steady and continuous process of further amelioration in the
future. They believed that a time would come when the universe would
fall into ruins, [Footnote: Ib. 95.] but the intervening period did not
interest them. Like many other philosophers, they thought that their
own philosophy was the final word on the universe, and they did not
contemplate the possibility that important advances in knowledge might
be achieved by subsequent generations. And, in any case, their scope was
entirely individualistic; all their speculations were subsidiary to the
aim of rendering the life of the individual as tolerable as possible
here and now. Their philosophy, like Stoicism, was a philosophy of
resignation; it was thoroughly pessimistic and therefore incompatible
with the idea of Progress. Lucretius himself allows an underlying
feeling of scepticism as to the value of civilisation occasionally
to escape. [Footnote: His eadem sunt omnia semper (iii. 945) is the
constant refrain of Marcus Aurelius.]

Indeed, it might be said that in the mentality of the ancient Greeks
there was a strain which would have rendered them indisposed to take
such an idea seriously, if it had been propounded. No period of their
history could be described as an age of optimism. They were never, by
their achievements in art or literature, in mathematics or philosophy,
exalted into self-complacency or lured into setting high hopes on
human capacity. Man has resourcefulness to meet everything--[words in
Greek],--they did not go further than that.

This instinctive pessimism of the Greeks had a religious tinge which
perhaps even the Epicureans found it hard entirely to expunge. They
always felt that they were in the presence of unknown incalculable
powers, and that subtle dangers lurked in human achievements and gains.
Horace has taken this feeling as the motif of a criticism on man's
inventive powers. A voyage of Virgil suggests the reflection that his
friend's life would not be exposed to hazards on the high seas if the
art of navigation had never been discovered--if man had submissively
respected the limits imposed by nature. But man is audacious:


  Nequiquam deus abscidit
    Prudens oceano dissociabili   Terras.


  In vain a wise god sever'd lands
    By the dissociating sea.


Daedalus violated the air, as Hercules invaded hell. The discovery
of fire put us in possession of a forbidden secret. Is this unnatural
conquest of nature safe or wise? Nil mortalibus ardui est:

   Man finds no feat too hard or high;
    Heaven is not safe from man's desire.
    Our rash designs move Jove to ire,
   He dares not lay his thunder by.


The thought of this ode [Footnote: i. 3.] roughly expresses what would
have been the instinctive sense of thoughtful Greeks if the idea of
Progress had been presented to them. It would have struck them as
audacious, the theory of men unduly elated and perilously at ease in the
presence of unknown incalculable powers.

This feeling or attitude was connected with the idea of Moira. If we
were to name any single idea as generally controlling or pervading Greek
thought from Homer to the Stoics, [Footnote: The Stoics identified
Moira with Pronoia, in accordance with their theory that the universe is
permeated by thought.] it would perhaps be Moira, for which we have no
equivalent. The common rendering "fate" is misleading. Moira meant a
fixed order in the universe; but as a fact to which men must bow, it had
enough in common with fatality to demand a philosophy of resignation and
to hinder the creation of an optimistic atmosphere of hope. It was this
order which kept things in their places, assigned to each its proper
sphere and function, and drew a definite line, for instance, between
men and gods. Human progress towards perfection--towards an ideal of
omniscience, or an ideal of happiness, would have been a breaking down
of the bars which divide the human from the divine. Human nature does
not alter; it is fixed by Moira.

5.

We can see now how it was that speculative Greek minds never hit on
the idea of Progress. In the first place, their limited historical
experience did not easily suggest such a synthesis; and in the second
place, the axioms of their thought, their suspiciousness of change,
their theories of Moira, of degeneration and cycles, suggested a view
of the world which was the very antithesis of progressive development.
Epicurean, philosophers made indeed what might have been an important
step in the direction of the doctrine of Progress, by discarding the
theory of degeneration, and recognising that civilisation had been
created by a series of successive improvements achieved by the effort of
man alone. But here they stopped short. For they had their eyes fixed on
the lot of the individual here and now, and their study of the history
of humanity was strictly subordinate to this personal interest. The
value of their recognition of human progress in the past is conditioned
by the general tenor and purpose of their theory of life. It was simply
one item in their demonstration that man owed nothing to supernatural
intervention and had nothing to fear from supernatural powers. It is
however no accident that the school of thought which struck on a path
that might have led to the idea of Progress was the most uncompromising
enemy of superstition that Greece produced.

It might be thought that the establishment of Roman rule and order in a
large part of the known world, and the civilising of barbarian peoples,
could not fail to have opened to the imagination of some of those who
reflected on it in the days of Virgil or of Seneca, a vista into the
future. But there was no change in the conditions of life likely to
suggest a brighter view of human existence. With the loss of freedom
pessimism increased, and the Greek philosophies of resignation were
needed more than ever. Those whom they could not satisfy turned their
thoughts to new mystical philosophies and religions, which were little
interested in the earthly destinies of human society.

II

1.

The idea of the universe which prevailed throughout the Middle Ages, and
the general orientation of men's thoughts were incompatible with some of
the fundamental assumptions which are required by the idea of Progress.
According to the Christian theory which was worked out by the Fathers,
and especially by St. Augustine, the whole movement of history has the
purpose of securing the happiness of a small portion of the human race
in another world; it does not postulate a further development of human
history on earth. For Augustine, as for any medieval believer, the
course of history would be satisfactorily complete if the world came
to an end in his own lifetime. He was not interested in the question
whether any gradual amelioration of society or increase of knowledge
would mark the period of time which might still remain to run before the
day of Judgment. In Augustine's system the Christian era introduced the
last period of history, the old age of humanity, which would endure only
so long as to enable the Deity to gather in the predestined number
of saved people. This theory might be combined with the widely-spread
belief in a millennium on earth, but the conception of such a
dispensation does not render it a theory of Progress.

Again, the medieval doctrine apprehends history not as a natural
development but as a series of events ordered by divine intervention and
revelations. If humanity had been left to go its own way it would have
drifted to a highly undesirable port, and all men would have incurred
the fate of everlasting misery from which supernatural interference
rescued the minority. A belief in Providence might indeed, and in a
future age would, be held along with a belief in Progress, in the same
mind; but the fundamental assumptions were incongruous, and so long as
the doctrine of Providence was undisputedly in the ascendant, a doctrine
of Progress could not arise. And the doctrine of Providence, as it was
developed in Augustine's "City of God," controlled the thought of the
Middle Ages.

There was, moreover, the doctrine of original sin, an insuperable
obstacle to the moral amelioration of the race by any gradual process of
development. For since, so long as the human species endures on earth,
every child will be born naturally evil and worthy of punishment,
a moral advance of humanity to perfection is plainly impossible.
[Footnote: It may be added that, as G. Monod observed, "les hommes du
moyen age n'avaient pas conscience des modifications successives que le
temps apporte avec lui dans les choses humaines" (Revue Historique, i.
p. 8).]

2.

But there are certain features in the medieval theory of which we must
not ignore the significance. In the first place, while it maintained
the belief in degeneration, endorsed by Hebrew mythology, it definitely
abandoned the Greek theory of cycles. The history of the earth was
recognised as a unique phenomenon in time; it would never occur again
or anything resembling it. More important than all is the fact that
Christian theology constructed a synthesis which for the first time
attempted to give a definite meaning to the whole course of human
events, a synthesis which represents the past as leading up to a
definite and desirable goal in the future. Once this belief had been
generally adopted and prevailed for centuries men might discard it along
with the doctrine of Providence on which it rested, but they could not
be content to return again to such views as satisfied the ancients,
for whom human history, apprehended as a whole, was a tale of little
meaning. [Footnote: It may be observed that Augustine (De Civ. Dei, x.
14) compares the teaching (recta eruditio) of the people of God, in
the gradual process of history, to the education of an individual.
Prudentius has a similar comparison for a different purpose (c.
Symmachum, ii. 315 sqq.):

Tardis semper processibus aucta Crescit vita hominis et longo proficit
usu. Sic aevi mortalis habet se mobilis ordo, Sic variat natura vices,
infantia repit, etc.

Floras (Epitome, ad init.) had already divided Roman history into four
periods corresponding to infancy, adolescence, manhood, and old age.]

They must seek for some new synthesis to replace it.

Another feature of the medieval theory, pertinent to our inquiry, was an
idea which Christianity took over from Greek and Roman thinkers. In
the later period of Greek history, which began with the conquests of
Alexander the Great, there had emerged the conception of the whole
inhabited world as a unity and totality, the idea of the whole human
race as one. We may conveniently call it the ecumenical idea--the
principle of the ecumene or inhabited world, as opposed to the principle
of the polis or city. Promoted by the vast extension of the geographical
limits of the Greek world resulting from Alexander's conquests, and by
his policy of breaking down the barriers between Greek and barbarian,
the idea was reflected in the Stoic doctrine that all men are brothers,
and that a man's true country is not his own particular city, but the
ecumene. [Footnote: Plutarch long ago saw the connection between the
policy of Alexander and the cosmopolitan teaching of Zeno. De Alexandri
Magni virtute, i. Sec. 6.] It soon became familiar, popularised by the
most popular of the later philosophies of Greece; and just as it had
been implied in the imperial aspiration and polity of Alexander, so it
was implied, still more clearly, in the imperial theory of Rome. The
idea of the Roman Empire, its theoretical justification, might
be described as the realisation of the unity of the world by the
establishment of a common order, the unification of mankind in a single
world-embracing political organism. The term "world," orbis (terrarum),
which imperial poets use freely in speaking of the Empire, is more than
a mere poetical or patriotic exaggeration; it expresses the idea, the
unrealised ideal of the Empire. There is a stone from Halicarnassus in
the British Museum, on which the idea is formally expressed from another
point of view. The inscription is of the time of Augustus, and the
Emperor is designated as "saviour of the community of mankind." There we
have the notion of the human race apprehended as a whole, the ecumenical
idea, imposing upon Rome the task described by Virgil as regere
imperio populos, and more humanely by Pliny as the creation of a single
fatherland for all the peoples of the world. [Footnote: Pliny, Nat.
Hist. iii. 6. 39.]

This idea, which in the Roman Empire and in the Middle Ages took the
form of a universal State and a universal Church, passed afterwards
into the conception of the intercohesion of peoples as contributors to
a common pool of civilisation--a principle which, when the idea of
Progress at last made its appearance in the world, was to be one of the
elements in its growth.

3.

One remarkable man, the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, [Footnote: c. A.D.
1210-92. Of Bacon's Opus Majus the best and only complete edition is
that of J. H. Bridges, 2 vols. 1897 (with an excellent Introduction).
The associated works, Opus Minus and Opus Tertium, have been edited by
Brewer, Fr. Rogeri Bacon Opera Inedita, 1859.]who stands on an
isolated pinnacle of his own in the Middle Ages, deserves particular
consideration. It has been claimed for him that he announced the idea of
Progress; he has even been compared to Condorcet or Comte. Such claims
are based on passages taken out of their context and indulgently
interpreted in the light of later theories. They are not borne out by an
examination of his general conception of the universe and the aim of his
writings.

His aim was to reform higher education and introduce into the
universities a wide, liberal, and scientific programme of secular
studies. His chief work, the "Opus Majus," was written for this purpose,
to which his exposition of his own discoveries was subordinate. It was
addressed and sent to Pope Clement IV., who had asked Bacon to give him
an account of his researches, and was designed to persuade the Pontiff
of the utility of science from an ecclesiastical point of view, and
to induce him to sanction an intellectual reform, which without the
approbation of the Church would at that time have been impossible. With
great ingenuity and resourcefulness he sought to show that the
studies to which he was devoted--mathematics, astronomy, physics,
chemistry--were indispensable to an intelligent study of theology and
Scripture. Though some of his arguments may have been urged simply to
capture the Pope's good-will, there can be no question that Bacon
was absolutely sincere in his view that theology was the mistress
(dominatrix) of the sciences and that their supreme value lay in being
necessary to it.

It was, indeed, on this principle of the close interconnection of
all branches of knowledge that Bacon based his plea and his scheme of
reform. And the idea of the "solidarity" of the sciences, in which
he anticipated a later age, is one of his two chief claims to be
remembered. [Footnote: Cp. Opus Tertium, c. iv. p. 18, omnes scientiae
sunt connexae et mutuis se fovent auxiliis sicut partes ejusdem totius,
quarum quaelibet opus suum peragit non solum propter se sed pro aliis.]
It is the motif of the Opus Majus, and it would have been more fully
elaborated if he had lived to complete the encyclopaedic work, Scriptum
Principale, which he had only begun before his death. His other title
to fame is well-known. He realised, as no man had done before him, the
importance of the experimental method in investigating the secrets of
nature, and was an almost solitary pioneer in the paths to which his
greater namesake, more than three hundred years later, was to invite the
attention of the world.

But, although Roger Bacon was inspired by these enlightened ideas,
although he cast off many of the prejudices of his time and boldly
revolted against the tyranny of the prevailing scholastic philosophy,
he was nevertheless in other respects a child of his age and could not
disencumber himself of the current medieval conception of the universe.
His general view of the course of human history was not materially
different from that of St. Augustine. When he says that the practical
object of all knowledge is to assure the safety of the human race, he
explains this to mean "things which lead to felicity in the next life."
[Footnote: Opus Majus, vii. p. 366.]

It is pertinent to observe that he not only shared in the belief in
astrology, which was then universal, but considered it one of the most
important parts of "mathematics." It was looked upon with disfavour by
the Church as a dangerous study; Bacon defended its use in the
interests of the Church itself. He maintained, like Thomas Aquinas,
the physiological influence of the celestial bodies, and regarded the
planets as signs telling us what God has decreed from eternity to come
to pass either by natural processes or by acts of human will or directly
at his own good pleasure. Deluges, plagues, and earthquakes were capable
of being predicted; political and religious revolutions were set in the
starry rubric. The existence of six principal religions was determined
by the combinations of Jupiter with the other six planets. Bacon
seriously expected the extinction of the Mohammedan religion before the
end of the thirteenth century, on the ground of a prediction by an Arab
astrologer. [Footnote: Ib. iv. p. 266; vii. p. 389.]

One of the greatest advantages that the study of astrological lore
will bring to humanity is that by its means the date of the coming of
Anti-Christ may be fixed with certainty, and the Church may be prepared
to face the perils and trials of that terrible time. Now the arrival
of Anti-Christ meant the end of the world, and Bacon accepted the view,
which he says was held by all wise men, that "we are not far from the
times of Anti-Christ." Thus the intellectual reforms which he urged
would have the effect, and no more, of preparing Christendom to resist
more successfully the corruption in which the rule of Anti-Christ would
involve the world. "Truth will prevail," by which he meant science
will make advances, "though with difficulty, until Anti-Christ and his
forerunners appear;" and on his own showing the interval would probably
be short.

The frequency with which Bacon recurs to this subject, and the emphasis
he lays on it, show that the appearance of Anti-Christ was a fixed
point in his mental horizon. When he looked forward into the future,
the vision which confronted him was a scene of corruption, tyranny, and
struggle under the reign of a barbarous enemy of Christendom; and after
that, the end of the world. [Footnote: (1) His coming may be fixed by
astrology: Opus Majus, iv. p. 269 (inveniretur sufficiens suspicio vel
magis certitudo de tempore Antichristi; cp. p. 402). (2) His coming
means the end of the world: ib. p. 262. (3) We are not far from it: ib.
p. 402. One of the reasons which seem to have made this view probable to
Bacon was the irruption of the Mongols into Europe during his lifetime;
cp. p. 268 and vii. p. 234. Another was the prevalent corruption,
especially of the clergy, which impressed him deeply; see Compendium
studii philosophiae, ed. Brewer, p. 402. (4) "Truth will prevail," etc.:
Opus Majus, i. pp. 19, 20. He claimed for experimental science that
it would produce inventions which could be usefully employed against
Antichrist: ib. vii. p. 221.] It is from this point of view that we
must appreciate the observations which he made on the advancement of
knowledge. "It is our duty," he says, "to supply what the ancients have
left incomplete, because we have entered into their labours, which,
unless we are asses, can stimulate us to achieve better results";
Aristotle corrected the errors of earlier thinkers; Avicenna and
Averroes have corrected Aristotle in some matters and have added much
that is new; and so it will go on till the end of the world. And Bacon
quotes passages from Seneca's "Physical Inquiries" to show that the
acquisition of knowledge is gradual. Attention has been already called
to those passages, and it was shown how perverse it is, on the strength
of such remarks, to claim Seneca as a teacher of the doctrine
of Progress. The same claim has been made for Bacon with greater
confidence, and it is no less perverse. The idea of Progress is
glaringly incongruous with his vision of the world. If his programme of
revolutionising secular learning had been accepted--it fell completely
dead, and his work was forgotten for many ages,--he would have been the
author of a progressive reform; but how many reformers have there been
before and after Bacon on whose minds the idea of Progress never dawned?

