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The Idea of Progress, An inguiry into its origin and growth

J.B. Bury

Section 16 of 21 - Table of Contents
CHAPTER XIV

CURRENTS OF THOUGHT IN FRANCE AFTER THE REVOLUTION

1.

The failure of the Revolution to fulfil the visionary hopes which
had dazzled France for a brief period--a failure intensified by the
horrors that had attended the experiment--was followed by a reaction
against the philosophical doctrines and tendencies which had
inspired its leaders. Forces, which the eighteenth century had
underrated or endeavoured to suppress, emerged in a new shape, and
it seemed for a while as if the new century might definitely turn
its back on its predecessor. There was an intellectual
rehabilitation of Catholicism, which will always be associated with
the names of four thinkers of exceptional talent, Chateaubriand, De
Maistre, Bonald, and Lamennais.

But the outstanding fame of these great reactionaries must not
mislead us into exaggerating the reach of this reaction. The spirit
and tendencies of the past century still persisted in the circles
which were most permanently influential. Many eminent savants who
had been imbued with the ideas of Condillac and Helvetius, and had
taken part in the Revolution and survived it, were active under the
Empire and the restored Monarchy, still true to the spirit of their
masters, and commanding influence by the value of their scientific
work. M. Picavet's laborious researches into the activities of this
school of thinkers has helped us to understand the transition from
the age of Condorcet to the age of Comte. The two central figures
are Cabanis, the friend of Condorcet, [Footnote: He has already
claimed our notice, above, p. 215.] and Destutt de Tracy. M. Picavet
has grouped around them, along with many obscurer names, the great
scientific men of the time, like Laplace, Bichat, Lamarck, as all in
the direct line of eighteenth century thought. "Ideologists" he
calls them. [Footnote: Ideology is now sometimes used to convey a
criticism; for instance, to contrast the methods of Lamarck with
those of Darwin.] Ideology, the science of ideas, was the word
invented by de Tracy to distinguish the investigation of thought in
accordance with the methods of Locke and Condillac from old-
fashioned metaphysics. The guiding principle of the ideologists was
to apply reason to observed facts and eschew a priori deductions.
Thinkers of this school had an influential organ, the Decade
philosophique, of which J. B. Say the economist was one of the
founders in 1794. The Institut, which had been established by the
Convention, was crowded with "ideologists," and may be said to have
continued the work of the Encyclopaedia. [Footnote: Picavet, op.
cit. p. 69. The members of the 2nd Class of the Institut, that of
moral and political science, were so predominantly Ideological that
the distrust of Napoleon was excited, and he abolished it in 1803,
distributing its members among the other Classes.] These men had a
firm faith in the indefinite progress of knowledge, general
enlightenment, and "social reason."

2.

Thus the ideas of the "sophists" of the age of Voltaire were alive
in the speculative world, not withstanding political, religious, and
philosophical reaction. But their limitations were to be
transcended, and account taken of facts and aspects which their
philosophy had ignored or minimised. The value of the reactionary
movement lay in pressing these facts and aspects on the attention,
in reopening chambers of the human spirit which the age of Voltaire
had locked and sealed.

The idea of Progress was particularly concerned in the general
change of attitude, intellectual and emotional, towards the Middle
Ages. A fresh interest in the great age of the Church was a natural
part of the religious revival, but extended far beyond the circle of
ardent Catholics. It was a characteristic feature, as every one
knows, of the Romantic movement. It did not affect only creative
literature, it occupied speculative thinkers and stimulated
historians. For Guizot, Michelet, and Auguste Comte, as well as for
Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo, the Middle Ages have a significance
which Frenchmen of the previous generation could hardly have
comprehended.

We saw how that period had embarrassed the first pioneers who
attempted to trace the course of civilisation as a progressive
movement, how lightly they passed over it, how unconvincingly they
explained it away. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the
medieval question was posed in such a way that any one who undertook
to develop the doctrine of Progress would have to explore it more
seriously. Madame de Stael saw this when she wrote her book on
Literature considered in its Relation to Social Institutions (1801).
She was then under the influence of Condorcet and an ardent believer
in perfectibility, and the work is an attempt to extend this theory,
which she testifies was falling into discredit, to the realm of
literature. She saw that, if man regressed instead of progressing
for ten centuries, the case for Progress was gravely compromised,
and she sought to show that the Middle Ages contributed to the
development of the intellectual faculties and to the expansion of
civilisation, and that the Christian religion was an indispensable
agent. This contention that Progress was uninterrupted is an advance
on Condorcet and an anticipation of Saint-Simon and Comte.

