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CHAPTER XII
THE THEORY OF PROGRESS IN ENGLAND
1.
The idea of Progress could not help crossing the Channel. France and
England had been at war in the first year of the eighteenth century,
they were at war in the last, and their conflict for supremacy was
the leading feature of the international history of the whole
century. But at no period was there more constant intellectual
intimacy or more marked reciprocal influence between the two
countries. It was a commonplace that Paris and London were the two
great foci of civilisation, and they never lost touch of each other
in the intellectual sphere. Many of the principal works of
literature that appeared in either country were promptly translated,
and some of the French books, which the censorship rendered it
dangerous to publish in Paris, were printed in London.
It was not indeed to be expected that the theory should have the
same kind of success, or exert the same kind of effect in England as
in France. England had her revolution behind her, France had hers
before her. England enjoyed what were then considered large
political liberties, the envy of other lands; France groaned under
the tyranny of worthless rulers. The English constitution satisfied
the nation, and the serious abuses which would now appear to us
intolerable were not sufficient to awaken a passionate desire for
reforms. The general tendency of British thought was to see
salvation in the stability of existing institutions, and to regard
change with suspicion. Now passionate desire for reform was the
animating force which propagated the idea of Progress in France. And
when this idea is translated from the atmosphere of combat, in which
it was developed by French men of letters, into the calm climate of
England, it appears like a cold reflection.
Again, English thinkers were generally inclined to hold, with Locke,
that the proper function of government is principally negative, to
preserve order and defend life and property, not to aim directly at
the improvement of society, but to secure the conditions in which
men may pursue their own legitimate aims. Most of the French
theorists believed in the possibility of moulding society
indefinitely by political action, and rested their hopes for the
future not only on the achievements of science, but on the
enlightened activity of governments. This difference of view tended
to give to the doctrine of Progress in France more practical
significance than in England.
But otherwise British soil was ready to receive the idea. There was
the same optimistic temper among the comfortable classes in both
countries. Shaftesbury, the Deist, had struck this note at the
beginning of the century by his sanguine theory, which was expressed
in Pope's banal phrase: "Whatever is, is right," and was worked into
a system by Hutcheson. This optimism penetrated into orthodox
circles. Progress, far from appearing as a rival of Providence, was
discussed in the interests of Christianity by the Scotch theologian,
Turnbull. [Footnote: The Principles of Modern Philosophy, 1740.]
2.
The theory of the indefinite progress of civilisation left Hume
cold. There is little ground, he argued, to suppose that "the world"
is eternal or incorruptible. It is probably mortal, and must
therefore, with all things in it, have its infancy, youth, manhood,
and old age; and man will share in these changes of state. We must
then expect that the human species should, when the world is in the
age of manhood, possess greater bodily and mental vigour, longer
life, and a stronger inclination and power of generation. But it is
impossible to determine when this stage is reached. For the gradual
revolutions are too slow to be discernible in the short period known
to us by history and tradition. Physically and in mental powers men
have been pretty much the same in all known ages. The sciences and
arts have flourished now and have again decayed, but when they
reached the highest perfection among one people, the neighbouring
peoples were perhaps wholly unacquainted with them. We are therefore
uncertain whether at present man is advancing to his point of
perfection or declining from it. [Footnote: Essay on the
Populousness of Ancient Nations, ad init. ]
The argument is somewhat surprising in an eighteenth century thinker
like Hume, but it did not prevent him from recognising the
superiority of modern to ancient civilisation. This superiority
forms indeed the minor premiss in the general argument by which he
confuted the commonly received opinion as to the populousness of
ancient nations. He insisted on the improvements in art and
industry, on the greater liberty and security enjoyed by modern men.
"To one who considers coolly on the subject," he remarked, "it will
appear that human nature in general really enjoys more liberty at
present in the most arbitrary government of Europe than it ever did
during the most flourishing period of ancient times." [Footnote: The
justification of this statement was the abolition of slavery in
Europe.]
He discussed many of the problems of civilisation, especially the
conditions in which the arts and sciences flourish, [Footnote: Essay
on the Rise of Arts and Sciences.] and drew some general
conclusions, but he was too sceptical to suppose that any general
synthesis of history is possible, or that any considerable change
for the better in the manners of mankind is likely to occur.
[Footnote: Cf. Essay on the Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth, ad
init.]