[Footnote: Bacon quotes Seneca: See Opus Majus, i. pp. 37, 55, 14.

Much has been made out of a well-known passage in his short Epistle de
secretis operibus artis et naturae et de militate magiae, c. iv. (ed.
Brewer, p. 533), in which he is said to PREDICT inventions which have
been realised in the locomotives, steam navigation, and aeroplanes of
modern times. But Bacon predicts nothing. He is showing that science can
invent curious and, to the vulgar, incredible things without the aid of
magic. All the inventions which he enumerates have, he declares, been
actually made in ancient times, with the exception of a flying-machine
(instrumentum volandi quod non vidi nec hominem qui vidisset cognovi,
sed sapientem qui hoc artificium excogitavit explere cognosco).

Compare the remarks of S. Vogl, Die Physik Roger Bacos (1906), 98 sqq.]

4.

Thus Friar Bacon's theories of scientific reform, so far from amounting
to an anticipation of the idea of Progress, illustrate how impossible it
was that this idea could appear in the Middle Ages. The whole spirit
of medieval Christianity excluded it. The conceptions which were
entertained of the working of divine Providence, the belief that the
world, surprised like a sleeping household by a thief in the night,
might at any moment come to a sudden end, had the same effect as the
Greek theories of the nature of change and of recurring cycles of the
world. Or rather, they had a more powerful effect, because they were
not reasoned conclusions, but dogmas guaranteed by divine authority. And
medieval pessimism as to man's mundane condition was darker and sterner
than the pessimism of the Greeks. There was the prospect of happiness in
another sphere to compensate, but this, engrossing the imagination, only
rendered it less likely that any one should think of speculating about
man's destinies on earth.

III

1.

The civilised countries of Europe spent about three hundred years in
passing from the mental atmosphere of the Middle Ages into the mental
atmosphere of the modern world. These centuries were one of the
conspicuously progressive periods in history, but the conditions were
not favourable to the appearance of an idea of Progress, though the
intellectual milieu was being prepared in which that idea could be born.
This progressive period, which is conveniently called the Renaissance,
lasted from the fourteenth into the seventeenth century. The great
results, significant for our present purpose, which the human mind
achieved at this stage of its development were two. Self-confidence
was restored to human reason, and life on this planet was recognised as
possessing a value independent of any hopes or fears connected with a
life beyond the grave.

But in discarding medieval naivete and superstition, in assuming a
freer attitude towards theological authority, and in developing a new
conception of the value of individual personality, men looked to the
guidance of Greek and Roman thinkers, and called up the spirit of the
ancient world to exorcise the ghosts of the dark ages. Their minds were
thus directed backwards to a past civilisation which, in the ardour of
new discovery, and in the reaction against medievalism, they enthroned
as ideal; and a new authority was set up, the authority of ancient
writers. In general speculation the men of the Renaissance followed
the tendencies and adopted many of the prejudices of Greek philosophy.
Although some great discoveries, with far-reaching, revolutionary
consequences, were made in this period, most active minds were engaged
in rediscovering, elaborating, criticising, and imitating what was old.
It was not till the closing years of the Renaissance that speculation
began to seek and feel its way towards new points of departure. It
was not till then that a serious reaction set in against the deeper
influences of medieval thought.

2.

To illustrate the limitations of this period let us take Machiavelli,
one of the most original thinkers that Italy ever produced.

There are certain fundamental principles underlying Machiavelli's
science of politics, which he has indicated incidentally in his
unsystematic way, but which are essential to the comprehension of his
doctrines. The first is that at all times the world of human beings has
been the same, varying indeed from land to land, but always presenting
the same aspect of some societies advancing towards prosperity, and
others declining. Those which are on the upward grade will always reach
a point beyond which they cannot rise further, but they will not remain
permanently on this level, they will begin to decline; for human things
are always in motion and therefore must go up or down. Similarly,
declining states will ultimately touch bottom and then begin to ascend.
Thus a good constitution or social organisation can last only for a
short time. [Footnote: Machiavelli's principle of advance and decline:
Discorsi, ii. Introduction; Istorie fiorentine, v. ad init. For the
cycle of constitutions through which all states tend to move see
Discorsi, ii. 2 (here we see the influence of Polybius).]

It is obvious that in this view of history Machiavelli was inspired and
instructed by the ancients. And it followed from his premisses that the
study of the past is of the highest value because it enables men to
see what is to come; since to all social events at any period there are
correspondences in ancient times. "For these events are due to men, who
have and always had the same passions, and therefore of necessity the
effects must be the same." [Footnote: Discorsi, iii. 43.]

Again, Machiavelli follows his ancient masters in assuming as evident
that a good organisation of society can be effected only by the
deliberate design of a wise legislator. [Footnote: Ib. iii. 1. The
lawgiver must assume for his purposes that all men are bad: ib. i. 3.
Villari has useful remarks on these principles in his Machiavelli,
Book ii. cap. iii.] Forms of government and religions are the personal
creations of a single brain; and the only chance for a satisfactory
constitution or for a religion to maintain itself for any length of
time is constantly to repress any tendencies to depart from the original
conceptions of its creator.

It is evident that these two assumptions are logically connected. The
lawgiver builds on the immutability of human nature; what is good for
one generation must be good for another. For Machiavelli, as for Plato,
change meant corruption. Thus his fundamental theory excluded any
conception of a satisfactory social order gradually emerging by the
impersonal work of successive generations, adapting their institutions
to their own changing needs and aspirations. It is characteristic, and
another point of resemblance with ancient thinkers that he sought the
ideal state in the past--republican Rome.

These doctrines, the sameness of human nature and the omnipotent
lawgiver, left no room for anything resembling a theory of Progress.
If not held afterwards in the uncompromising form in which Machiavelli
presented them, yet it has well been pointed out that they lay at the
root of some of the most famous speculations of the eighteenth century.
[Footnote: Villari, loc. cit.]

Machiavelli's sameness of human nature meant that man would always have
the same passions and desires, weaknesses and vices. This assumption was
compatible with the widely prevailing view that man had degenerated in
the course of the last fifteen hundred years. From the exaltation of
Greek and Roman antiquity to a position of unattainable superiority,
especially in the field of knowledge, the degeneration of humanity was
an easy and natural inference. If the Greeks in philosophy and
science were authoritative guides, if in art and literature they were
unapproachable, if the Roman republic, as Machiavelli thought, was an
ideal state, it would seem that the powers of Nature had declined, and
she could no longer produce the same quality of brain. So long as this
paralysing theory prevailed, it is manifest that the idea of Progress
could not appear.

But in the course of the sixteenth century men began here and there,
somewhat timidly and tentatively, to rebel against the tyranny of
antiquity, or rather to prepare the way for the open rebellion which was
to break out in the seventeenth. Breaches were made in the proud citadel
of ancient learning. Copernicus undermined the authority of Ptolemy
and his predecessors; the anatomical researches of Vesalius injured the
prestige of Galen; and Aristotle was attacked on many sides by men like
Telesio, Cardan, Ramus, and Bruno. [Footnote: It has been observed that
the thinkers who were rebelling against the authority of Aristotle--the
most dangerous of the ancient philosophers, because he was so closely
associated with theological scholasticism and was supported by the
Church--frequently attacked under the standard of some other ancient
master; e.g. Telesio resorted to Parmenides, Justus Lipsius to
the Stoics, and Bruno is under the influence of Plotinus and Plato
(Bouillier, La Philosophie cartesienne, vol. i. p. 5). The idea of
"development" in Bruno has been studied by Mariupolsky (Zur Geschichte
des Entwicklungsbegriffs in Berner Studien, Bd. vi. 1897), who pointed
out the influence of Stoicism on his thought.] In particular branches of
science an innovation was beginning which heralded a radical revolution
in the study of natural phenomena, though the general significance of
the prospect which these researches opened was but vaguely understood at
the time. The thinkers and men of science were living in an intellectual
twilight. It was the twilight of dawn. At one extremity we have
mysticism which culminated in the speculations of Bruno and Campanella;
at the other we have the scepticism of Montaigne, Charron, and Sanchez.
The bewildered condition of knowledge is indicated by the fact that
while Bruno and Campanella accepted the Copernican astronomy, it was
rejected by one who in many other respects may claim to be reckoned as a
modern--I mean Francis Bacon.

But the growing tendency to challenge the authority of the ancients does
not sever this period from the spirit which informed the Renaissance.
For it is subordinate or incidental to a more general and important
interest. To rehabilitate the natural man, to claim that he should be
the pilot of his own course, to assert his freedom in the fields of art
and literature had been the work of the early Renaissance. It was the
problem of the later Renaissance to complete this emancipation in the
sphere of philosophical thought. The bold metaphysics of Bruno, for
which he atoned by a fiery death, offered the solution which was most
unorthodox and complete. His deification of nature and of man as part of
nature involved the liberation of humanity from external authority. But
other speculative minds of the age, though less audacious, were equally
inspired by the idea of freely interrogating nature, and were all
engaged in accomplishing the programme of the Renaissance--the
vindication of this world as possessing a value for man independent of
its relations to any supermundane sphere. The raptures of Giordano Bruno
and the sobrieties of Francis Bacon are here on common ground. The whole
movement was a necessary prelude to a new age of which science was to be
the mistress.

It is to be noted that there was a general feeling of complacency as to
the condition of learning and intellectual pursuits. This optimism is
expressed by Rabelais. Gargantua, in a letter to Pantagruel, studying
at Paris, enlarges to his son on the vast improvements in learning and
education which had recently, he says, been brought about. "All the
world is full of savants, learned teachers, large libraries; and I am of
opinion that neither in the time of Plato nor of Cicero nor of Papinian
were there such facilities for study as one sees now." It is indeed the
study of the ancient languages and literatures that Gargantua considers
in a liberal education, but the satisfaction at the present diffusion of
learning, with the suggestion that here at least contemporaries have
an advantage over the ancients, is the significant point. [Footnote:
Rabelais, Book ii. chap. 8.] This satisfaction shines through the
observation of Ramus that "in one century we have seen a greater
progress in men and works of learning than our ancestors had seen in the
whole course of the previous fourteen centuries." [Footnote: Praefat.
Scholarum Mathematicarum, maiorem doctorum hominum et operum proventum
seculo uno vidimus quam totis antea 14 seculis maiores nostri viderent.
(Ed. Basel, 1569.)] [Footnote 1. Guillaume Postel observed in his
De magistratibus Atheniensium liber (1541) that the ages are always
progressing (secula semper proficere), and every day additions are made
to human knowledge, and that this process would only cease if Providence
by war, or plague, or some catastrophe were to destroy all the
accumulated stores of knowledge which have been transmitted from
antiquity in books (Praef., B verso). What is known of the life of this
almost forgotten scholar has been collected by G. Weill (De Gulielmi
Postelli vita et indole, 1892). He visited the East, brought back
oriental MSS., and was more than once imprisoned on charges of heresy.
He dreamed of converting the Mohammedans, and of uniting the whole world
under the empire of France.]

In this last stage of the Renaissance, which includes the first quarter
of the seventeenth century, soil was being prepared in which the idea of
Progress could germinate, and our history of it origin definitely begins
with the work of two men who belong to this age, Bodin, who is hardly
known except to special students of political science, and Bacon, who
is known to all the world. Both had a more general grasp of the
significance of their own time than any of their contemporaries, and
though neither of them discovered a theory of Progress, they both made
contributions to thought which directly contributed to its subsequent
appearance.



CHAPTER I. SOME INTERPRETATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY: BODIN AND LE ROY

1.

It is a long descent from the genius of Machiavelli to the French
historian, Jean Bodin, who published his introduction to historical
studies [Footnote: Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem, 1566.]
about forty years after Machiavelli's death. His views and his method
differ widely from those of that great pioneer, whom he attacks. His
readers were not arrested by startling novelties or immoral doctrine; he
is safe, and dull.

But Bodin had a much wider range of thought than Machiavelli, whose mind
was entirely concentrated on the theory of politics; and his importance
for us lies not in the political speculations by which he sought to
prove that monarchy is the best form of government [Footnote: Les six
livres de la Republique, 1576.], but in his attempt to substitute a new
theory of universal history for that which prevailed in the Middle Ages.
He rejected the popular conception of a golden age and a subsequent
degeneration of mankind; and he refuted the view, generally current
among medieval theologians, and based on the prophecies of Daniel, which
divided the course of history into four periods corresponding to the
Babylonian Persian, Macedonian, and Roman monarchies, the last of which
was to endure till the day of Judgement. Bodin suggests a division into
three great periods: the first, of about two thousand years, in which
the South-Eastern peoples were predominant; the second, of the same
duration, in which those whom he calls the Middle (Mediterranean)
peoples came to the front; the third, in which the Northern nations
who overthrew Rome became the leaders in civilisation. Each period is
stamped by the psychological character of the three racial groups. The
note of the first is religion, of the second practical sagacity, of the
third warfare and inventive skill. This division actually anticipates
the synthesis of Hegel. [Footnote: Hegel's division is (1) the Oriental,
(2) a, the Greek, b, the Roman, and (3) the Germanic worlds.] But the
interesting point is that it is based on anthropological considerations,
in which climate and geography are taken into account; and,
notwithstanding the crudeness of the whole exposition and the intrusion
of astrological arguments, it is a new step in the study of universal
history. [Footnote: Climates and geography. The fullest discussion
will be found in the Republique, Book v. cap. i. Here Bodin anticipated
Montesquieu. There was indeed nothing new in the principle; it had been
recognised by Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, and other Greeks,
and in a later age by Roger Bacon.

But Bodin first developed and applied it methodically. This part of
his work was ignored, and in the eighteenth century Montesquieu's
speculations on the physical factors in history were applauded as a new
discovery.]

I have said that Bodin rejected the theory of the degeneration of man,
along with the tradition of a previous age of virtue and felicity.
[Footnote: See especially Methodus, cap. v. pp. 124, 130, 136.] The
reason which he alleged against it is important. The powers of nature
have always been uniform. It is illegitimate to suppose that she could
at one time produce the men and conditions postulated by the theory of
the golden age, and not produce them at another. In other words, Bodin
asserts the principle of the permanent and undiminishing capacities
of nature, and, as we shall see in the sequel, this principle was
significant. It is not to be confounded with the doctrine of the
immutability of human things assumed by Machiavelli. The human scene has
vastly changed since the primitive age of man; "if that so-called golden
age could be revoked and compared with our own, we should consider
it iron." [Footnote: Methodus, cap. VII. p. 353.] For history largely
depends on the will of men, which is always changing; every day new
laws, new customs, new institutions, both secular and religious, come
into being, and new errors. [Footnote: Ib. cap. I. p. 12.]

But in this changing scene we can observe a certain regularity, a law of
oscillation. Rise is followed by fall, and fall by rise; it is a mistake
to think that the human race is always deteriorating. [Footnote: Ib.
cap. VII. p. 361: "cum aeterna quadam lege naturae conversio rerum
omnium velut in orbem redire videatur, ut aeque vitia virtutibus,
ignoratio scientiae, turpe honesto consequens sit, atque tenebrae luci,
fallunt qui genus hominum semper deterius seipso evadere putant."] If
that were so, we should long ago have reached the lowest stage of vice
and iniquity. On the contrary, there has been, through the series of
oscillations, a gradual ascent. In the ages which have been foolishly
designated as gold and silver men lived like the wild beasts; and from
that state they have slowly reached the humanity of manners and the
social order which prevail to-day. [Footnote: Ib. p. 356.]

Thus Bodin recognises a general progress in the past. That is nothing
new; it was the view, for instance, of the Epicureans. But much had
passed in the world since the philosophy of Epicurus was alive, and
Bodin had to consider twelve hundred years of new vicissitudes. Could
the Epicurean theory be brought up to date?

