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