The greatest work dealing with social problems, that Britain
produced in the eighteenth century, was Adam Smith's Wealth of
Nations, and his luminous exposition of the effects of the division
of labour was the most considerable contribution made by British
thinkers of the age to the study of human development. It is much
more than a treatise on economic principles; it contains a history
of the gradual economic progress of human society, and it suggests
the expectation of an indefinite augmentation of wealth and well-
being. Smith was entirely at one with the French Economists on the
value of opulence for the civilisation and happiness of mankind. But
it was indirectly perhaps that his work contributed most effectively
to the doctrine of the Progress of collective mankind. [Footnote: It
has been observed by Mr. Leslie Stephen that the doctrine of the
rights of man lies in the background of Adam Smith's speculations.]
His teaching that the free commercial intercourse of all the peoples
of the world, unfettered by government policies, was to the greatest
advantage of each, presented an ideal of the economic "solidarity"
of the race, which was one element in the ideal of Progress. And
this principle soon began to affect practice. Pitt assimilated it
when he was a young man, and it is one of the distinctions of his
statesmanship that he endeavoured to apply the doctrines of his
master so far as the prevailing prejudices would allow him.
3.
A few writers of less weight and fame than Hume or Smith expressly
studied history in the light of Progress. It would not help us, in
following the growth of the idea, to analyse the works of Ferguson,
Dunbar, or Priestley. [Footnote: In his Essay on the History of
Civil Society Adam Ferguson treated the growth of civilisation as
due to the progressive nature of man, which insists on carrying him
forward to limits impossible to ascertain. He formulated the process
as a movement from simplicity to complexity, but contributed little
to its explanation.] But I will quote one passage from Priestley,
the most eminent of the three, and the most enthusiastic for the
Progress of man. As the division of labour--the chief principle of
organised society--is carried further he anticipates that
... nature, including both its materials and its laws, will be more
at our command; men will make their situation in this world
abundantly more easy and comfortable; they will probably prolong
their existence in it and will grow daily more happy. ... Thus,
whatever was the beginning of this world, the end will be glorious
and paradisiacal beyond what our imaginations can now conceive.
Extravagant as some people may suppose these views to be, I think I
could show them to be fairly suggested by the true theory of human
nature and to arise from the natural course of human affairs.
[Footnote: This passage of Priestley occurs in his Essay on the
First Principles of Government and on the Nature of Political,
Civil, and Religious Liberty (1768, 2nd ed. 1771), pp. 2-4. His
Lectures on History and General Policy appeared in 1788.
Priestley was a strict utilitarian, who held that there is nothing
intrinsically excellent in justice and veracity apart from their
relation to happiness. The degree of public happiness is measured by
the excellence of religion, science, government, laws, arts,
commerce, conveniences of life, and especially by the degrees of
personal security and personal liberty. In all these the ancients
were inferior, and therefore they enjoyed less happiness. The
present state of Europe is vastly preferable to what it was in any
former period. And "the plan of this divine drama is opening more
and more." In the future, Knowledge will increase and accumulate and
diffuse itself to the lower ranks of society, who, by degrees, will
find leisure for speculation; and looking beyond their immediate
employment, they will consider the complex machine of society, and
in time understand it better than those who now write about it.
See his Lectures, pp. 371, 388 sqq., 528-53.
The English thinker did not share all the views of his French
masters. As a Unitarian, he regarded Christianity as a "great remedy
of vice and ignorance," part of the divine plan; and he ascribed to
government a lesser role than they in the improvement of humanity.
He held, for instance, that the state should not interfere in
education, arguing that this art was still in the experimental
stage, and that the intervention of the civil power might stereotype
a bad system.
Not less significant, though less influential, than the writings of
Priestley and Ferguson was the work of James Dunbar, Professor of
Philosophy at Aberdeen, entitled Essays on the History of Mankind in
Rude and Cultivated Ages (2nd ed., 1781). He conceived history as
progressive, and inquired into the general causes which determine
the gradual improvements of civilisation. He dealt at length with
the effects of climate and local circumstances, but unlike the
French philosophers did not ignore heredity. While he did not enter
upon any discussion of future developments, he threw out
incidentally the idea that the world may be united in a league of
nations.
Posterity, he wrote, "may contemplate, from a concurrence of various
causes and events, some of which are hastening into light, the
greater part, or even the whole habitable globe, divided among
nations free and independent in all the interior functions of
government, forming one political and commercial system" (p. 287).