2.

Bodin deals with the question almost entirely in respect to human
knowledge. In definitely denying the degeneration of man, Bodin was only
expressing what many thinkers of the sixteenth century had been coming
to feel, though timidly and obscurely. The philosophers and men of
science, who criticised the ancients in special departments, did not
formulate any general view on the privileged position of antiquity.
Bodin was the first to do so.

Knowledge, letters, and arts have their vicissitudes, he says; they
rise, increase, and nourish, and then languish and die. After the decay
of Rome there was a long fallow period; but this was followed by a
splendid revival of knowledge and an intellectual productivity which
no other age has exceeded. The scientific discoveries of the ancients
deserve high praise; but the moderns have not only thrown new light
on phenomena which they had incompletely explained, they have made new
discoveries of equal or indeed greater importance. Take, for instance,
the mariner's compass which has made possible the circumnavigation of
the earth and a universal commerce, whereby the world has been
changed, as it were, into a single state. [Footnote: Cardan had
already signalised the compass, printing, and gunpowder as three modern
inventions, to which "the whole of antiquity has nothing equal to show."
He adds, "I pass over the other inventions of this age which, though
wonderful, form rather a development of ancient arts than surpass the
intellects of our ancestors." De subtilitate, lib. 3 ad init. (Opera,
iii. p. 609).] Take the advances we have made in geography and
astronomy; the invention of gunpowder; the development of the woollen
and other industries. The invention of printing alone can be set against
anything that the ancients achieved. [Footnote: Methodus, cap. VII.,
pp. 359-61. Bodin also points out that there was an improvement, in
some respects, in manners and morals since the early Roman Empire; for
instance, in the abolition of gladiatorial spectacles (p. 359).]

An inference from all this, obvious to a modern reader, would be that
in the future there will be similar oscillations, and new inventions and
discoveries as remarkable as any that have been made in the past. But
Bodin does not draw this inference. He confines himself to the past and
present, and has no word to say about the vicissitudes of the future.
But he is not haunted by any vision of the end of the world, or the
coming of Antichrist; three centuries of humanism lay between him and
Roger Bacon.

3.

And yet the influence of medievalism, which it had been the work of
those three centuries to overcome, was still pervasively there. Still
more the authority of the Greeks and Romans, which had been set up by
the revival of learning, was, without their realising it, heavy even
upon thinkers like Bodin, who did not scruple freely to criticise
ancient authors. And so, in his thoughtful attempt to find a clew to
universal history, he was hampered by theological and cosmic theories,
the legacy of the past. It is significant of the trend of his mind that
when he is discussing the periodic decline of science and letters, he
suggests that it may be due to the direct action of God, punishing those
who misapplied useful sciences to the destruction of men.

But his speculations were particularly compromised by his belief
in astrology, which, notwithstanding the efforts of humanists like
Petrarch, Aeneas Sylvius, and Pico to discredit it, retained its
hold over the minds of many eminent, otherwise emancipated, thinkers
throughout the period of the Renaissance. [Footnote: Bodin was also a
firm believer in sorcery. His La Demonomanie (1578) is a monument of
superstition.] Here Bodin is in the company of Machiavelli and Lord
Bacon. But not content with the doctrine of astral influence on human
events, he sought another key to historical changes in the influence of
numbers, reviving the ideas of Pythagoras and Plato, but working them
out in a way of his own. He enumerates the durations of the lives of
many famous men, to show that they can be expressed by powers of 7 and
9, or the product of these numbers. Other numbers which have special
virtues are the powers of 12, the perfect number [Footnote: I.e. a
number equal to the sum of all its factors.] 496, and various others.
He gives many examples to prove that these mystic numbers determine the
durations of empires and underlie historical chronology. For instance,
the duration of the oriental monarchies from Ninus to the Conquest of
Persia by Alexander the Great was 1728 (= 12 cubed) years. He gives the
Roman republic from the foundation of Rome to the battle of Actium 729
(=9 cubed) years. [Footnote: Methodus, cap. v. pp. 265 sqq.]

4.

From a believer in such a theory, which illustrates the limitations of
men's outlook on the world in the Renaissance period, we could perhaps
hardly expect a vision of Progress. The best that can be said for it
is that, both here and in his astrological creed, Bodin is crudely
attempting to bring human history into close connection with the rest of
the universe, and to establish the view that the whole world is built
on a divine plan by which all the parts are intimately interrelated.
[Footnote: Cp. Baudrillart, J. Bodin et son temps, p. 148 (1853). This
monograph is chiefly devoted to a full analysis of La Republique.] He is
careful, however, to avoid fatalism. He asserts, as we have seen, that
history depends largely on the will of men. And he comes nearer to the
idea of Progress than any one before him; he is on the threshold.

For if we eliminate his astrological and Pythagorean speculations, and
various theological parentheses which do not disturb his argument, his
work announces a new view of history which is optimistic regarding man's
career on earth, without any reference to his destinies in a future
life. And in this optimistic view there are three particular points
to note, which were essential to the subsequent growth of the idea of
Progress. In the first place, the decisive rejection of the theory of
degeneration, which had been a perpetual obstacle to the apprehension
of that idea. Secondly, the unreserved claim that his own age was fully
equal, and in some respects superior, to the age of classical antiquity,
in respect of science and the arts. He leaves the ancients reverently on
their pedestal, but he erects another pedestal for the moderns, and
it is rather higher. We shall see the import of this when we come to
consider the intellectual movement in which the idea of Progress was
afterwards to emerge. In the third place, he had a conception of the
common interest of all the peoples of the earth, a conception which
corresponded to the old ecumenical idea of the Greeks and Romans,
[Footnote: See above, p. 23.] but had now a new significance through the
discoveries of modern navigators. He speaks repeatedly of the world as a
universal state, and suggests that the various races, by their peculiar
aptitudes and qualities, contribute to the common good of the whole.
This idea of the "solidarity" of peoples was to be an important element
in the growth of the doctrine of Progress. [Footnote: Republique, Book
v. cap. 1 (p. 690; ed. 1593); Methodus, cap. vi. p. 194; cap. vii. p.
360.]

These ideas were in the air. Another Frenchman, the classical scholar,
Louis Le Roy, translator of Plato and Aristotle, put forward similar
views in a work of less celebrity, On the Vicissitude or Variety of
the Things in the Universe. [Footnote: De la vicissitude ou variete
des choses en l'univers, 1577, 2nd ed. (which I have used), 1584.] It
contains a survey of great periods in which particular peoples attained
an exceptional state of dominion and prosperity, and it anticipates
later histories of civilisation by dwelling but slightly on political
events and bringing into prominence human achievements in science,
philosophy, and the arts. Beginning with the advance of man from
primitive rudeness to ordered society--a sketch based on the conjectures
of Plato in the Protagoras--Le Roy reviews the history, and estimates
the merits, of the Egyptians, Assyrians and Persians, the Greeks, Romans
and Saracens, and finally of the modern age. The facts, he thinks,
establish the proposition that the art of warfare, eloquence,
philosophy, mathematics, and the fine arts, generally flourish and
decline together.

But they do decline. Human things are not perpetual; all pass through
the same cycle--beginning, progress, perfection, corruption, end. This,
however, does not explain the succession of empires in the world, the
changes of the scene of prosperity from one people or set of peoples
to another. Le Roy finds the cause in providential design. God, he
believes, cares for all parts of the universe and has distributed
excellence in arms and letters now to Asia, now to Europe, again to
Africa, letting virtue and vice, knowledge and ignorance travel from
country to country, that all in their turn may share in good and bad
fortune, and none become too proud through prolonged prosperity.

But what of the modern age in Western Europe? It is fully the equal, he
assevers, of the most illustrious ages of the past, and in some respects
it is superior. Almost all the liberal and mechanical arts of antiquity,
which had been lost for about 1200 years, have been restored, and
there have been new inventions, especially printing, and the mariner's
compass, and "I would give the third place to gunnery but that it seems
invented rather for the ruin than for the utility of the human race." In
our knowledge of astronomy and cosmography we surpass the ancients. "We
can affirm that the whole world is now known, and all the races of men;
they can interchange all their commodities and mutually supply their
needs, as inhabitants of the same city or world-state." And hence there
has been a notable increase of wealth.

Vice and suffering, indeed, are as grave as ever, and we are afflicted
by the trouble of heresies; but this does not prove a general
deterioration of morals. If that inveterate complaint, the refrain
chanted by old men in every age, were true, the world would already
have reached the extreme limit of wickedness, and integrity would have
disappeared utterly. Seneca long ago made the right criticism. Hoc
maiores nostri questi sunt, hoc nos querimur, hoc posteri nostri
querentur, eversos esse mores.... At ista stant loco eodem. Perhaps
Le Roy was thinking particularly of that curious book the Apology for
Herodotus, in which the eminent Greek scholar, Henri Estienne, exposed
with Calvinistic prejudice the iniquities of modern times and the
corruption of the Roman Church. [Footnote: L'Introduction au traite
de la conformite des merveilles anciennes avec les modernes, ou traite
preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote, ed. Ristelhuber, 2 vols., 1879.
The book was published in 1566.]

But if we are to judge by past experience, does it not follow that this
modern age must go the same way as the great ages of the past which
it rivals or even surpasses? Our civilisation, too, having reached
perfection, will inevitably decline and pass away: is not this the clear
lesson of history? Le Roy does not shirk the issue; it is the point to
which his whole exposition has led and he puts it vividly.

"If the memory of the past is the instruction of the present and the
premonition of the future, it is to be feared that having reached
so great excellence, power, wisdom, studies, books, industries
will decline, as has happened in the past, and disappear--confusion
succeeding to the order and perfection of to-day, rudeness to
civilisation, ignorance to knowledge. I already foresee in imagination
nations, strange in form, complexion, and costume, overwhelming
Europe--like the Goths, Huns, Vandals, Lombards, Saracens of
old--destroying our cities and palaces, burning our libraries,
devastating all that is beautiful. I foresee in all countries wars,
domestic and foreign, factions and heresies which will profane all
things human and divine; famines, plagues, and floods; the universe
approaching an end, world-wide confusion, and the return of things to
their original chaos." [Footnote: It is characteristic of the age that
in the last sentence the author goes beyond the issue and contemplates
the possibility which still haunted men's minds that the end of the
world might not be far off.]

But having conducted us to this pessimistic conclusion Le Roy finds
it repugnant, and is unwilling to acquiesce in it. Like an embarrassed
dramatist he escapes from the knot which he has tied by introducing the
deus ex machina.

"However much these things proceed according to the fatal law of the
world, and have their natural causes, yet events depend principally
on Divine Providence which is superior to nature and alone knows the
predetermined times of events." That is to say, it depends, after all,
on Providence whether the argument from past experience is valid. Who
knows whether the modern age may not prove the exception to the law
which has hitherto prevailed? Let us act as if it would.

This is the practical moral that Le Roy enforces in the last book of his
dissertation. We must not allow ourselves to be paralysed or dismayed by
the destinies of past civilisations, but must work hard to transmit to
posterity all that has been achieved, and augment the discoveries of the
past by new researches. For knowledge is inexhaustible. "Let us not be
so simple as to believe that the ancients have known and said everything
and left nothing to their successors. Or that nature gave them all her
favours in order to remain sterile ever after." Here Le Roy lays
down Bodin's principle which was to be asserted more urgently in the
following century--the permanence of natural forces. Nature is the same
now as always, and can produce as great intellects as ever. The elements
have the same power, the constellations keep their old order, men are
made of the same material. There is nothing to hinder the birth in this
age of men equal in brains to Plato, Aristotle, or Hippocrates.

Philosophically, Le Roy's conclusion is lame enough. We are asked to
set aside the data of experience and act on an off-chance. But the
determination of the optimist to escape from the logic of his own
argument is significant. He has no conception of an increasing
purpose or underlying unity in the history of man, but he thinks that
Providence--the old Providence of St. Augustine, who arranged the events
of Roman history with a view to the coming of Christ--may, for some
unknown reason, prolong indefinitely the modern age. He is obeying
the instinct of optimism and confidence which was already beginning to
create the appropriate atmosphere for the intellectual revolution of the
coming century.

His book was translated into English, but neither in France nor in
England had it the same influence as the speculations of Bodin. But it
insinuated, as the reader will have observed, the same three views which
Bodin taught, and must have helped to propagate them: that the world
has not degenerated; that the modern age is not inferior to classical
antiquity; and that the races of the earth form now a sort of "mundane
republic."



CHAPTER II. UTILITY THE END OF KNOWLEDGE: BACON

1.

Among the great precursors of a new order of thought Francis Bacon
occupies a unique position. He drew up a definite programme for a
"great Renovation" of knowledge; he is more clearly conscious than his
contemporaries of the necessity of breaking with the past and making
a completely new start; and his whole method of thought seems
intellectually nearer to us than the speculations of a Bruno or a
Campanella. Hence it is easy to understand that he is often regarded,
especially in his own country, as more than a precursor, as the first
philosopher, of the modern age, definitely within its precincts.
[Footnote: German critics have been generally severe on Bacon as
deficient in the scientific spirit. Kuno Fischer, Baco van Verulam
(1856). Liebig, Ueber Francis Bacon van Verulam und die Methode der
Naturforschung (1863). Lange (Geschichte des Materialismus, i. 195)
speaks of "die aberglaubische und eitle Unwissenschaftlichkeit Bacos."]

It is not indeed a matter of fundamental importance how we classify
these men who stood on the border of two worlds, but it must
be recognised that if in many respects Bacon is in advance of
contemporaries who cannot be dissociated from the Renaissance, in other
respects, such as belief in astrology and dreams, he stands on the same
ground, and in one essential point--which might almost be taken as
the test of mental progress at this period--Bruno and Campanella have
outstripped him. For him Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo worked in vain;
he obstinately adhered to the old geocentric system.

It must also be remembered that the principle which he laid down in his
ambitious programme for the reform of science--that experiment is the
key for discovering the secrets of nature--was not a new revelation. We
need not dwell on the fact that he had been anticipated by Roger Bacon;
for the ideas of that wonderful thinker had fallen dead in an age
which was not ripe for them. But the direct interrogation of nature
was already recognised both in practice and in theory in the sixteenth
century. What Bacon did was to insist upon the principle more strongly
and explicitly, and to formulate it more precisely. He clarified and
explained the progressive ideas which inspired the scientific thought
of the last period of the European Renaissance, from which he cannot, I
think, be dissociated.

But in clearing up and defining these progressive ideas, he made a
contribution to the development of human thought which had far-reaching
importance and has a special significance for our present subject. In
the hopes of a steady increase of knowledge, based on the application of
new methods, he had been anticipated by Roger Bacon, and further back
by Seneca. But with Francis Bacon this idea of the augmentation of
knowledge has an entirely new value. For Seneca the exploration of
nature was a means of escaping from the sordid miseries of life. For the
friar of Oxford the principal use of increasing knowledge was to prepare
for the coming of Antichrist. Francis Bacon sounded the modern note; for
him the end of knowledge is utility. [Footnote; The passages specially
referred to are: De Aug. Sc. vii. i; Nov. Org. i. 81 and 3.]

2.

The principle that the proper aim of knowledge is the amelioration
of human life, to increase men's happiness and mitigate their
sufferings--commodis humanis inservire--was the guiding star of Bacon
in all his intellectual labour. He declared the advancement of "the
happiness of mankind" to be the direct purpose of the works he had
written or designed. He considered that all his predecessors had gone
wrong because they did not apprehend that the finis scientarum, the real
and legitimate goal of the sciences, is "the endowment of human life
with new inventions and riches"; and he made this the test for defining
the comparative values of the various branches of knowledge.