A more eloquent and persuasive voice was raised in the following
year from the ranks of reaction. Chateaubriand's Genie du
Christianisme appeared in 1802, "amidst the ruins of our temples,"
as the author afterwards said, when France was issuing from the
chaos of her revolution. It was a declaration of war against the
spirit of the eighteenth century which had treated Christianity as a
barbarous system whose fall was demanded in the name of Progress.
But it was much more than polemic. Chateaubriand arrayed arguments
in support of orthodox dogmas, original sin, primitive degeneration,
and the rest; but the appeal of the book did not lie in its logic,
it lay in the appreciation of Christianity from a new point of view.
He approached it in the spirit of an artist, as an aesthete, not as
a philosopher, and so far as he proved anything he proved that
Christianity is valuable because it is beautiful, not because it is
true. He aimed at showing that it can "enchanter l'ame aussi
divinement que les dieux de Virgile et d'Homere." He might call to
his help the Fathers of the Church, but it was on Dante, Milton,
Racine that his case was really based. The book is an apologia, from
the aesthetic standpoint of the Romantic school. "Dieu ne defend pas
les routes fleuries quand elles servent a revenir a lui."

It was a matter of course that the defender of original sin should
reject the doctrine of perfectibility. "When man attains the highest
point of civilisation," wrote Chateaubriand in the vein of Rousseau,
"he is on the lowest stair of morality; if he is free, he is rude;
by civilising his manners, he forges himself chains. His heart
profits at the expense of his head, his head at the expense of his
heart." And, apart from considerations of Christian doctrine, the
question of Progress had little interest for the Romantic school.
Victor Hugo, in the famous Preface to his Cromwell (1827), where he
went more deeply than Chateaubriand into the contrasts between
ancient and modern art, revived the old likeness of mankind to an
individual man, and declared that classical antiquity was the time
of its virility and that we are now spectators of its imposing old
age.

From other points of view powerful intellects were reverting to the
Middle Ages and eager to blot out the whole development of modern
society since the Reformation, as the Encyclopaedic philosophers had
wished to blot out the Middle Ages. The ideal of Bonald, De Maistre,
and Lamennais was a sacerdotal government of the world, and the
English constitution was hardly less offensive to their minds than
the Revolution which De Maistre denounced as "satanic." Advocates as
they were of the dead system of theocracy, they contributed,
however, to the advance of thought, not only by forcing medieval
institutions on the notice of the world but also by their perception
that society had been treated in the eighteenth century in too
mechanical a way, that institutions grow, that the conception of
individual men divested of their life in society is a misleading
abstraction. They put this in extravagant and untenable forms, but
there was a large measure of truth in their criticism, which did its
part in helping the nineteenth century to revise and transcend the
results of eighteenth century speculation.

In this reactionary literature we can see the struggle of the
doctrine of Providence, declining before the doctrine of Progress,
to gain the upper-hand again. Chateaubriand, Bonald, De Maistre,
Lamennais firmly held the dogma of an original golden age and the
degradation of man, and denounced the whole trend of progressive
thought from Bacon to Condorcet. These writers were unconsciously
helping Condorcet's doctrine to assume a new and less questionable
shape. [Footnote: Bonald indeed in his treatise De pouvoir adopted
the idea of development and applied it to religion (as Newman did
afterwards) for the purpose of condemning the Reformation as a
retrograde movement.]

3.

Along with the discovery of the Middle Ages came the discovery of
German literature. In the intellectual commerce between the two
countries in the age of Frederick the Great, France had been
exclusively the giver, Germany the recipient. It was due, above all,
to Madame de Stael that the tide began to flow the other way. Among
the writers of the Napoleonic epoch, Madame de Stael is easily first
in critical talent and intellectual breadth. Her study of the
Revolution showed a more dispassionate appreciation of that
convulsion than any of her contemporaries were capable of forming.
But her chef-d'oeuvre is her study of Germany, De l'Allemagne,
[Footnote: A.D. 1813.] which revealed the existence of a world of
art and thought, unsuspected by the French public. Within the next
twenty years Herder and Lessing, Kant and Hegel were exerting their
influence at Paris. She did in France what Coleridge was doing in
England for the knowledge of German thought.