Dunbar's was an optimistic book, but his optimism was more cautious
than Priestley's. These are his final words:
If human nature is liable to degenerate, it is capable of
proportionable improvement from the collected wisdom of ages. It is
pleasant to infer from the actual progress of society, the glorious
possibilities of human excellence. And, if the principles can be
assembled into view, which most directly tend to diversify the
genius and character of nations, some theory may be raised on these
foundations that shall account more systematically for past
occurrences and afford some openings and anticipations into the
eventual history of the world.]
The problem of dark ages, which an advocate of Progress must
explain, was waved away by Priestley in his Lectures on History with
the observation that they help the subsequent advance of knowledge
by "breaking the progress of authority." [Footnote: This was
doubtless suggested to him by some remarks of Hume in The Rise of
Arts and Sciences.] This is not much of a plea for such periods
viewed as machinery in a Providential plan. The great history of the
Middle Ages, which in the words of its author describes "the triumph
of barbarism and religion," had been completed before Priestley's
Lectures appeared, and it is remarkable that he takes no account of
it, though it might seem to be a work with which a theory of
Progress must come to terms.
Yet the sceptical historian of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, who was more at home in French literature than any of his
fellow-countrymen, was not opposed to the theory of Progress, and he
even states it in a moderate form. Having given reasons for
believing that civilised society will never again be threatened by
such an irruption of barbarians as that which oppressed the arms and
institutions of Rome, he allows us to "acquiesce in the pleasing
conclusion that every age of the world has increased, and still
increases, the real wealth, the happiness, the knowledge and perhaps
the virtue of the human race."
"The discoveries of ancient and modern navigators, and the domestic
history or tradition of the most enlightened nations, represent the
HUMAN SAVAGE, naked both in mind and body, and destitute of laws, of
arts, of ideas, and almost of language. From this abject condition,
perhaps the primitive and universal state of man, he has gradually
arisen to command the animals, to fertilise the earth, to traverse
the ocean, and to measure the heavens. His progress in the
improvement and exercise of his mental and corporeal faculties has
been irregular and various, infinitely slow in the beginning, and
increasing by degrees with redoubled velocity; ages of laborious
ascent have been followed by a moment of rapid downfall; and the
several climates of the globe have felt the vicissitudes of light
and darkness. Yet the experience of four thousand years should
enlarge our hopes and diminish our apprehensions; we cannot
determine to what height the human species may aspire in their
advances towards perfection; but it may safely be presumed that no
people, unless the face of nature is changed, will relapse into
their original barbarism." [Footnote: Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, ch. xxxviii. ad fin.]
But Gibbon treats the whole subject as a speculation, and he treats
it without reference to any of the general principles on which
French thinkers had based their theory. He admits that his reasons
for holding that civilisation is secure against a barbarous
cataclysm may be considered fallacious; and he also contemplates the
eventuality that the fabric of sciences and arts, trade and
manufacture, law and policy, might be "decayed by time." If so, the
growth of civilisation would have to begin again, but not ab initio.
For "the more useful or at least more necessary arts," which do not
require superior talents or national subordination for their
exercise, and which war, commerce, and religious zeal have spread
among the savages of the world, would certainly survive.
These remarks are no more than obiter dicta but they show how the
doctrine of Progress was influencing those who were temperamentally
the least likely to subscribe to extravagant theories.
4.
The outbreak of the French Revolution evoked a sympathetic movement
among English progressive thinkers which occasioned the Government
no little alarm. The dissenting minister Dr. Richard Price, whose
Observations on Civil Liberty (1776), defending the action of the
American colonies, had enjoyed an immense success, preached the
sermon which provoked Burke to write his Reflections; and Priestley,
no less enthusiastic in welcoming the Revolution, replied to Burke.
The Government resorted to tyrannous measures; young men who
sympathised with the French movement and agitated for reforms at
home were sent to Botany Bay. Paine was prosecuted for his Rights of
Man, which directly preached revolution. But the most important
speculative work of the time, William Godwin's Political Justice,
escaped the censorship because it was not published at a popular
price. [Footnote: Godwin had helped to get Paine's book published in
1791, and he was intimate with the group of revolutionary spirits
who were persecuted by the Government. A good account of the episode
will be found in Brailsford's Shelley, Godwin, and their Circle.]