The true object, therefore, of the investigation of nature is not, as
the Greek philosophers held, speculative satisfaction, but to establish
the reign of man over nature; and this Bacon judged to be attainable,
provided new methods of attacking the problems were introduced. Whatever
may be thought of his daring act in bringing natural science down from
the clouds and assigning to her the function of ministering to the
material convenience and comfort of man, we may criticise Bacon for his
doctrine that every branch of science should be pursued with a single
eye towards practical use. Mathematics, he thought, should conduct
herself as a humble, if necessary, handmaid, without any aspirations
of her own. But it is not thus that the great progress in man's command
over nature since Bacon's age has been effected. Many of the most
valuable and surprising things which science has succeeded in doing for
civilisation would never have been performed if each branch of
knowledge were not guided by its own independent ideal of speculative
completeness. [Footnote: This was to be well explained by Fontenelle,
Preface sur l'utilite des mathematiques, in Oeuvres (ed. 1729), iii,
I sqq.] But this does not invalidate Bacon's pragmatic principle, or
diminish the importance of the fact that in laying down the utilitarian
view of knowledge he contributed to the creation of a new mental
atmosphere in which the theory of Progress was afterwards to develop.

3.

Bacon's respect for the ancients and his familiarity with their writings
are apparent on almost every page he wrote. Yet it was one of his
principal endeavours to shake off the yoke of their authority, which he
recognised to be a fatal obstacle to the advancement of science. "Truth
is not to be sought in the good fortune of any particular conjuncture of
time"; its attainment depends on experience, and how limited was theirs.
In their age "the knowledge both of time and of the world was confined
and meagre; they had not a thousand years of history worthy of that
name, but mere fables and ancient traditions; they were not acquainted
with but a small portion of the regions and countries of the world."
[Footnote: Nov. Org. i. 84; 56, 72, 73, 74.] In all their systems and
scientific speculation "there is hardly one single experiment that has a
tendency to assist mankind." Their theories were founded on opinion,
and therefore science has remained stationary for the last two thousand
years; whereas mechanical arts, which are founded on nature and
experience, grow and increase.

In this connection, Bacon points out that the word "antiquity" is
misleading, and makes a remark which will frequently recur in writers
of the following generations. Antiquitas seculi iuventus mundi; what we
call antiquity and are accustomed to revere as such was the youth of the
world. But it is the old age and increasing years of the world--the
time in which we are now living--that deserves in truth to be called
antiquity. We are really the ancients, the Greeks and Romans were
younger than we, in respect to the age of the world. And as we look to
an old man for greater knowledge of the world than from a young man, so
we have good reason to expect far greater things from our own age than
from antiquity, because in the meantime the stock of knowledge has been
increased by an endless number of observations and experiments. Time
is the great discoverer, and truth is the daughter of time, not of
authority.

Take the three inventions which were unknown to the ancients-printing,
gunpowder, and the compass. These "have changed the appearance and state
of the whole world; first in literature, then in warfare, and lastly in
navigation; and innumerable changes have been thence derived, so that
no empire, sect, or star appears to have exercised a greater power
or influence on human affairs than these mechanical discoveries."
[Footnote: Nov. Org. 129. We have seen that these three inventions had
already been classed together as outstanding by Cardan and Le Roy. They
also appear in Campanella. Bodin, as we saw, included them in a longer
list.] It was perhaps the results of navigation and the exploration of
unknown lands that impressed Bacon more than all, as they had impressed
Bodin. Let me quote one passage.

"It may truly be affirmed to the honour of these times, and in a
virtuous emulation with antiquity, that this great building of the world
had never through-lights made in it till the age of us and our fathers.
For although they [the ancients] had knowledge of the antipodes... yet
that mought be by demonstration, and not in fact; and if by travel, it
requireth the voyage but of half the earth. But to circle the earth, as
the heavenly bodies do, was not done nor enterprised till these later
times: and therefore these times may justly bear in their word... plus
ultra in precedence of the ancient non ultra.... And this proficience in
navigation and discoveries may plant also an expectation of the further
proficience and augmentation of all sciences, because it may seem that
they are ordained by God to be coevals, that is, to meet in one age. For
so the prophet Daniel, speaking of the latter times foretelleth, Plurimi
pertransibunt, et multiplex erit scientia: as if the openness and
through-passage of the world and the increase of knowledge were
appointed to be in the same ages; as we see it is already performed in
great part: the learning of these later times not much giving place to
the former two periods or returns of learning, the one of the Grecians,
the other of the Romans." [Footnote: Advancement of Learning, ii. 13,
14.]

In all this we have a definite recognition of the fact that knowledge
progresses. Bacon did not come into close quarters with the history of
civilisation, but he has thrown out some observations which amount to a
rough synthesis. [Footnote: Advancement, ii. 1, 6; Nov. Org. i. 78,
79, 85.] Like Bodin, he divided, history into three periods--(1) the
antiquities of the world; (2) the middle part of time which comprised
two sections, the Greek and the Roman; (3) "modern history," which
included what we now call the Middle Ages. In this sequence three
particular epochs stand out as fertile in science and favourable to
progress--the Greek, the Roman, and our own--"and scarcely two centuries
can with justice be assigned to each." The other periods of time are
deserts, so far as philosophy and science are concerned. Rome and Greece
are "two exemplar States of the world for arms, learning, moral virtue,
policy, and laws." But even in those two great epochs little progress
was made in natural philosophy. For in Greece moral and political
speculation absorbed men's minds; in Rome, meditation and labour were
wasted on moral philosophy, and the greatest intellects were devoted to
civil affairs. Afterwards, in the third period, the study of theology
was the chief occupation of the Western European nations. It was
actually in the earliest period that the most useful discoveries for
the comfort of human life were made, "so that, to say the truth, when
contemplation and doctrinal science began, the discovery of useful works
ceased."

So much for the past history of mankind, during which many things
conspired to make progress in the subjugation of nature slow, fitful,
and fortuitous. What of the future? Bacon's answer is: if the errors
of the past are understood and avoided there is every hope of steady
progress in the modern age.

But it might be asked. Is there not something in the constitution of
things which determines epochs of stagnation and vigour, some force
against which man's understanding and will are impotent? Is it not
true that in the revolutions of ages there are floods and ebbs of the
sciences, which flourish now and then decline, and that when they have
reached a certain point they can proceed no further? This doctrine of
Returns or ricorsi [Footnote: Bodin's conversiones.] is denounced
by Bacon as the greatest obstacle to the advancement of knowledge,
creating, as it does, diffidence or despair. He does not formally
refute it, but he marshals the reasons for an optimistic view, and these
reasons supply the disproof The facts on which the fatalistic doctrine
of Returns is based can be explained without resorting to any mysterious
law. [Footnote: Nov. Org. i. 92 sqq.] Progress has not been steady or
continuous on account of the prejudices and errors which hindered men
from setting to work in the right way. The difficulties in advancing did
not arise from things which are not in our power; they were due to the
human understanding, which wasted time and labour on improper objects.
"In proportion as the errors which have been committed impeded the past,
so do they afford reason to hope for the future."

4.

But will the new period of advance, which Bacon expected and strove to
secure, be of indefinite duration? He does not consider the question.
His view that he lived in the old age of the world implies that he did
not anticipate a vast tract of time before the end of mankind's career
on earth. And an orthodox Christian of that time could hardly be
expected to predict. The impression we get is that, in his sanguine
enthusiasm, he imagined that a "prudent interrogation" of nature could
extort all her secrets in a few generations. As a reformer he was so
engaged in the immediate prospect of results that his imagination did
not turn to the possibilities of a remoter future, though these would
logically follow from his recognition of "the inseparable propriety of
time which is ever more and more to disclose truth." He hopes everything
from his own age in which learning has made her third visitation to the
world, a period which he is persuaded will far surpass that of Grecian
and Roman learning. [Footnote: Advancement, ii. 24.] If he could have
revisited England in 1700 and surveyed what science had performed since
his death his hopes might have been more than satisfied.

But, animated though he was with the progressive spirit, as Leonardo
da Vinci had been before him, all that he says of the prospects of an
increase of knowledge fails to amount to the theory of Progress. He
prepares the way, he leads up to it; but his conception of his own time
as the old age of humanity excludes the conception of an indefinite
advance in the future, which is essential if the theory is to have
significance and value. And in regard to progress in the past, though he
is clearer and more emphatic than Bodin, he hardly adds anything to what
Bodin had observed. The novelty of his view lies not in his recognition
of the advance of knowledge and its power to advance still further, but
in the purpose which he assigned to it. [Footnote: Campanella held its
purpose to be the contemplation of the wisdom of God; cp., for instance,
De sensu rerum, Bk. iv. epilogus, where the world is described as statua
Dei altissimi (p. 370; ed. 1620).] The end of the sciences is their
usefulness to the human race. To increase knowledge is to extend
the dominion of man over nature, and so to increase his comfort and
happiness, so far as these depend on external circumstances. To Plato
or Seneca, or to a Christian dreaming of the City of God, this doctrine
would seem material and trivial; and its announcement was revolutionary:
for it implied that happiness on earth was an end to be pursued for its
own sake, and to be secured by co-operation for mankind at large. This
idea is an axiom which any general doctrine of Progress must presuppose;
and it forms Bacon's great contribution to the group of ideas which
rendered possible the subsequent rise of that doctrine.

Finally, we must remember that by Bacon, as by most of his Elizabethan
contemporaries, the doctrine of an active intervening Providence, the
Providence of Augustine, was taken as a matter of course, and governed
more or less their conceptions of the history of civilisation. But, I
think, we may say that Bacon, while he formally acknowledged it, did not
press it or emphasise it. [Footnote: See Advancement, iii. II. On
the influence of the doctrine on historical writing in England at the
beginning of the seventeenth century see Firth, Sir Walter Raleigh's
History of the World (Proc. of British Academy, vol. viii., 1919), p.
8.]

5.

Bacon illustrated his view of the social importance of science in his
sketch of an ideal state, the New Atlantis. He completed only a part of
the work, and the fragment was published after his death. [Footnote: In
1627. It was composed about 1623. It seems almost certain that he
was acquainted with the Christianopolis of Johann Valentin Andreae
(1586-1654), which had appeared in Latin in 1614, and contained a plan
for a scientific college to reform the civilised world. Andreae, who was
acquainted both with More and with Campanella, placed his ideal society
in an island which he called Caphar Salama (the name of a village in
Palestine). Andreae's work had also a direct influence on the Nova
Solyma of Samuel Gott (1648). See the Introduction of F. E. Held to his
edition of Christianopolis (1916). In Macaria, another imaginary state
of the seventeenth century (A description of the famous Kingdoms of
Macaria, 1641, by Hartlib), the pursuit of science is not a feature.]
It is evident that the predominating interest that moved his imagination
was different from that which guided Plato. While Plato aimed at
securing a permanent solid order founded on immutable principles,
the design of Bacon was to enable his imaginary community to achieve
dominion over nature by progressive discoveries. The heads of Plato's
city are metaphysicians, who regulate the welfare of the people by
abstract doctrines established once for all; while the most important
feature in the New Atlantis is the college of scientific investigators,
who are always discovering new truths which may alter the conditions of
life. Here, though only in a restricted field, an idea of progressive
improvement, which is the note of the modern age, comes in to modify
the idea of a fixed order which exclusively prevailed in ancient
speculation.

On the other hand, we must not ignore the fact that Bacon's ideal
society is established by the same kind of agency as the ideal societies
of Plato and Aristotle. It has not developed; it was framed by the
wisdom of an original legislator Solamona. In this it resembles
the other imaginary commonwealths of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. The organisation of More's Utopia is fixed initially once for
all by the lawgiver Utopus. The origin of Campanella's Civitas Solis is
not expressly stated, but there can be no doubt that he conceived its
institutions as created by the fiat of a single lawgiver. Harrington,
in his Oceana, argues with Machiavelli that a commonwealth, to be
well turned, must be the work of one man, like a book or a building.
[Footnote: Harrington, Oceana, pp. 77-8, 3rd ed. (1747).]

What measure of liberty Bacon would have granted to the people of his
perfect state we cannot say; his work breaks off before he comes
to describe their condition. But we receive the impression that the
government he conceived was strictly paternal, though perhaps less
rigorous than the theocratic despotism which Campanella, under Plato's
influence, set up in the City of the Sun. But even Campanella has this
in common with More--and we may be sure that Bacon's conception would
have agreed here--that there are no hard-and-fast lines between the
classes, and the welfare and happiness of all the inhabitants is
impartially considered, in contrast with Plato's scheme in the Laws,
where the artisans and manual labourers were an inferior caste existing
less for their own sake than for the sake of the community as a whole.
[Footnote: This however does not apply to the Republic, as is so
commonly asserted. See the just criticisms of A. A. Trever, A History of
Greek Economic Thought (Chicago, 1916), 49 sqq.]

It may finally be pointed out that these three imaginary commonwealths
stand together as a group, marked by a humaner temper than the ancient,
and also by another common characteristic which distinguishes them, on
one hand, from the ideal states of Plato and, on the other, from modern
sketches of desirable societies. Plato and Aristotle conceived their
constructions within the geographical limits of Hellas, either in the
past or in the present. More, Bacon, and Campanella placed theirs in
distant seas, and this remoteness in space helped to create a certain
illusion, of reality. [Footnote: Civitas Solis, p. 461 (ed. 1620).
Expectancy of end of world: Ib. p. 455.] The modern plan is to project
the perfect society into a period of future time. The device of More
and his successors was suggested by the maritime explorations of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the later method was a result of the
rise of the idea of Progress. [Footnote: Similarly the ideal communistic
states imagined by Euemerus and Iambulus in the southern seas owed
their geographical positions to the popular interest in seafaring in the
Indian Ocean in the age after Alexander. One wonders whether Campanella
knew the account of the fictitious journey of Iambulus to the Islands of
the Sun, in Diodorus Siculus, ii. 55-60.]

6.

A word or two more may be said about the City of the Sun. Campanella was
as earnest a believer in the interrogation of nature as Bacon, and the
place which science and learning hold in his state (although research is
not so prominent as in the New Atlantis), and the scientific training of
all the citizens, are a capital feature. The progress in inventions, to
which science may look forward, is suggested. The men of the City of
the Sun "have already discovered the one art which the world seemed
to lack--the art of flying; and they expect soon to invent ocular
instruments which will enable them to see the invisible stars and
auricular instruments for hearing the harmony of the spheres."
Campanella's view of the present conditions and prospects of knowledge
is hardly less sanguine than that of Bacon, and characteristically he
confirms his optimism by astrological data. "If you only knew what their
astrologers say about the coming age. Our times, they assert, have more
history in a hundred years than the whole world in four thousand. More
books have been published in this century than in five thousand
years before. They dwell on the wonderful inventions of printing, of
artillery, and of the use of the magnet,--clear signs of the times--and
also instruments for the assembling of the inhabitants of the world into
one fold," and show that these discoveries were conditioned by stellar
influences.

But Campanella is not very sure or clear about the future. Astrology
and theology cause him to hesitate. Like Bacon, he dreams of a great
Renovation and sees that the conditions are propitious, but his faith is
not secure. The astronomers of his imaginary state scrutinise the stars
to discover whether the world will perish or not, and they believe in
the oracular saying of Jesus that the end will come like a thief in the
night. Therefore they expect a new age, and perhaps also the end of the
world.

The new age of knowledge was about to begin. Campanella, Bruno, and
Bacon stand, as it were, on the brink of the dividing stream, tenduntque
manus ripae ulterioris amore.



CHAPTER III. CARTESIANISM

If we are to draw any useful lines of demarcation in the continuous flux
of history we must neglect anticipations and announcements, and we need
not scruple to say that, in the realm of knowledge and thought, modern
history begins in the seventeenth century. Ubiquitous rebellion against
tradition, a new standard of clear and precise thought which affects
even literary expression, a flow of mathematical and physical
discoveries so rapid that ten years added more to the sum of knowledge
than all that had been added since the days of Archimedes, the
introduction of organised co-operation to increase knowledge by the
institution of the Royal Society at London, the Academy of Sciences at
Paris, Observatories--realising Bacon's Atlantic dream--characterise the
opening of a new era.

For the ideas with which we are concerned, the seventeenth century
centres round Descartes, whom an English admirer described as "the grand
secretary of Nature." [Footnote: Joseph Glanvill, Vanity of Dogmatising,
p. 211, 64] Though his brilliant mathematical discoveries were the sole
permanent contribution he made to knowledge, though his metaphysical and
physical systems are only of historical interest, his genius exercised
a more extensive and transforming influence on the future development of
thought than any other man of his century.