Madame de Stael had raised anew the question which had been raised
in the seventeenth century and answered in the negative by Voltaire:
is there progress in aesthetic literature? Her early book on
Literature had clearly defined the issue. She did not propose the
thesis that there is any progress or improvement (as some of the
Moderns had contended in the famous Quarrel) in artistic form.
Within the limits of their own thought and emotional experience the
ancients achieved perfection of expression, and perfection cannot be
surpassed. But as thought progresses, as the sum of ideas increases
and society changes, fresh material is supplied to art, there is "a
new development of sensibility" which enables literary artists to
compass new kinds of charm. The Genie du Christianisme embodied a
commentary on her contention, more arresting than any she could
herself have furnished. Here the reactionary joined hands with the
disciple of Condorcet, to prove that there is progress in the domain
of art. Madame de Stael's masterpiece, Germany, was a further
impressive illustration of the thesis that the literature of the
modern European nations represents an advance on classical
literature, in the sense that it sounds notes which the Greek and
Roman masters had not heard, reaches depths which they had not
conjectured, unlocks chambers which to them were closed,--as a
result of the progressive experiences of the human soul. [Footnote:
German literature was indeed already known, in some measure, to
readers of the Decade philosophique, and Kant had been studied in
France long before 1813, the year of the publication of De
l'Allemagne. See Picavet, Les Ideologues, p. 99.] [Footnote: We can
see the effect of her doctrine in Guizot's remarks (Histoire de la
civilisation en Europe, 2e lecon) where he says of modern
literatures that "sous le point de vue du fond des sentiments et des
idees elles sont plus fortes et plus riches [than the ancient]. On
voit que l'ame humaine a ete remuee sur un plus grand nombre de
points a une plus grande profondeur"--and to this very fact he
ascribes their comparative imperfection in form.]

This view is based on the general propositions that all social
phenomena closely cohere and that literature is a social phenomenon;
from which it follows that if there is a progressive movement in
society generally, there is a progressive movement in literature.
Her books were true to the theory; they inaugurated the methods of
modern criticism, which studies literary works in relation to the
social background of their period.

4.

France, then, under the Bourbon Restoration began to seek new light
from the obscure profundities of German speculation which Madame de
Stael proclaimed. Herder's "Ideas" were translated by Edgar Quinet,
Lessing's Education by Eugene Rodrigues. Cousin sat at the feet of
Hegel. At the same time a new master, full of suggestiveness for
those who were interested in the philosophy of history, was
discovered in Italy. The "Scienza nuova" of Vico was translated by
Michelet.

The book of Vico was now a hundred years old. I did not mention him
in his chronological place, because he exercised no immediate
influence on the world. His thought was an anachronism in the
eighteenth century, it appealed to the nineteenth. He did not
announce or conceive any theory of Progress, but his speculation,
bewildering enough and confused in its exposition, contained
principles which seemed predestined to form the basis of such a
doctrine. His aim was that of Cabanis and the ideologists, to set
the study of society on the same basis of certitude which had been
secured for the study of nature through the work of Descartes and
Newton. [Footnote: Vico has sometimes been claimed as a theorist of
Progress, but incorrectly. See B. Croce, The Philosophy of
Giambattista Vico (Eng. tr., 1913), p. 132--an indispensable aid to
the study of Vico. The first edition of the Scienza nuova appeared
in 1725; the second, which was a new work, in 1730.

Vico influenced Ballanche, a writer who enjoyed a considerable
repute in his day. He taught the progressive development of man
towards liberty and equality within the four corners of the
Christian religion, which he regarded as final. His Palingenesie
sociale appeared in 1823-30.]

His fundamental idea was that the explanation of the history of
societies is to be found in the human mind. The world at first is
felt rather than thought; this is the condition of savages in the
state of nature, who have no political organisation. The second
mental state is imaginative knowledge, "poetical wisdom"; to this
corresponds the higher barbarism of the heroic age. Finally, comes
conceptual knowledge, and with it the age of civilisation. These are
the three stages through which every society passes, and each of
these types determines law, institutions, language, literature, and
the characters of men.