The Enquiry concerning Political Justice, begun in 1791, appeared in
1793. The second edition, three years later, shows the influence of
Condorcet's Sketch, which had appeared in the meantime. Godwin says
that his original idea was to produce a work on political science to
supersede Montesquieu. The note of Montesquieu's political
philosophy was respect for social institutions. Godwin's principle
was that social institutions are entirely pernicious, that they
perpetuate harmful prejudices, and are an almost insuperable
obstacle to improvement. If he particularly denounced monarchical
government, he regarded all government as evil, and held that social
progress would consist, not in the reformation of government, but in
its abolition. While he recognised that man had progressed in the
past, he considered history mainly a sequence of horrors, and he was
incapable of a calm survey of the course of civilisation. In English
institutions he saw nothing that did not outrage the principles of
justice and benevolence. The present state of humanity is about as
bad as it could be.
It is easy to see the deep influence which the teaching of Rousseau
exercised on Godwin. Without accepting the theory of Arcadia Godwin
followed him in unsparing condemnation of existing conditions.
Rousseau and Godwin are the two great champions in the eighteenth
century of the toiling and suffering masses. But Godwin drew the
logical conclusion from Rousseau's premisses which Rousseau
hesitated to draw himself. The French thinker, while he extolled the
anarchical state of uncivilised society, and denounced government as
one of the sources of its corruption, nevertheless sought the remedy
in new social and political institutions. Godwin said boldly,
government is the evil; government must go. Humanity can never be
happy until all political authority and social institutions
disappear.
Now the peculiarity of Godwin's position as a doctrinaire of
Progress lies in the fact that he entertained the same pessimistic
view of some important sides of civilisation as Rousseau, and at the
same time adopted the theories of Rousseau's opponents, especially
Helvetius. His survey of human conditions seems to lead inevitably
to pessimism; then he turns round and proclaims the doctrine of
perfectibility.
The explanation of this argument was the psychological theory of
Helvetius. He taught, as we saw, and Godwin developed the view in
his own way, that the natures and characters of men are moulded
entirely by their environment--not physical, but intellectual and
moral environment, and therefore can be indefinitely modified. A man
is born into the world without innate tendencies. His conduct
depends on his opinions. Alter men's opinions and they will act
differently. Make their opinions conformable to justice and
benevolence, and you will have a just and benevolent society.
Virtue, as Socrates taught, is simply a question of knowledge. The
situation, therefore, is not hopeless. For it is not due to the
radical nature of man; it is caused by ignorance and prejudice, by
governments and institutions, by kings and priests. Transform the
ideas of men, and society will be transformed. The French
philosopher considered that a reformed system of educating children
would be one of the most powerful means for promoting progress and
bringing about the reign of reason; and Condorcet worked out a
scheme of universal state education. This was entirely opposed to
Godwin's principles. State schools would only be another instrument
of power in the hands of a government, worse even than a state
Church. They would strengthen the poisonous influence of kings and
statesmen, and establish instead of abolishing prejudices. He seems
to have relied entirely on the private efforts of enlightened
thinkers to effect a gradual conversion of public opinion.
In his study of the perfectibility of man and the prospect of a
future reign of general justice and benevolence, Godwin was even
more visionary than Condorcet, as in his political views he was more
radical than the Revolutionists. Condorcet had at least sought to
connect his picture of the future with a reasoned survey of the
past, and to find a chain of connection, but the perfectibility of
Godwin hung in the air, supported only by an abstract theory of the
nature of man.
It can hardly be said that he contributed anything to the
theoretical problem of civilisation. His significance is that he
proclaimed in England at an opportune moment, and in a more
impressive and startling way than a sober apostle like Priestley,
the creed of progress taught by French philosophers, though
considerably modified by his own anarchical opinions.
5.
Perfectibility, as expounded by Condorcet and Godwin, encountered a
drastic criticism from Malthus, whose Essay on the Principle of
Population appeared in its first form anonymously in 1798. Condorcet
had foreseen an objection which might be raised as fatal to the
realisation of his future state. Will not the progress of industry
and happiness cause a steady increase in population, and must not
the time come when the number of the inhabitants of the globe will
surpass their means of subsistence? Condorcet did not grapple with
this question. He contented himself with saying that such a period
must be very far away, and that by then "the human race will have
achieved improvements of which we can now scarcely form an idea."