Cartesianism affirmed the two positive axioms of the supremacy of
reason, and the invariability of the laws of nature; and its instrument
was a new rigorous analytical method, which was applicable to history as
well as to physical knowledge. The axioms had destructive corollaries.
The immutability of the processes of nature collided with the theory
of an active Providence. The supremacy of reason shook the thrones from
which authority and tradition had tyrannised over the brains of men.
Cartesianism was equivalent to a declaration of the Independence of Man.

It was in the atmosphere of the Cartesian spirit that a theory of
Progress was to take shape.

1.

Let us look back. We saw that all the remarks of philosophers prior to
the seventeenth century, which have been claimed as enunciations of the
idea of Progress, amount merely to recognitions of the obvious fact that
in the course of the past history of men there have been advances
and improvements in knowledge and arts, or that we may look for some
improvements in the future. There is not one of them that adumbrates
a theory that can be called a theory of Progress. We have seen several
reasons why the idea could not emerge in the ancient or in the
Middle Ages. Nor could it have easily appeared in the period of the
Renaissance. Certain preliminary conditions were required, and these
were not fulfilled till the seventeenth century. So long as men believed
that the Greeks and Romans had attained, in the best days of their
civilisation, to an intellectual plane which posterity could never
hope to reach, so long as the authority of their thinkers was set up as
unimpeachable, a theory of degeneration held the field, which excluded
a theory of Progress. It was the work of Bacon and Descartes to liberate
science and philosophy from the yoke of that authority; and at the same
time, as we shall see, the rebellion began to spread to other fields.

Another condition for the organisation of a theory of Progress was a
frank recognition of the value of mundane life and the subservience of
knowledge to human needs. The secular spirit of the Renaissance prepared
the world for this new valuation, which was formulated by Bacon, and has
developed into modern utilitarianism.

There was yet a third preliminary condition. There can be no certainty
that knowledge will continually progress until science has been
placed on sure foundations. And science does not rest for us on sure
foundations unless the invariability of the laws of nature is admitted.
If we do not accept this hypothesis, if we consider it possible that the
uniformities of the natural world may be changed from time to time, we
have no guarantee that science can progress indefinitely. The philosophy
of Descartes established this principle, which is the palladium of
science; and thus the third preliminary condition was fulfilled.

2.

During the Renaissance period the authority of the Greeks and Romans
had been supreme in the realm of thought, and in the interest of
further free development it was necessary that this authority should
be weakened. Bacon and others had begun the movement to break down this
tyranny, but the influence of Descartes was weightier and more decisive,
and his attitude was more uncompromising. He had none of Bacon's
reverence for classical literature; he was proud of having forgotten the
Greek which he had learned as a boy. The inspiration of his work was the
idea of breaking sharply and completely with the past, and constructing
a system which borrows nothing from the dead. He looked forward to an
advancement of knowledge in the future, on the basis of his own method
and his own discoveries, [Footnote: Cf. for instance his remarks on
medicine, at the end of the Discours de la methode.] and he conceived
that this intellectual advance would have far-reaching effects on the
condition of mankind. The first title he had proposed to give to his
Discourse on Method was "The Project of a Universal Science which can
elevate our Nature to its highest degree of Perfection." He regarded
moral and material improvement as depending on philosophy and science.

The justification of an independent attitude towards antiquity, on
the ground that the world is now older and more mature, was becoming a
current view. [Footnote: Descartes wrote: Non est quod antiquis multum
tribuamus propter antiquitatem, sed nos potius iis seniores dicendi. Jam
enim senior est mundus quam tune majoremque habemus rerum experientiam.
(A fragment quoted by Baillet, Vie de Descartes, viii. 10.) Passages
to the same effect occur in Malebranche, Arnauld, and Nicole. (See
Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartesienne, i. 482-3.)

A passage in La Mothe Le Vayer's essay Sur l'opiniatrete in Orasius
Tubero (ii. 218) is in point, if, as seems probable, the date of that
work is 1632-33. "Some defer to the ancients and allow themselves to be
led by them like children; others hold that the ancients lived in the
youth of the world, and it is those who live to-day who are really the
ancients, and consequently ought to carry most weight." See Rigault,
Histoire de la querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, p. 52.

The passage of Pascal occurs in the Fragment d'un traite du vide, not
published till 1779 (now included in the Pensees, Premiere Partie, Art.
I), and therefore without influence on the origination of the theory of
progress. It has been pointed out that Guillaume Colletet had in 1636
expressed a similar view (Brunetiere, Etudes critiques, v. 185-6).]

Descartes expressed it like Bacon, and it was taken up and repeated
by many whom Descartes influenced. Pascal, who till 1654 was a man of
science and a convert to Cartesian ideas, put it in a striking way.
The whole sequence of men (he says) during so many centuries should
be considered as a single man, continually existing and continually
learning. At each stage of his life this universal man profited by the
knowledge he had acquired in the preceding stages, and he is now in his
old age. This is a fuller, and probably an independent, development of
the comparison of the race to an individual which we found in Bacon. It
occurs in a fragment which remained unpublished for more than a hundred
years, and is often quoted as a recognition, not of a general progress
of man, but of a progress in human knowledge.

To those who reproached Descartes with disrespect towards ancient
thinkers he might have replied that, in repudiating their authority, he
was really paying them the compliment of imitation and acting far more
in their own spirit than those who slavishly followed them. Pascal saw
this point. "What can be more unjust," he wrote, "than to treat our
ancients with greater consideration than they showed towards their own
predecessors, and to have for them this incredible respect which they
deserve from us only because they entertained no such regard for
those who had the same advantage (of antiquity) over them?" [Footnote:
Pensees, ib.]

At the same time Pascal recognised that we are indebted to the ancients
for our very superiority to them in the extent of our knowledge. "They
reached a certain point, and the slightest effort enables us to mount
higher; so that we find ourselves on a loftier plane with less trouble
and less glory." The attitude of Descartes was very different. Aspiring
to begin ab integro and reform the foundations of knowledge, he ignored
or made little of what had been achieved in the past. He attempted
to cut the threads of continuity as with the shears of Atropos. This
illusion [Footnote: He may be reproached himself with scholasticism in
his metaphysical reasoning.] hindered him from stating a doctrine of
the progress of knowledge as otherwise he might have done. For any such
doctrine must take account of the past as well as of the future.

But a theory of progress was to grow out of his philosophy, though he
did not construct it. It was to be developed by men who were imbued with
the Cartesian spirit.

3.

The theological world in France was at first divided on the question
whether the system of Descartes could be reconciled with orthodoxy
or not. The Jesuits said no, the Fathers of the Oratory said yes.
The Jansenists of Port Royal were enthusiastic Cartesians. Yet it was
probably the influence of the great spiritual force of Jansenism that
did most to check the immediate spread of Cartesian ideas. It was
preponderant in France for fifty years. The date of the Discourse of
Method is 1637. The Augustinus of Jansenius was published in 1640, and
in 1643 Arnauld's Frequent Communion made Jansenism a popular power.
The Jansenist movement was in France in some measure what the Puritan
movement was in England, and it caught hold of serious minds in much
the same way. The Jesuits had undertaken the task of making Christianity
easy, of finding a compromise between worldliness and religion, and they
flooded the world with a casuistic literature designed for this purpose.
Ex opinionum varietate jugum Christi suavius deportatur. The doctrine of
Jansenius was directed against this corruption of faith and morals.
He maintained that there can be no compromise with the world; that
casuistry is incompatible with morality; that man is naturally corrupt;
and that in his most virtuous acts some corruption is present.

Now the significance of these two forces--the stern ideal of the
Jansenists and the casuistry of the Jesuit teachers--is that they both
attempted to meet, by opposed methods, the wave of libertine thought and
conduct which is a noticeable feature in the history of French society
from the reign of Henry IV. to that of Louis XV. [Footnote: For the
prevalence of "libertine" thought in France at the beginning of the
seventeenth century see the work of the Pere Garasse, La Doctrine
curieuse des beaux esprits de ce temps ou pretendus tels, etc. (1623).
Cp. also Brunetiere's illuminating study, "Jansenistes et Cartesiens"
in Etudes critiques, 4me serie.] This libertinism had its philosophy, a
sort of philosophy of nature, of which the most brilliant exponents
were Rabelais and Moliere. The maxim, "Be true to nature," was evidently
opposed sharply to the principles of the Christian religion, and it was
associated with sceptical views which prevailed widely in France from
the early years of the seventeenth century. The Jesuits sought to make
terms by saying virtually: "Our religious principles and your philosophy
of nature are not after all so incompatible in practice. When it comes
to the application of principles, opinions differ. Theology is as
elastic as you like. Do not abandon your religion on the ground that her
yoke is hard." Jansenius and his followers, on the other hand, fought
uncompromisingly with the licentious spirit of the time, maintaining
the austerest dogmas and denouncing any compromise or condescension. And
their doctrine had a wonderful success, and penetrated everywhere. Few
of the great literary men of the reign of Louis XIV. escaped it. Its
influence can be traced in the Maximes of La Rochefoucauld and the
Caracteres of La Bruyere. It was through its influence that Moliere
found it difficult to get some of his plays staged. It explains the fact
that the court of Louis XIV., however corrupt, was decorous compared
with the courts of Henry IV. and Louis XV.; a severe standard was set
up, if it was not observed.

The genius of Pascal made the fortunes of Jansenism. He outlived his
Cartesianism and became its most influential spokesman. His
Provinciales (1656) rendered abstruse questions of theology more or less
intelligible, and invited the general public to pronounce an opinion on
them. His lucid exposition interested every one in the abstruse problem,
Is man's freedom such as not to render grace superfluous? But Pascal
perceived that casuistry was not the only enemy that menaced the true
spirit of religion for which Jansenism stood. He came to realise that
Cartesianism, to which he was at first drawn, was profoundly opposed to
the fundamental views of Christianity. His Pensees are the fragments of
a work which he designed in defence of religion, and it is easy to see
that this defence was to be specially directed against the ideas of
Descartes.

Pascal was perfectly right about the Cartesian conception of the
Universe, though Descartes might pretend to mitigate its tendencies, and
his fervent disciple, Malebranche, might attempt to prove that it was
more or less reconcilable with orthodox doctrine. We need not trouble
about the special metaphysical tenets of Descartes. The two axioms
which he launched upon the world--the supremacy of reason, and the
invariability of natural laws--struck directly at the foundations of
orthodoxy. Pascal was attacking Cartesianism when he made his memorable
attempt to discredit the authority of reason, by showing that it is
feeble and deceptive. It was a natural consequence of his changed
attitude that he should speak (in the Pensees) in a much less confident
tone about the march of science than he had spoken in the passage which
I quoted above. And it was natural that he should be pessimistic about
social improvement, and that, keeping his eyes fixed on his central fact
that Christianity is the goal of history, he should take only a slight
and subsidiary interest in amelioration.

The preponderant influence of Jansenism only began to wane during the
last twenty years of the seventeenth century, and till then it seems
to have been successful in counteracting the diffusion of the Cartesian
ideas. Cartesianism begins to become active and powerful when Jansenism
is beginning to decline. And it is just then that the idea of Progress
begins definitely to emerge. The atmosphere in France was favourable for
its reception.

4.

The Cartesian mechanical theory of the world and the doctrine of
invariable law, carried to a logical conclusion, excluded the doctrine
of Providence. This doctrine was already in serious danger. Perhaps
no article of faith was more insistently attacked by sceptics in the
seventeenth century, and none was more vital. The undermining of the
theory of Providence is very intimately connected with our subject;
for it was just the theory of an active Providence that the theory of
Progress was to replace; and it was not till men felt independent of
Providence that they could organise a theory of Progress.

Bossuet was convinced that the question of Providence was the most
serious and pressing among all the questions of the day that were at
issue between orthodox and heretical thinkers. Brunetiere, his fervent
admirer, has named him the theologian of Providence, and has shown that
in all his writings this doctrine is a leading note. It is sounded
in his early sermons in the fifties, and it is the theme of his most
ambitious work, the Discourse on Universal History, which appeared
in 1681. [Footnote; It has been shown that on one hand he controverts
Spinoza's Tractatus theologico-politicus, and on the other the dangerous
methods of Richard Simon, one of the precursors of modern biblical
criticism. Brunetiere, op. cit. 74-85.] This book, which has received
high praise from those who most heartily dissent from its conclusions,
is in its main issue a restatement of the view of history which
Augustine had worked out in his memorable book. The whole course of
human experience has been guided by Providence for the sake of the
Church; that is, for the sake of the Church to which Bossuet belonged.
Regarded as a philosophy of history the Discourse may seem little more
than the theory of the De Civitate Dei brought up to date; but this is
its least important aspect. We shall fail to understand it unless we
recognise that it was a pragmatical, opportune work, designed for the
needs of the time, and with express references to current tendencies of
thought.

One main motive of Bossuet in his lifelong concern for Providence
was his conviction that the doctrine was the most powerful check on
immorality, and that to deny it was to remove the strongest restraint
on the evil side of human nature. There is no doubt that the free-living
people of the time welcomed the arguments which called Providence in
question, and Bossuet believed that to champion Providence was the
most efficient means of opposing the libertine tendencies of his day.
"Nothing," he declared in one of his sermons (1662), "has appeared
more insufferable to the arrogance of libertines than to see themselves
continually under the observation of this ever-watchful eye of
Providence. They have felt it as an importunate compulsion to recognise
that there is in Heaven a superior force which governs all our movements
and chastises our loose actions with a severe authority. They have
wished to shake off the yoke of this Providence, in order to maintain,
in independence, an unteachable liberty which moves them to live at
their own fancy, without fear, discipline, or restraint." [Passage from
Bossuet, quoted by Brunetiere, op. cit. 58.] Bossuet was thus working in
the same cause as the Jansenists.

He had himself come under the influence of Descartes, whose work he
always regarded with the deepest respect. The cautiousness of the master
had done much to disguise the insidious dangers of his thought, and it
was in the hands of those disciples who developed his system and sought
to reconcile it at all points with orthodoxy that his ideas displayed
their true nature. Malebranche's philosophy revealed the incompatibility
of Providence--in the ordinary acceptation--with immutable natural laws.
If the Deity acts upon the world, as Malebranche maintained, only by
means of general laws, His freedom is abolished, His omnipotence is
endangered, He is subject to a sort of fatality. What will become of the
Christian belief in the value of prayers, if God cannot adapt or modify,
on any given occasion, the general order of nature to the needs of human
beings? These are some of the arguments which we find in a treatise
composed by Fenelon, with the assistance of Bossuet, to demonstrate
that the doctrine of Malebranche is inconsistent with piety and orthodox
religion. They were right. Cartesianism was too strong a wine to
be decanted into old bottles. [Footnote: Fenelon's Refutation of
Malebranche's Traite de la nature et de la grace was not published till
1820. This work of Malebranche also provoked a controversy with Arnauld,
who urged similar arguments.]

Malebranche's doctrine of what he calls divine Providence was closely
connected with his philosophical optimism. It enabled him to maintain
the perfection of the universe. Admitting the obvious truth that the
world exhibits many imperfections, and allowing that the Creator
could have produced a better result if he had employed other means,
Malebranche argued that, in judging the world, we must take into account
not only the result but the methods by which it has been produced. It is
the best world, he asserts, that could be framed by general and simple
methods; and general and simple methods are the most perfect, and alone
worthy of the Creator. Therefore, if we take the methods and the
result together, a more perfect world is impossible. The argument was
ingenious, though full of assumptions, but it was one which could only
satisfy a philosopher. It is little consolation to creatures suffering
from the actual imperfections of the system into which they are born to
be told that the world might have been free from those defects, only in
that case they would not have the satisfaction of knowing that it was
created and conducted on theoretically superior principles.

Though Malebranche's conception was only a metaphysical theory,
metaphysical theories have usually their pragmatic aspects; and the
theory that the universe is as perfect as it could be marks a stage
in the growth of intellectual optimism which we can trace from the
sixteenth century. It was a view which could appeal to the educated
public in France, for it harmonised with the general spirit of
self-complacency and hopefulness which prevailed among the higher
classes of society in the reign of Louis XIV. For them the conditions
of life under the new despotism had become far more agreeable than in
previous ages, and it was in a spirit of optimism that they devoted
themselves to the enjoyment of luxury and elegance. The experience of
what the royal authority could achieve encouraged men to imagine that
one enlightened will, with a centralised administration at its command,
might accomplish endless improvements in civilisation. There was no age
had ever been more glorious, no age more agreeable to live in.