Similarly Godwin, in his fancy picture of the future happiness of
mankind, notices the difficulty and shirks it. "Three-fourths of the
habitable globe are now uncultivated. The parts already cultivated
are capable of immeasurable improvement. Myriads of centuries of
still increasing population may pass away and the earth be still
found sufficient for the subsistence of its inhabitants."
Malthus argued that these writers laboured under an illusion as to
the actual relations between population and the means of
subsistence. In present conditions the numbers of the race are only
kept from increasing far beyond the means of subsistence by vice,
misery, and the fear of misery. [Footnote: This observation had been
made (as Hazlitt pointed out) before Malthus by Robert Wallace (see
A Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind, p. 13, 1753). It was
another book of Wallace that suggested the difficulty to Godwin.] In
the conditions imagined by Condorcet and Godwin these checks are
removed, and consequently the population would increase with great
rapidity, doubling itself at least in twenty-five years. But the
products of the earth increase only in an arithmetical progression,
and in fifty years the food supply would be too small for the
demand. Thus the oscillation between numbers and food supply would
recur, and the happiness of the species would come to an end.
Godwin and his adherents could reply that one of the checks on over-
population is prudential restraint, which Malthus himself
recognised, and that this would come more extensively into operation
with that progress of enlightenment which their theory assumed.
[Footnote: This is urged by Hazlitt in his criticism of Malthus in
the Spirit of the Age.] But the criticisms of Malthus dealt a
trenchant blow to the doctrine that human reason, acting through
legislation and government, has a virtually indefinite power of
modifying the condition of society. The difficulty, which he stated
so vividly and definitely, was well calculated to discredit the
doctrine, and to suggest that the development of society could be
modified by the conscious efforts of man only within restricted
limits. [Footnote: The recent conclusions of Mr. Knibbs,
statistician to the Commonwealth of Australia, in vol. i. of his
Appendix to the Census of the Commonwealth, have an interest in this
connection. I quote from an article in the Times of August 5, 1918:
"An eminent geographer, the late Mr. E. G. Ravenstein, some years
ago, when the population of the earth was estimated at 1400 million,
foretold that about the middle of this century population would have
reached a limit beyond which increase would be disastrous. Mr.
Knibbs is not so pessimistic and is much more precise; though he
defers the disastrous culmination, he has no doubt as to its
inevitability. The limits of human expansion, he assures us, are
much nearer than popular opinion imagines; the difficulty of food
supplies will soon be most grave; the exhaustion of sources of
energy necessary for any notable increase of population, or advance
in the standards of living, or both combined, is perilously near.
The present rate of increase in the world's population cannot
continue for four centuries."]
6.
The Essay of Malthus afterwards became one of the sacred books of
the Utilitarian sect, and it is interesting to notice what Bentham
himself thought of perfectibility. Referring to the optimistic views
of Chastellux and Priestley on progressive amelioration he observed
that "these glorious expectations remind us of the golden age of
poetry." For perfect happiness "belongs to the imaginary region of
philosophy and must be classed with the universal elixir and the
philosopher's stone." There will always be jealousies through the
unequal gifts of nature and of fortune; interests will never cease
to clash and hatred to ensue; "painful labour, daily subjection, a
condition nearly allied to indigence, will always be the lot of
numbers"; in art and poetry the sources of novelty will probably be
exhausted. But Bentham was far from being a pessimist. Though he
believes that "we shall never make this world the abode of
happiness," he asserts that it may be made a most delightful garden
"compared with the savage forest in which men so long have
wandered." [Footnote: Works, vol. i. p. 193 seq.]
7.
The book of Malthus was welcomed at the moment by all those who had
been thoroughly frightened by the French Revolution and saw in the
"modern philosophy," as it was called, a serious danger to society.
[Footnote: Both Hazlitt and Shelley thought that Malthus was playing
to the boxes, by sophisms "calculated to lull the oppressors of
mankind into a security of everlasting triumph" (Revolt of Islam,
Preface). Bentham refers in his Book of Fallacies (Works, ii. p.
462) to the unpopularity of the views of Priestley, Godwin, and
Condorcet: "to aim at perfection has been pronounced to be utter
folly or wickedness."] Vice and misery and the inexorable laws of
population were a godsend to rescue the state from "the precipice of
perfectibility." We can understand the alarm occasioned to believers
in the established constitution of things, for Godwin's work--now
virtually forgotten, while Malthus is still appealed to as a
discoverer in social science--produced an immense effect on
impressionable minds at the time. All who prized liberty,
sympathised with the downtrodden, and were capable of falling in
love with social ideals, hailed Godwin as an evangelist. "No one,"
said a contemporary, "was more talked of, more looked up to, more
sought after; and wherever liberty, truth, justice was the theme,
his name was not far off." Young graduates left the Universities to
throw themselves at the feet of the new Gamaliel; students of law
and medicine neglected their professional studies to dream of "the
renovation of society and the march of mind." Godwin carried with
him "all the most sanguine and fearless understandings of the time."
[Footnote: Hazlitt, Spirit of the Age: article on Godwin (written in
1814).]
The most famous of his disciples were the poets Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Southey, and afterwards Shelley. Wordsworth had been an
ardent sympathiser with the French Revolution. In its early days he
had visited Paris:
An emporium then
Of golden expectations and receiving
Freights every day from a new world of hope.
He became a Godwinian in 1795, when the Terror had destroyed his
faith in Revolutionary France. Southey, who had come under the
influence of Rousseau, was initiated by Coleridge into Godwin's
theories, and in their utopian enthusiasm they formed the design of
founding a "pantisocratic" settlement in America, to show how
happiness could be realised in a social environment in which duty
and interest coincide and consequently all are virtuous. The plan
anticipated the experiments of Owen and Cabet; but the pantisocrats
did not experience the disappointments of the socialists, for it was
never carried out. Coleridge and Southey as well as Wordsworth soon
abandoned their Godwinian doctrines. [Footnote: In letters of 1797
and 1798 Coleridge repudiated the French doctrines and Godwin's
philosophy. See Cestre, La Revolution francaise et les poetes
anglais (1789-1809), pp. 389, 414.] They had, to use a phrase of
Hazlitt, lost their way in Utopia, and they gave up the abstract and
mechanical view of society which the French philosophy of the
eighteenth century taught, for an organic conception in which
historic sentiment and the wisdom of our ancestors had their due
place. Wordsworth could presently look back and criticise his
Godwinian phase as that of
A proud and most presumptuous confidence
In the transcendent wisdom of the age
And its discernment. [Footnote: Excursion, Book ii.]
He and Southey became conservative pillars of the state. Yet
Southey, reactionary as he was in politics, never ceased to believe
in social Progress. [Footnote: See his Colloquies; and Shelley,
writing in 1811, says that Southey "looks forward to a state when
all shall be perfected and matter become subjected to the
omnipotence of mind" (Dowden, Life of Shelley, i. p. 212). Compare
below, p. 325.] Amelioration was indeed to be effected by slow and
cautious reforms, with the aid of the Church, but the intellectual
aberrations of his youth had left an abiding impression.
While these poets were sitting at Godwin's feet, Shelley was still a
child. But he came across Political Justice at Eton; in his later
life he reread it almost every year; and when he married Godwin's
daughter he was more Godwinian than Godwin himself. Hazlitt, writing
in 1814, says that Godwin's reputation had "sunk below the horizon,"
but Shelley never ceased to believe in his theory, though he came to
see that the regeneration of man would be a much slower process than
he had at first imagined. In the immature poem Queen Mab the
philosophy of Godwin was behind his description of the future, and
it was behind the longer and more ambitious poems of his maturer
years. The city of gold, of the Revolt of Islam, is Godwin's future
society, and he describes that poem as "an experiment on the temper
of the public mind as to how far a thirst for a happier condition of
moral and political society survives, among the enlightened and
refined, the tempests which have shaken the age in which we live."
As to Prometheus Unbound his biographer observes: [Footnote: Dowden,
ib. ii. p. 264. Elsewhere Dowden remarks on the singular
insensibility of Shelley's mind "to the wisdom or sentiment of
history" (i. p. 55).]
All the glittering fallacies of "Political Justice"--now
sufficiently tarnished--together with all its encouraging and
stimulating truths, may be found in the caput mortuum left when the
critic has reduced the poetry of the "Prometheus" to a series of
doctrinaire statements.
The same dream inspired the final chorus of Hellas. Shelley was the
poet of perfectibility.
8.
The attraction of perfectibility reached beyond the ranks of men of
letters, and in Robert Owen, the benevolent millowner of Lanark, it
had an apostle who based upon it a very different theory from that
of Political Justice and became one of the founders of modern
socialism.