The world had begun to abandon the theory of corruption, degeneration,
and decay.

Some years later the optimistic theory of the perfection of the universe
found an abler exponent in Leibnitz, whom Diderot calls the father of
optimism. [Footnote: See particularly Monadologie, ad fin. published
posthumously in German 1720, in Latin 1728; Theodicee, Section 341
(1710); and the paper, De rerum originatione radicali, written in 1697,
but not published till 1840 (Opera philosophica, ed. Erdmann, p. 147
sqq).] The Creator, before He acted, had considered all possible worlds,
and had chosen the best. He might have chosen one in which humanity
would have been better and happier, but that would not have been
the best possible, for He had to consider the interests of the whole
universe, of which the earth with humanity is only an insignificant
part. The evils and imperfections of our small world are negligible
in comparison with the happiness and perfection of the whole cosmos.
Leibnitz, whose theory is deduced from the abstract proposition that
the Creator is perfect, does not say that now or at any given moment
the universe is as perfect as it could be; its merit lies in its
potentialities; it will develop towards perfection throughout infinite
time.

The optimism of Leibnitz therefore concerns the universe as a whole, not
the earth, and would obviously be quite consistent with a pessimistic
view of the destinies of humanity. He does indeed believe that it would
be impossible to improve the universal order, "not only for the
whole, but for ourselves in particular," and incidentally he notes
the possibility that "in the course of time the human race may reach a
greater perfection than we can imagine at present." But the significance
of his speculation and that of Malebranche lies in the fact that the old
theories of degeneration are definitely abandoned.



CHAPTER IV. THE DOCTRINE OF DEGENERATION: THE ANCIENTS AND MODERNS

1.

Outside the circle of systematic thinkers the prevalent theory of
degeneration was being challenged early in the seventeenth century. The
challenge led to a literary war, which was waged for about a hundred
years in France and England; over the comparative merits of the ancients
and the moderns. It was in the matter of literature, and especially
poetry, that the quarrel was most acrimonious, and that the interest of
the public was most keenly aroused, but the ablest disputants extended
the debate to the general field of knowledge. The quarrel of the
Ancients and Moderns used commonly to be dismissed as a curious and
rather ridiculous episode in the history of literature. [Footnote:
The best and fullest work on the subject is Rigault's "Histoire de la
querelle des Anciens et des Modernes" (1856).] Auguste Comte was, I
think, one of the first to call attention to some of its wider bearings.

The quarrel, indeed, has considerable significance in the history of
ideas. It was part of the rebellion against the intellectual yoke of
the Renaissance; the cause of the Moderns, who were the aggressors,
represented the liberation of criticism from the authority of the
dead; and, notwithstanding the perversities of taste of which they were
guilty, their polemic, even on the purely literary side, was distinctly
important, as M. Brunetiere has convincingly shown, [Footnote: See his
"L'evolution des genres dans l'histoire de la litterature."] in the
development of French criticism. But the form in which the critical
questions were raised forced the debate to touch upon a problem of
greater moment. The question, Can the men of to-day contend on equal
terms with the illustrious ancients, or are they intellectually
inferior? implied the larger issue, Has nature exhausted her powers;
is she no longer capable of producing men equal in brains and vigour to
those whom she once produced; is humanity played out, or are her forces
permanent and inexhaustible?

The assertion of the permanence of the powers of nature by the
champions of the Moderns was the direct contradiction of the theory of
degeneration, and they undoubtedly contributed much towards bringing
that theory into discredit. When we grasp this it will not be surprising
to find that the first clear assertions of a doctrine of progress
in knowledge were provoked by the controversy about the Ancients and
Moderns.

Although the great scene of the controversy was France, the question had
been expressly raised by an Italian, no less a person than Alessandro
Tassoni, the accomplished author of that famous ironical poem, "La
Secchia rapita," which caricatured the epic poets of his day. He was
bent on exposing the prejudices of his time and uttering new doctrine,
and he created great scandal in Italy by his attacks on Petrarch, as
well as on Homer and Aristotle. The earliest comparison of the merits of
the ancients and the moderns will be found in a volume of Miscellaneous
Thoughts which he published in 1620. [Footnote: Dieci libri di pensieri
diversi (Carpi, 1620). The first nine books had appeared in 1612. The
tenth contains the comparison. Rigault was the first to connect this
work with the history of the controversy.] He speaks of the question
as a matter of current dispute, [Footnote: It was incidental to the
controversy which arose over the merits of Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered.
That the subject had been discussed long before may be inferred from a
remark of Estienne in his Apology for Herodotus, that while some of
his contemporaries carry their admiration of antiquity to the point of
superstition, others depreciate and trample it underfoot.] on which he
proposes to give an impartial decision by instituting a comprehensive
comparison in all fields, theoretical, imaginative, and practical.

He begins by criticising the a priori argument that, as arts are
brought to perfection by experience and long labour, the modern age must
necessarily have the advantage. This reasoning, he says, is unsound,
because the same arts and studies are not always uninterruptedly pursued
by the most powerful intellects, but pass into inferior hands, and
so decline or are even extinguished, as was the case in Italy in the
decrepitude of the Roman Empire, when for many centuries the arts fell
below mediocrity. Or, to phrase it otherwise, the argument would be
admissible only if there were no breaches of continuity. [Footnote:
Tassoni argues that a decline in all pursuits is inevitable when
a certain point of excellence has been reached, quoting Velleius
Paterculus (i. 17): difficilisque in perfecto mora est naturaliterque
quod procedere non potest recedit.]

In drawing his comparison Tassoni seeks to make good his claim that he
is not an advocate. But while he awards superiority here and there to
the ancients, the moderns on the whole have much the best of it. He
takes a wide enough survey, including the material side of civilisation,
even costume, in contrast with some of the later controversialists, who
narrowed the field of debate to literature and art.

Tassoni's Thoughts were translated into French, and the book was
probably known to Boisrobert, a dramatist who is chiefly remembered
for the part he took in founding the Academie francaise. He delivered a
discourse before that body immediately after its institution (February
26, 1635), in which he made a violent and apparently scurrilous attack
on Homer. This discourse kindled the controversy in France, and even
struck a characteristic note. Homer--already severely handled by
Tassoni--was to be the special target for the arrows of the Moderns, who
felt that, if they could succeed in discrediting him, their cause would
be won.

Thus the gauntlet was flung--and it is important to note this--before
the appearance of the Discourse of Method (1637); but the influence
of Descartes made itself felt throughout the controversy, and the most
prominent moderns were men who had assimilated Cartesian ideas. This
seems to be true even of Desmarets de Saint Sorlin, who, a good many
years after the discourse of Boisrobert, opened the campaign. Saint
Sorlin had become a fanatical Christian; that was one reason for hating
the ancients. [Footnote: For the views of Saint Sorlin see the Preface
to his Clovis and his Traite pour juger des poefes grecs, latins, et
francais, chap. iv. (1670). Cp. Rigault, Hist. de la querelle, p. 106.
The polemic of Saint Sorlin extended over about five years (1669-73).]
He was also, like Boisrobert, a bad poet; that was another. His thesis
was that the history of Christianity offered subjects far more inspiring
to a poet than those which had been treated by Homer and Sophocles, and
that Christian poetry must bear off the palm from pagan. His own Clovis
and Mary Magdalene or the Triumph of Grace were the demonstration of
Homer's defeat. Few have ever heard of these productions; how many have
read them? Curiously, about the same time an epic was being composed
in England which might have given to the foolish contentions of Saint
Sorlin some illusory plausibility.

But the literary dispute does not concern us here. What does concern
us is that Saint Sorlin was aware of the wider aspects of the question,
though he was not seriously interested in them. Antiquity, he says, was
not so happy or so learned or so rich or so stately as the modern age,
which is really the mature old age, and as it were the autumn of the
world, possessing the fruits and the spoils of all the past centuries,
with the power to judge of the inventions, experiences, and errors of
predecessors, and to profit by all that. The ancient world was a spring
which had only a few flowers. Nature indeed, in all ages, produces
perfect works but it is not so with the creations of man, which require
correction; and the men who live latest must excel in happiness and
knowledge. Here we have both the assertion of the permanence of the
forces of nature and the idea, already expressed by Bacon and others,
that the modern age has advantages over antiquity comparable to those of
old age over childhood.

2.

How seriously the question between the Moderns and the Ancients--on
whose behalf Boileau had come forward and crossed swords with Saint
Sorlin--was taken is shown by the fact that Saint Sorlin, before his
death, solemnly bequeathed the championship of the Moderns to a younger
man, Charles Perrault. We shall see how he fulfilled the trust. It
is illustrated too by a book which appeared in the seventies, Les
Entretiens d'Ariste et Eugene, by Bouhours, a mundane and popular Jesuit
Father. In one of these dialogues the question is raised, but with a
curious caution and evasiveness, which suggests that the author was
afraid to commit himself; he did not wish to make enemies. [Footnote:
Rigault notes that he makes one contribution to the subject, the idea
that the torch of civilisation has passed from country to country, in
different ages, e.g. from Greece to Rome, and recently from Italy to
France. In the last century the Italians were first in doctrine and
politesse. The present century is for France what the last was for
Italy: "We have all the esprit and all the science, all other countries
are barbarous in comparison" (p. 239, ed. 1782, Amsterdam). But, as we
shall see, he had been anticipated by Hakewill, whose work was unknown
to Rigault.]

The general atmosphere in France, in the reign of Louis XIV., was
propitious to the cause of the Moderns. Men felt that it was a great
age, comparable to the age of Augustus, and few would have preferred
to have lived at any other time. Their literary artists, Corneille, and
then Racine and Moliere, appealed so strongly to their taste that they
could not assign to them any rank but the first. They were impatient
of the claims to unattainable excellence advanced for the Greeks and
Romans. "The ancients," said Moliere, "are the ancients, we are the
people of to-day." This might be the motto of Descartes, and it probably
expressed a very general feeling.

It was in 1687 that Charles Perrault--who is better remembered for his
collection of fairy-tales than for the leading role which he played in
this controversy--published his poem on "The Age of Louis the Great."
The enlightenment of the present age surpasses that of antiquity,--this
is the theme.


  La docte Antiquite dans toute sa duree
   A l'egal de nos jours ne fut point eclairee.


Perrault adopts a more polite attitude to "la belle antiquite" than
Saint Sorlin, but his criticism is more insidious. Greek and Roman men
of genius, he suggests, were all very well in their own times, and might
be considered divine by our ancestors. But nowadays Plato is rather
tiresome; and the "inimitable Homer" would have written a much better
epic if he had lived in the reign of Louis the Great. The important
passage, however, in the poem is that in which the permanent power of
nature to produce men of equal talent in every age is affirmed.


  A former les esprits comme a former les corps
   La Nature en tout temps fait les mesmes efforts;
   Son etre est immuable, et cette force aisee
   Dont elle produit tout ne s'est point epuisee;
.....   De cette mesme main les forces infinies
   Produisent en tout temps de semblables genies.


The "Age of Louis the Great" was a brief declaration of faith. Perrault
followed it up by a comprehensive work, his Comparison of the Ancients
and the Moderns (Parallele des Anciens et des Modernes), which appeared
in four parts during the following years (1688-1696). Art, eloquence,
poetry the sciences, and their practical applications are all discussed
at length; and the discussion is thrown into the form of conversations
between an enthusiastic champion of the modern age, who conducts the
debate, and a devotee of antiquity, who finds it difficult not to admit
the arguments of his opponent, yet obstinately persists in his own
views.

Perrault bases his thesis on those general considerations which we
have met incidentally in earlier writers, and which were now almost
commonplaces among those who paid any attention to the matter. Knowledge
advances with time and experience; perfection is not necessarily
associated with antiquity; the latest comers have inherited from their
predecessors and added new acquisitions of their own. But Perrault has
thought out the subject methodically, and he draws conclusions which
have only to be extended to amount to a definite theory of the progress
of knowledge.

A particular difficulty had done much to hinder a general admission of
progressive improvement in the past. The proposition that the
posterior is better and the late comers have the advantage seemed to be
incompatible with an obvious historical fact. We are superior to the men
of the dark ages in knowledge and arts. Granted. But will you say that
the men of the tenth century were superior to the Greeks and Romans? To
this question--on which Tassoni had already touched--Perrault replies:
Certainly not. There are breaches of continuity. The sciences and arts
are like rivers, which flow for part of their course underground, and
then, finding an opening, spring forth as abundant as when they plunged
beneath the earth. Long wars, for instance, may force peoples to
neglect studies and throw all their vigour into the more urgent needs
of self-preservation; a period of ignorance may ensue but with peace
and felicity knowledge and inventions will begin again and make further
advances. [Footnote: The passages in Perrault's Parallele specially
referred to in the text will be found in vol. i. pp. 35-7, 60-61, 67,
231-3.]

It is to be observed that he does not, claim any superiority in talents
or brain power for the moderns. On the contrary, he takes his stand on
the principle which he had asserted in the "Age of Louis the Great,"
that nature is immutable. She still produces as great men as ever, but
she does not produce greater. The lions of the deserts of Africa in our
days do not differ in fierceness from those the days of Alexander the
Great, and the best men of all times are equal in vigour. It is their
work and productions that are unequal, and, given equally favourable
conditions, the latest must be the best. For science and the arts depend
upon the accumulation of knowledge, and knowledge necessarily increases
as time goes on.

But could this argument be applied to poetry and literary art, the field
of battle in which the belligerents, including Perrault himself, were
most deeply interested? It might prove that the modern age was capable
of producing poets and men of letter no less excellent than the ancient
masters, but did it prove that their works must be superior? The
objection did not escape Perrault, and he answers it ingeniously. It is
the function of poetry and eloquence to please the human heart, and
in order to please it we must know it. Is it easier to penetrate the
secrets of the human heart than the secrets of nature, or will it take
less time? We are always making new discoveries about its passions and
desires. To take only the tragedies of Corneille you will find there
finer and more delicate reflections on ambition, vengeance, and jealousy
than in all the books of antiquity. At the close of his Parallel,
however, Perrault, while he declares the general superiority of the
moderns, makes a reservation in regard to poetry and eloquence "for the
sake of peace."

The discussion of Perrault falls far short of embodying a full idea
of Progress. Not only is he exclusively concerned with progress in
knowledge--though he implies, indeed, without developing, the doctrine
that happiness depends on knowledge--but he has no eyes for the future,
and no interest in it. He is so impressed with the advance of knowledge
in the recent past that he is almost incapable of imagining further
progression. "Read the journals of France and England," he says, "and
glance at the publications of the Academies of these great kingdoms, and
you will be convinced that within the last twenty or thirty years more
discoveries have been made in natural science than throughout the period
of learned antiquity. I own that I consider myself fortunate to know the
happiness we enjoy; it is a great pleasure to survey all the past ages
in which I can see the birth and the progress of all things, but nothing
which has not received a new increase and lustre in our own times. Our
age has, in some sort, arrived at the summit of perfection. And since
for some years the rate of the progress is much slower and appears
almost insensible--as the days seem to cease lengthening when the
solstice is near--it is pleasant to think that probably there are not
many things for which we need envy future generations."

Indifference to the future, or even a certain scepticism about it, is
the note of this passage, and accords with the view that the world
has reached its old age. The idea of the progress of knowledge, which
Perrault expounds, is still incomplete.

3.

Independently of this development in France, the doctrine of
degeneration had been attacked, and the comparison of the ancients with
the moderns incidentally raised, in England.

A divine named George Hakewill published in 1627 a folio of six hundred
pages to confute "the common error touching Nature's perpetual and
universal decay." [Footnote: An Apologie or Declaration of the Power
and Providence of God in the Government of the World, consisting in an
Examination and Censure of the common Errour, etc. (1627, 1630, 1635).]
He and his pedantic book, which breathes the atmosphere of the sixteenth
century, are completely forgotten; and though it ran to three editions,
it can hardly have attracted the attention of many except theologians.
The writer's object is to prove that the power and providence of God
in the government of the world are not consistent with the current view
that the physical universe, the heavens and the elements, are undergoing
a process of decay, and that man is degenerating physically, mentally,
and morally. His arguments in general are futile as well as tedious.
But he has profited by reading Bodin and Bacon, whose ideas, it would
appear, were already agitating theological minds.

A comparison between the ancients and the moderns arises in a general
refutation of the doctrine of decay, as naturally as the question of
the stability of the powers of nature arises in a comparison between the
ancients and moderns. Hakewill protests against excessive admiration of
antiquity, just because it encourages the opinion of the world's
decay. He gives his argument a much wider scope than the French
controversialists. For him the field of debate includes not only
science, arts, and literature, but physical qualities and morals. He
seeks to show that mentally and physically there has been no decay, and
that the morals of modern Christendom are immensely superior to those
of pagan times. There has been social progress, due to Christianity; and
there has been an advance in arts and knowledge.

  Multa dies uariusque labor mutabilis aeui
   Rettulit in melius.


Hakewill, like Tassoni, surveys all the arts and sciences, and concludes
that the moderns are equal to the ancients in poetry, and in almost
all other things excel them. [Footnote: Among modern poets equal to
the ancients, Hakewill signalises Sir Philip Sidney, Spenser, Marot,
Ronsard, Ariosto, Tasso (Book iii. chap. 8, Section 3).]

One of the arguments which he urges against the theory of degeneration
is pragmatic--its paralysing effect on human energy. "The opinion of the
world's universal decay quails the hopes and blunts the edge of men's
endeavours." And the effort to improve the world, he implies, is a duty
we owe to posterity.

"Let not then the vain shadows of the world's fatal decay keep us either
from looking backward to the imitation of our noble predecessors or
forward in providing for posterity, but as our predecessors worthily
provided, for us, so let our posterity bless us in providing for them,
it being still as uncertain to us what generations are still to ensue,
as it was to our predecessors in their ages."

We note the suggestion that history may be conceived as a sequence of
improvements in civilisation, but we note also that Hakewill here is
faced by the obstacle which Christian theology offered to the logical
expansion of the idea. It is uncertain what generations are still to
ensue. Roger Bacon stood before the same dead wall. Hakewill thinks that
he is living in the last age of the world; but how long it shall last
is a question which cannot be resolved, "it being one of those secrets
which the Almighty hath locked up in the cabinet of His own counsel."
Yet he consoles himself and his readers with a consideration which
suggests that the end is not yet very near. [Footnote: See Book i.
chap. 2, Section 4, p. 24.] "It is agreed upon all sides by Divines that
at least two signs forerunning the world's end remain unaccomplished--the
subversion of Rome and the conversion of the Jews. And when they shall
be accomplished God only knows, as yet in man's judgment there being
little appearance of the one or the other."

It was well to be assured that nature is not decaying or man
degenerating. But was the doctrine that the end of the world does
not "depend upon the law of nature," and that the growth of human
civilisation may be cut off at any moment by a fiat of the Deity, less
calculated to "quail the hopes and blunt the edge of men's endeavours?"
Hakewill asserted with confidence that the universe will be suddenly
wrecked by fire. Una dies dabit exitio. Was the prospect of an arrest
which might come the day after to-morrow likely to induce men to exert
themselves to make provision for posterity?

The significance of Hakewill lies in the fact that he made the current
theory of degeneration, which stood in the way of all possible theories
of progress, the object of a special inquiry. And his book illustrates
the close connection between that theory and the dispute over the
Ancients and Moderns. It cannot be said that he has added anything
valuable to what may be found in Bodin and Bacon on the development
of civilisation. The general synthesis of history which he attempts is
equivalent to theirs. He describes the history of knowledge and arts,
and all things besides, as exhibiting "a kind of circular progress," by
which he means that they have a birth, growth, nourishing, failing and
fading, and then within a while after a resurrection and reflourishing.
[Footnote: Book iii. chap. 6, Section i, p. 259.] In this method of
progress the lamp of learning passed from one people to another. It
passed from the Orientals (Chaldeans and Egyptians) to the Greeks; when
it was nearly extinguished in Greece it began to shine afresh among the
Romans; and having been put out by the barbarians for the space of
a thousand years it was relit by Petrarch and his contemporaries. In
stating this view of "circular progress," Hakewill comes perilously near
to the doctrine of Ricorsi or Returns which had been severely denounced
by Bacon.

In one point indeed Hakewill goes far beyond Bodin. It was suggested,
as we saw, by the French thinker that in some respects the modern age is
superior in conduct and morals to antiquity, but he said little on the
matter. Hakewill develops the suggestion at great length into a severe
and partial impeachment of ancient manners and morals. Unjust and
unconvincing though his arguments are, and inspired by theological
motives, his thesis nevertheless deserves to be noted as an assertion of
the progress of man in social morality. Bacon, and the thinkers of the
seventeenth century generally, confined their views of progress in the
past to the intellectual field. Hakewill, though he overshot the mark
and said nothing actually worth remembering, nevertheless anticipated
the larger problem of social progress which was to come to the front in
the eighteenth century.

4.

During the forty years that followed the appearance of Hakewill's book
much had happened in the world of ideas, and when we take up Glanvill's
Plus ultra, or the Progress and Advancement of Knowledge since the days
of Aristotle, [Footnote: The title is evidently suggested by a passage
in Bacon quoted above, p. 55.] we breathe a different atmosphere. It was
published in 1668, and its purpose was to defend the recently founded
Royal Society which was attacked on the ground that it was inimical
to the interests of religion and sound learning. For the Aristotelian
tradition was still strongly entrenched in the English Church and
Universities, notwithstanding the influence of Bacon; and the Royal
Society, which realised "the romantic model" of Bacon's society
of experimenters, repudiated the scholastic principles and methods
associated with Aristotle's name.

Glanvill was one of those latitudinarian clergymen, so common in the
Anglican Church in the seventeenth century, who were convinced that
religious faith must accord with reason, and were unwilling to abate in
its favour any of reason's claims. He was under the influence of
Bacon, Descartes, and the Cambridge Platonists, and no one was more
enthusiastic than he in following the new scientific discoveries of his
time. Unfortunately for his reputation he had a weak side. Enlightened
though he was, he was a firm believer in witchcraft, and he is chiefly
remembered not as an admirer of Descartes and Bacon, and a champion
of the Royal Society, but as the author of Saducismus Triumphatus,
a monument of superstition, which probably contributed to check the
gradual growth of disbelief in witches and apparitions.

His Plus ultra is a review of modern improvements of useful knowledge.
It is confined to mathematics and science, in accordance with its
purpose of justifying the Royal Society; and the discoveries of the past
sixty years enable the author to present a far more imposing picture
of modern scientific progress than was possible for Bodin or Bacon.
[Footnote: Bacon indeed could have made out a more impressive picture of
the new age if he had studied mathematics and taken the pains to master
the evidence which was revolutionising astronomy. Glanvill had the
advantage of comprehending the importance of mathematics for the advance
of physical science.] He had absorbed Bacon's doctrine of utility. His
spirit is displayed in the remark that more gratitude is due to the
unknown inventor of the mariners' compass

"than to a thousand Alexanders and Caesars, or to ten times the number
of Aristotles. And he really did more for the increase of knowledge
and the advantage of the world by this one experiment than the numerous
subtile disputers that have lived ever since the erection of the school
of talking."

Glanvill, however, in his complacency with what has already been
accomplished, is not misled into over-estimating its importance. He
knows that it is indeed little compared with the ideal of attainable
knowledge. The human design, to which it is the function of the Royal
Society to contribute, is laid as low, he says, as the profoundest
depths of nature, and reaches as high as the uppermost storey of the
universe, extends to all the varieties of the great world, and aims at
the benefit of universal mankind. Such a work can only proceed slowly,
by insensible degrees. It is an undertaking wherein all the generations
of men are concerned, and our own age can hope to do little more than
to remove useless rubbish, lay in materials, and put things in order for
the building. "We must seek and gather, observe and examine, and lay up
in bank for the ages that come after."

These lines on "the vastness of the work" suggest to the reader that
a vast future will be needed for its accomplishment. Glanvill does not
dwell on this, but he implies it. He is evidently unembarrassed by the
theological considerations which weighed so heavily on Hakewill. He does
not trouble himself with the question whether Anti-Christ has still to
appear. The difference in general outlook between these two clergymen is
an indication how the world had travelled in the course of forty years.

Another point in Glanvill's little book deserves attention. He takes
into his prospect the inhabitants of the Transatlantic world; they, too,
are to share in the benefits which shall result from the subjugation of
nature.

"By the gaining that mighty continent and the numerous fruitful isles
beyond the Atlantic, we have obtained a larger field of nature, and
have thereby an advantage for more phenomena, and more helps both for
knowledge and for life, which 'tis very like that future ages will make
better use of to such purposes than those hitherto have done; and that
science also may at last travel into those parts and enrich Peru with
a more precious treasure than that of its golden mines, is not
improbable."

Sprat, the Bishop of Rochester, in his interesting History of the Royal
Society, so sensible and liberal--published shortly before Glanvill's
book,--also contemplates the extension of science over the world.
Speaking of the prospect of future discoveries, he thinks it will partly
depend on the enlargement of the field of western civilisation "if this
mechanic genius which now prevails in these parts of Christendom shall
happen to spread wide amongst ourselves and other civil nations, or if
by some good fate it shall pass farther on to other countries that were
yet never fully civilised."

This then being imagin'd, that there may some lucky tide of civility
flow into those lands which are yet salvage, then will a double
improvement thence arise both in respect of ourselves and them. For even
the present skilful parts of mankind will be thereby made more skilful,
and the other will not only increase those arts which we shall bestow
upon them, but will also venture on new searches themselves.

He expects much from the new converts, on the ground that nations which
have been taught have proved more capable than their teachers, appealing
to the case of the Greeks who outdid their eastern masters, and to that
of the peoples of modern Europe who received their light from the Romans
but have "well nigh doubled the ancient stock of trades delivered to
their keeping."

5.

The establishment of the Royal Society in 1660 and the Academy of
Sciences in 1666 made physical science fashionable in London and Paris.
Macaulay, in his characteristic way, describes how "dreams of perfect
forms of government made way for dreams of wings with which men were to
fly from the Tower to the Abbey, and of double-keeled ships which were
never to founder in the fiercest storm. All classes were hurried along
by the prevailing sentiment. Cavalier and Roundhead, Churchman and
Puritan were for once allied. Divines, jurists, statesmen, nobles,
princes, swelled the triumph of the Baconian philosophy." The seeds sown
by Bacon had at last begun to ripen, and full credit was given to him by
those who founded and acclaimed the Royal Society. The ode which Cowley
addressed to that institution might have been entitled an ode in honour
of Bacon, or still better--for the poet seized the essential point of
Bacon's labours--a hymn on the liberation of the human mind from the
yoke of Authority.

  Bacon has broke that scar-crow Deity.


Dryden himself, in the Annus Mirabilis, had turned aside from his
subject, the defeat of the Dutch and England's mastery of the seas, to
pay a compliment to the Society, and to prophesy man's mastery of the
universe.

  Instructed ships shall sail to rich commerce,
    By which remotest regions are allied;
   Which makes one city of the universe,
    Where some may gain and all may be supplied.


  Then we upon our globe's last verge shall go,
    And view the ocean leaning on the sky,
   From thence our rolling neighbours we shall know,
    And on the lunar world securely pry.


[Footnote: It may be noted that John Wilkins (Bishop of Chester)
published in 1638 a little book entitled Discovery of a New World,
arguing that the moon is inhabited. A further edition appeared in 1684.
He attempted to compose a universal language (Sprat, Hist. of Royal
Society, p. 251). His Mercury or the Secret and Swift Messenger (1641)
contains proposals for a universal script (chap. 13). There is also an
ingenious suggestion for the communication of messages by sound, which
might be described as an anticipation of the Morse code. Wilkins and
another divine, Seth Ward, the Bishop of Salisbury, belonged to the
group of men who founded the Royal Society.]

Men did not look far into the future; they did not dream of what the
world might be a thousand or ten thousand years hence. They seem to have
expected quick results. Even Sprat thinks that "the absolute perfection
of the true philosophy" is not far off, seeing that "this first great
and necessary preparation for its coming"--the institution of scientific
co-operation--has been accomplished. Superficial and transient though
the popular enthusiasm was, it was a sign that an age of intellectual
optimism had begun, in which the science of nature would play a leading
role.



CHAPTER V. THE PROGRESS OF KNOWLEDGE: FONTENELLE

1.

Nine months before the first part of Perrault's work appeared a younger
and more brilliant man had formulated, in a short tract, the essential
points of the doctrine of the progress of knowledge. It was Fontenelle.

Fontenelle was an anima naturaliter moderna. Trained in the principles
of Descartes, he was one of those who, though like Descartes himself,
too critical to swear by a master, appreciated unreservedly the value of
the Cartesian method. Sometimes, he says, a great man gives the tone
to his age; and this is true of Descartes, who can claim the glory
of having established a new art of reasoning. He sees the effects
in literature. The best books on moral and political subjects are
distinguished by an arrangement and precision which he traces to the
esprit geometrique characteristic of Descartes. [Footnote: Sur l'utilite
des mathematiques el de la physique (Oeuvres, iii. p. 6, ed. 1729).]
Fontenelle himself had this "geometrical mind," which we see at its best
in Descartes and Hobbes and Spinoza.

He had indeed a considerable aptitude for letters. He wrote poor verses,
and could not distinguish good poetry from bad. That perhaps was the
defect of l'esprit geometrique. But he wrote lucid prose. There was an
ironical side to his temper, and he had an ingenious paradoxical wit,
which he indulged, with no little felicity, in his early work, Dialogues
of the Dead. These conversations, though they show no dramatic power and
are simply a vehicle for the author's satirical criticisms on life, are
written with a light touch, and are full of surprises and unexpected
turns. The very choice of the interlocutors shows a curious fancy,
which we do not associate with the geometrical intellect. Descartes
is confronted with the Third False Demetrius, and we wonder what the
gourmet Apicius will find to say to Galileo.

2.

In the Dialogues of the Dead, which appeared in 1683, the Ancient and
Modern controversy is touched on more than once, and it is the subject
of the conversation between Socrates and Montaigne. Socrates ironically
professes to expect that the age of Montaigne will show a vast
improvement on his own; that men will have profited by the experience
of many centuries; and that the old age of the world will be wiser and
better regulated than its youth. Montaigne assures him that it is not
so, and that the vigorous types of antiquity, like Pericles, Aristides,
and Socrates himself, are no longer to be found. To this assertion
Socrates opposes the doctrine of the permanence of the forces of Nature.
Nature has not degenerated in her other works; why should she cease to
produce reasonable men?

He goes on to observe that antiquity is enlarged and exalted by
distance: "In our own day we esteemed our ancestors more than they
deserved, and now our posterity esteems us more than we deserve. There
is really no difference between our ancestors, ourselves, and our
posterity. C'est toujours la meme chose." But, objects Montaigne, I
should have thought that things were always changing; that different
ages had their different characters. Are there not ages of learning and
ages of ignorance, rude ages and polite? True, replies Socrates, but
these are only externalities. The heart of man does not change with
the fashions of his life. The order of Nature remains constant (l'ordre
general de la Nature a l'air bien constant).

This conclusion harmonises with the general spirit of the Dialogues. The
permanence of the forces of Nature is asserted, but for the purpose
of dismissing the whole controversy as rather futile. Elsewhere modern
discoveries, like the circulation of the blood and the motions of the
earth, are criticised as useless; adding nothing to the happiness and
pleasures of mankind. Men acquired, at an early period, a certain amount
of useful knowledge, to which they have added nothing; since then they
have been slowly discovering things that are unnecessary. Nature has not
been so unjust as to allow one age to enjoy more pleasures than
another. And what is the value of civilisation? It moulds our words, and
embarrasses our actions; it does not affect our feelings. [Footnote:
See the dialogues of Harvey with Erasistratus (a Greek physician of
the third century B.C.); Galileo with Apicius; Montezuma with Fernando
Cortez.]

One might hardly have expected the author of these Dialogues to come
forward a few years later as a champion of the Moderns, even though, in
the dedicatory epistle to Lucian, he compared France to Greece. But he
was seriously interested in the debated question, as an intellectual
problem, and in January 1688 he published his Digression on the Ancients
and Moderns, a short pamphlet, but weightier and more suggestive than
the large work of his friend Perrault, which began to appear nine months
later.