The success of the idea of Progress has been promoted by its
association with socialism. [Footnote: The word was independently
invented in England and France. An article in the Poor Man's
Guardian (a periodical edited by H. Hetherington, afterwards by
Bronterre O'Brien), Aug. 24, 1833, is signed "A Socialist"; and in
1834 socialisme is opposed to individualism by P. Leroux in an
article in the Revue Encyclopedique. The word is used in the New
Moral World, and from 1836 was applied to the Owenites. See
Dolleans, Robert Owen (1907), p. 305.] The first phase of socialism,
what has been called its sentimental phase, was originated by Saint-
Simon in France and Owen in England at about the same time; Marx was
to bring it down from the clouds and make it a force in practical
politics. But both in its earlier and in its later forms the
economical doctrines rest upon a theory of society depending on the
assumption, however disguised, that social institutions have been
solely responsible for the vice and misery which exist, and that
institutions and laws can be so changed as to abolish misery and
vice. That is pure eighteenth century doctrine; and it passed from
the revolutionary doctrinaires of that period to the constructive
socialists of the nineteenth century.
Owen learned it probably from Godwin, and he did not disguise it.
His numerous works enforce it ad nauseam. He began the propagation
of his gospel by his "New View of Society, or Essays on the
formation of the human character, preparatory to the development of
a plan for gradually ameliorating the condition of mankind," which
he dedicated to the Prince Regent. [Footnote: 3rd ed. 1817. The
Essays had appeared separately in 1813-14.] Here he lays down that
"any general character, from the best to the worst, may be given to
any community, even to the world at large, by the application of
proper means; which means are to a great extent at the command and
under the control of those who have influence in the affairs of
men." [Footnote: P. 19.] The string on which he continually harps is
that it is the cardinal error in government to suppose that men are
responsible for their vices and virtues, and therefore for their
actions and characters. These result from education and
institutions, and can be transformed automatically by transforming
those agencies. Owen founded several short-lived journals to diffuse
his theories. The first number of the New Moral World (1834-36)
[Footnote: This was not a journal, but a series of pamphlets which
appeared in 1836-1844. Other publications of Owen were: Outline of
the Rational System of Society (6th ed., Leeds, 1840); The
Revolution in the Mind and Practice of the Human Race, or the coming
change from Irrationality to Rationality (1849); The Future of the
Human Race, or a great, glorious and peaceful Revolution, near at
hand, to be effected through the agency of departed spirits of good
and superior men and women (1853); The New Existence of Man upon
Earth, Parts i.-viii., 1854-55.] proclaimed the approach of an ideal
society in which there will be no ignorance, no poverty, and no
charity--a system "which will ensure the happiness of the human race
throughout all future ages," to replace one "which, so long as it
shall be maintained, must produce misery to all." His own
experimental attempt to found such a society on a miniature scale in
America proved a ludicrous failure.
It is to be observed that in these socialist theories the conception
of Progress as indefinite tends to vanish or to lose its
significance. If the millennium can be brought about at a stroke by
a certain arrangement of society, the goal of development is
achieved; we shall have reached the term, and shall have only to
live in and enjoy the ideal state--a menagerie of happy men. There
will be room for further, perhaps indefinite, advance in knowledge,
but civilisation in its social character becomes stable and rigid.
Once man's needs are perfectly satisfied in a harmonious environment
there is no stimulus to cause further changes, and the dynamic
character of history disappears.
Theories of Progress are thus differentiating into two distinct
types, corresponding to two radically opposed political theories and
appealing to two antagonistic temperaments. The one type is that of
constructive idealists and socialists, who can name all the streets
and towers of "the city of gold," which they imagine as situated
just round a promontory. The development of man is a closed system;
its term is known and is within reach. The other type is that of
those who, surveying the gradual ascent of man, believe that by the
same interplay of forces which have conducted him so far and by a
further development of the liberty which he has fought to win, he
will move slowly towards conditions of increasing harmony and
happiness. Here the development is indefinite; its term is unknown,
and lies in the remote future. Individual liberty is the motive
force, and the corresponding political theory is liberalism; whereas
the first doctrine naturally leads to a symmetrical system in which
the authority of the state is preponderant, and the individual has
little more value than a cog in a well-oiled wheel: his place is
assigned; it is not his right to go his own way. Of this type the
principal example that is not socialistic is, as we shall see, the
philosophy of Comte.
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