3.

The question of pre-eminence between the Ancients and Moderns is
reducible to another. Were trees in ancient times greater than to-day?
If they were, then Homer, Plato, and Demosthenes cannot be equalled in
modern times; if they were not, they can.

Fontenelle states the problem in this succinct way at the beginning of
the Digression. The permanence of the forces of Nature had been asserted
by Saint Sorlin and Perrault; they had offered no proof, and had used
the principle rather incidentally and by way of illustration. But
the whole inquiry hinged on it. If it can be shown that man has not
degenerated, the cause of the Moderns is practically won. The issue
of the controversy must be decided not by rhetoric but by physics. And
Fontenelle offers what he regards as a formal Cartesian proof of the
permanence of natural forces.

If the Ancients had better intellects than ours, the brains of that
age must have been better arranged, formed of firmer or more delicate
fibres, fuller of "animal spirits." But if such a difference existed,
Nature must have been more vigorous; and in that case the trees must
have profited by that superior vigour and have been larger and finer.
The truth is that Nature has in her hands a certain paste which is
always the same, which she is ever turning over and over again in a
thousand ways, and of which she forms men, animals, and plants. She has
not formed Homer, Demosthenes, and Plato of a finer or better kneaded
clay than our poets, orators, and philosophers. Do not object that minds
are not material. They are connected by a material bond with the brain,
and it is the quality of this material bond that determines intellectual
differences.

But although natural processes do not change from age to age, they
differ in their effects in different climates. "It is certain that as
a result of the reciprocal dependence which exists between all parts of
the material world, differences of climate, which so clearly affect the
life of plants, must also produce some effect on human brains." May it
not be said then that, in consequence of climatic conditions, ancient
Greece and Rome produced men of mental qualities different from those
which could be produced in France? Oranges grow easily in Italy; it is
more difficult to cultivate them in France. Fontenelle replies that art
and cultivation exert a much greater influence on human brains than
on the soil; ideas can be transported more easily from one country
to another than plants; and as a consequence of commerce and mutual
influence, peoples do not retain the original mental peculiarities due
to climate. This may not be true of the extreme climates in the torrid
and glacial zones, but in the temperate zone we may discount entirely
climatic influence. The climates of Greece and Italy and that of France
are too similar to cause any sensible difference between the Greeks or
Latins and the French.

Saint Sorlin and Perrault had argued directly from the permanence of
vigour in lions or trees to the permanence of vigour in man. If trees
are the same as ever, brains must also be the same. But what about the
minor premiss? Who knows that trees are precisely the same? It is an
indemonstrable assumption that oaks and beeches in the days of Socrates
and Cicero were not slightly better trees than the oaks and beeches of
to-day. Fontenelle saw the weakness of this reasoning. He saw that it
was necessary to prove that the trees, no less than human brains, have
not degenerated. But his a priori proof is simply a statement of the
Cartesian principle of the stability of natural processes, which he put
in a thoroughly unscientific form. The stability of the laws of nature
is a necessary hypothesis, without which science would be impossible.
But here it was put to an illegitimate use. For it means that, given
precisely the same conditions, the same physical phenomena will occur.
Fontenelle therefore was bound to show that conditions had not altered
in such a way as to cause changes in the quality of nature's organic
productions. He did not do this. He did not take into consideration, for
instance, that climatic conditions may vary from age to age as well as
from country to country.

4.

Having established the natural equality of the Ancients and Moderns,
Fontenelle inferred that whatever differences exist are due to external
conditions--(1) time; (2) political institutions and the estate of
affairs in general.

The ancients were prior in time to us, therefore they were the authors
of the first inventions. For that, they cannot be regarded as our
superiors. If we had been in their place we should have been the
inventors, like them; if they were in ours, they would add to those
inventions, like us. There is no great mystery in that. We must impute
equal merit to the early thinkers who showed the way and to the later
thinkers who pursued it. If the ancient attempts to explain the universe
have been recently replaced by the discovery of a simple system (the
Cartesian), we must consider that the truth could only be reached by
the elimination of false routes, and in this way the numbers of the
Pythagoreans, the ideas of Plato, the qualities of Aristotle, all served
indirectly to advance knowledge. "We are under an obligation to the
ancients for having exhausted almost all the false theories that could
be formed." Enlightened both by their true views and by their errors, it
is not surprising that we should surpass them.

But all this applies only to scientific studies, like mathematics,
physics, and medicine, which depend partly on correct reasoning and
partly on experience. Methods of reasoning improve slowly, and the most
important advance which has been made in the present age is the method
inaugurated by Descartes. Before him reasoning was loose; he introduced
a more rigid and precise standard, and its influence is not only
manifest in our best works on physics and philosophy, but is even
discernible in books on ethics and religion.

We must expect posterity to excel us as we excel the Ancients, through
improvement of method, which is a science in itself--the most difficult
and least studied of all--and through increase of experience. Evidently
the process is endless (il est evident que tout cela n'a point de fin),
and the latest men of science must be the most competent.

But this does not apply to poetry or eloquence, round which the
controversy has most violently raged. For poetry and eloquence do not
depend on correct reasoning. They depend principally on vivacity of
imagination, and "vivacity of imagination does not require a long
course of experiments, or a great multitude of rules, to attain all the
perfection of which it is capable." Such perfection might be attained in
a few centuries. If the ancients did achieve perfection in imaginative
literature, it follows that they cannot be surpassed; but we have no
right to say, as their admirers are fond of pretending, that they cannot
be equalled.

5.

Besides the mere nature of time, we have to take into account external
circumstances in considering this question.

If the forces of nature are permanent, how are we to explain the fact
that in the barbarous centuries after the decline of Rome--the term
Middle Ages has not yet come into currency--ignorance was so dense and
deep? This breach of continuity is one of the plausible arguments of
the advocates of the Ancients. Those ages, they say, were ignorant and
barbarous because the Greek and Latin writers had ceased to be read;
as soon as the study of the classical models revived there was a
renaissance of reason and good taste. That is true, but it proves
nothing. Nature never forgot how to mould the head of Cicero or Livy.
She produces in every age men who might be great men; but the age does
not always allow them to exert their talents. Inundations of barbarians,
universal wars, governments which discourage or do not favour science
and art, prejudices which assume all variety of shapes--like the
Chinese prejudice against dissecting corpses--may impose long periods of
ignorance or bad taste.

But observe that, though the return to the study of the ancients
revived, as at one stroke, the aesthetic ideals which they had created
and the learning which they had accumulated, yet even if their works
had not been preserved we should, though it would have cost us many long
years of labour, have discovered for ourselves "ideas of the true and
the beautiful." Where should we have found them? Where the ancients
themselves found them, after much groping.

6.

The comparison of the life of collective humanity to the life of a
single man, which had been drawn by Bacon and Pascal, Saint Sorlin and
Perrault, contains or illustrates an important truth which bears on
the whole question. Fontenelle puts it thus. An educated mind is, as it
were, composed of all the minds of preceding ages; we might say that a
single mind was being educated throughout all history. Thus this secular
man, who has lived since the beginning of the world, has had his infancy
in which he was absorbed by the most urgent needs of life; his youth in
which he succeeded pretty well in things of imagination like poetry
and eloquence, and even began to reason, but with more courage than
solidity. He is now in the age of manhood, is more enlightened, and
reasons better; but he would have advanced further if the passion for
war had not distracted him and given him a distaste for the sciences to
which he has at last returned.

Figures, if they are pressed, are dangerous; they suggest unwarrantable
conclusions. It may be illuminative to liken the development of humanity
to the growth of an individual; but to infer that the human race is now
in its old age, merely on the strength of the comparison, is obviously
unjustifiable. That is what Bacon and the others had done. The fallacy
was pointed out by Fontenelle.

From his point of view, an "old age" of humanity, which if it meant
anything meant decay as well as the wisdom of experience, was contrary
to the principle of the permanence of natural forces. Man, he asserts,
will have no old age. He will be always equally capable, of achieving
the successes of his youth; and he will become more and more expert in
the things which become the age of virility. Or "to drop metaphor,
men will never degenerate." In ages to come we may be regarded--say in
America--with the same excess of admiration with which we regard the
ancients. We might push the prediction further. In still later ages the
interval of time which divides us from the Greeks and Romans will appear
so relatively small to posterity that they will classify us and the
ancients as virtually contemporary; just in the same way as we group
together the Greeks and Romans, though the Romans in their own day were
moderns in relation to the Greeks. In that remote period men will be
able to judge without prejudice the comparative merits of Sophocles and
Corneille.

Unreasonable admiration for the ancients is one of the chief obstacles
to progress (le progres des choses). Philosophy not only did not
advance, but even fell into an abyss of unintelligible ideas, because,
through devotion to the authority of Aristotle, men sought truth in his
enigmatic writings instead of seeking it in nature. If the authority of
Descartes were ever to have the same fortune, the results would be no
less disastrous.

7.

This memorable brochure exhibits, without pedantry, perspicuous
arrangement and the "geometrical" precision on which Fontenelle remarked
as one of the notes of the new epoch introduced by Descartes. It
displays too the author's open-mindedness, and his readiness to
follow where the argument leads. He is able already to look beyond
Cartesianism; he knows that it cannot be final. No man of his time was
more open-minded and free from prejudice than Fontenelle. This quality
of mind helped him to turn his eyes to the future. Perrault and his
predecessors were absorbed in the interest of the present and the past.
Descartes was too much engaged in his own original discoveries to do
more than throw a passing glance at posterity.

Now the prospect of the future was one of the two elements which were
still needed to fashion the theory of the progress of knowledge. All the
conditions for such a theory were present. Bodin and Bacon, Descartes
and the champions of the Moderns--the reaction against the Renaissance,
and the startling discoveries of science--had prepared the way; progress
was established for the past and present. But the theory of the progress
of knowledge includes and acquires its value by including the indefinite
future. This step was taken by Fontenelle. The idea had been almost
excluded by Bacon's misleading metaphor of old age, which Fontenelle
expressly rejects. Man will have no old age; his intellect will never
degenerate; and "the sound views of intellectual men in successive
generations will continually add up."

But progress must not only be conceived as extending indefinitely into
the future; it must also be conceived as necessary and certain. This is
the second essential feature of the theory. The theory would have
little value or significance, if the prospect of progress in the future
depended on chance or the unpredictable discretion of an external will.
Fontenelle asserts implicitly the certainty of progress when he declares
that the discoveries and improvements of the modern age would have been
made by the ancients if they exchanged places with the moderns; for
this amounts to saying that science will progress and knowledge increase
independently of particular individuals. If Descartes had not been born,
some one else would have done his work; and there could have been no
Descartes before the seventeenth century. For, as he says in a later
work, [Footnote: Preface des elemens de la geometrie de l'infini
(OEuvres, x. p. 40, ed. 1790).] "there is an order which regulates our
progress. Every science develops after a certain number of preceding
sciences have developed, and only then; it has to await its turn to
burst its shell."

Fontenelle, then, was the first to formulate the idea of the progress,
of knowledge, as a complete doctrine. At the moment the import and
far-reaching effects of the idea were not realised, either by himself or
by others, and his pamphlet, which appeared in the company of a perverse
theory of pastoral poetry, was acclaimed merely as an able defence of
the Moderns.

8.

If the theory of the indefinite progress of knowledge is true, it is one
of those truths which were originally established by false reasoning. It
was established on a principle which excluded degeneration, but equally
excluded evolution; and the whole conception of nature which Fontenelle
had learned from Descartes is long since dead and buried.

But it is more important to observe that this principle, which seemed
to secure the indefinite progress of knowledge, disabled Fontenelle from
suggesting a theory of the progress of society. The invariability of
nature, as he conceived it, was true of the emotions and the will,
as well as of the intellect. It implied that man himself would be
psychically always the same--unalterable, incurable. L'ordre general
de la Nature a Fair bien constant. His opinion of the human race was
expressed in the Dialogues of the Dead, [Footnote: It may be seen too in
the Plurality of Worlds.] and it never seems to have varied. The world
consists of a multitude of fools, and a mere handful of reasonable men.
Men's passions will always be the same and will produce wars in the
future as in the past. Civilisation makes no difference; it is little
more than a veneer.

Even if theory had not stood in his way, Fontenelle was the last man who
was likely to dream dreams of social improvement. He was temperamentally
an Epicurean, of the same refined stamp as Epicurus himself, and he
enjoyed throughout his long life--he lived to the age of a hundred--the
tranquillity which was the true Epicurean ideal. He was never troubled
by domestic cares, and his own modest ambition was satisfied when, at
the age of forty, he was appointed permanent Secretary of the Academy of
Sciences. He was not the man to let his mind dwell on the woes and
evils of the world; and the follies and perversities which cause them
interested him only so far as they provided material for his wit.

It remains, however, noteworthy that the author of the theory of the
progress of knowledge, which was afterwards to expand into a general
theory of human Progress, would not have allowed that this extension was
legitimate; though it was through this extension that Fontenelle's idea
acquired human value and interest and became a force in the world.

9.

Fontenelle did a good deal more than formulate the idea. He reinforced
it by showing that the prospect of a steady and rapid increase of
knowledge in the future was certified.

The postulate of the immutability of the laws of nature, which has
been the indispensable basis for the advance of modern science, is
fundamental with Descartes. But Descartes did not explicitly insist on
it, and it was Fontenelle, perhaps more than any one else, who made it
current coin. That was a service performed by the disciple; but he seems
to have been original in introducing the fruitful idea of the sciences
as confederate and intimately interconnected [Footnote: Roger Bacon,
as we saw, had a glimpse of this principle.]; not forming a number of
isolated domains, as hitherto, but constituting a system in which the
advance of one will contribute to the advance of the others. He
exposed with masterly ability the reciprocal relations of physics and
mathematics. No man of his day had a more comprehensive view of all the
sciences, though he made no original contributions to any. His curiosity
was universal, and as Secretary of the Academy he was obliged, according
to his own high standard of his duty, to keep abreast of all that was
being done in every branch of knowledge. That was possible then; it
would be impossible now.

In the famous series of obituary discourses which he delivered on
savants who were members of the Academy, Fontenelle probably
thought that he was contributing to the realisation of this ideal of
"solidarity," for they amounted to a chronicle of scientific progress in
every department. They are free from technicalities and extraordinarily
lucid, and they appealed not only to men of science, but to those of the
educated public who possessed some scientific curiosity. This brings us
to another important role of Fontenelle--the role of interpreter of
the world of science to the world outside. It is closely related to our
subject.

For the popularisation of science, which was to be one of the features
of the nineteenth century, was in fact a condition of the success of the
idea of Progress. That idea could not insinuate itself into the public
mind and become a living force in civilised societies until the meaning
and value of science had been generally grasped, and the results of
scientific discovery had been more or less diffused. The achievements of
physical science did more than anything else to convert the imaginations
of men to the general doctrine of Progress.

Before the later part of the seventeenth century, the remarkable
physical discoveries of recent date had hardly escaped beyond academic
circles. But an interest in these subjects began to become the fashion
in the later years of Louis XIV. Science was talked in the salons;
ladies studied mechanics and anatomy. Moliere's play, Les Femmes
savantes, which appeared in 1672, is one of the first indications. In
1686 Fontenelle published his Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds,
in which a savant explains the new astronomy to a lady in the park of
a country house. [Footnote: The Marquise of the Plurality of Worlds
is supposed to be Madame de la Mesangere, who lived near Rouen,
Fontenelle's birthplace. He was a friend and a frequent visitor at her
chateau. See Maigron, Fontenelle, p. 42. The English translation of 1688
was by Glanvill. A new translation was published at Dublin as late as
1761.] It is the first book--at least the first that has any claim to be
remembered--in the literature of popular science, and it is one of
the most striking. It met with the success which it deserved. It was
reprinted again and again, and it was almost immediately translated into
English.

The significance of the Plurality of Worlds is indeed much greater
than that of a pioneer work in popularisation and a model in the art
of making technical subjects interesting. We must remember that at this
time the belief that the sun revolves round the earth still prevailed.
Only the few knew better. The cosmic revolution which is associated with
the names of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo was slow in producing its
effects. It was rejected by Bacon; and the condemnation of Galileo by
the Church

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