Vico's strenuous researches in the study of Homer and early Roman
history were undertaken in order to get at the point of view of the
heroic age. He insisted that it could not be understood unless we
transcended our own abstract ways of thinking and looked at the
world with primitive eyes, by a forced effort of imagination. He was
convinced that history had been vitiated by the habit of ignoring
psychological differences, by the failure to recapture the ancient
point of view. Here he was far in advance of his own times.

Concentrating his attention above all on Roman antiquity, he
adopted--not altogether advantageously for his system--the
revolutions of Roman history as the typical rule of social
development. The succession of aristocracy (for the early kingship
of Rome and Homeric royalty are merely forms of aristocracy in
Vico's view), democracy, and monarchy is the necessary sequence of
political governments. Monarchy (the Roman Empire) corresponds to
the highest form of civilisation. What happens when this is reached?
Society declines into an anarchical state of nature, from which it
again passes into a higher barbarism or heroic age, to be followed
once more by civilisation. The dissolution of the Roman Empire and
the barbarian invasions are followed by the Middle Ages, in which
Dante plays the part of Homer; and the modern period with its strong
monarchies corresponds to the Roman Empire. This is Vico's principle
of reflux. If the theory were sound, it would mean that the
civilisation of his day must again relapse into barbarism and the
cycle begin again. He did not himself state this conclusion directly
or venture on any prediction. It is obvious how readily his doctrine
could be adapted to the conception of Progress as a spiral movement.
Evidently the corresponding periods in his cycles are not identical
or really homogeneous. Whatever points of likeness may be discovered
between early Greek or Roman and medieval societies, the points of
unlikeness are still more numerous and manifest. Modern civilisation
differs in fundamental and far-reaching ways from Greek and Roman.
It is absurd to pretend that the general movement brings man back
again and again to the point from which he started, and therefore,
if there is any value in Vico's reflux, it can only mean that the
movement of society may be regarded as a spiral ascent, so that each
stage of an upward progress corresponds, in certain general aspects,
to a stage which has already been traversed, this correspondence
being due to the psychical nature of man.

A conception of this kind could not be appreciated in Vico's day or
by the next generation. The "Scienza nuova" lay in Montesquieu's
library, and he made no use of it. But it was natural that it should
arouse interest in France at a time when the new idealistic
philosophies of Germany were attracting attention, and when
Frenchmen, of the ideological school, were seeking, like Vico
himself, a synthetic principle to explain social phenomena.
Different though Vico was in his point of departure as in his
methods from the German idealists, his speculations nevertheless had
something in common with theirs. Both alike explained history by the
nature of mind which necessarily determined the stages of the
process; Vico as little as Fichte or Hegel took eudaemonic
considerations into account. The difference was that the German
thinkers sought their principle in logic and applied it a priori,
while Vico sought his in concrete psychology and engaged in
laborious research to establish it a posteriori by the actual data
of history. But both speculations suggested that the course of human
development corresponds to the fundamental character of mental
processes and is not diverted either by Providential intervention or
by free acts of human will.

5.

These foreign influences co-operated in determining the tendencies
of French speculation in the period of the restored monarchy,
whereby the idea of Progress was placed on new basements and became
the headstone of new "religions." Before we consider the founders of
sects, we may glance briefly at the views of some eminent savants
who had gained the ear of the public before the July Revolution--
Jouffroy, Cousin, and Guizot.

Cousin, the chief luminary in the sphere of pure philosophy in
France in the first half of the nineteenth century, drew his
inspiration from Germany. He was professedly an eclectic, but in the
main his philosophy was Hegelian. He might endow God with
consciousness and speak of Providence, but he regarded the world-
process as a necessary evolution of thought, and he saw, not in
religion but in philosophy, the highest expression of civilisation.
In 1828 he delivered a course of lectures on the philosophy of
history. He divided history into three periods, each governed by a
master idea: the first by the idea of the infinite (the Orient); the
second by that of the finite (classical antiquity); the third by
that of the relation of finite to infinite (the modern age). As with
Hegel, the future is ignored, progress is confined within a closed
system, the highest circle has already been reached. As an opponent
of the ideologists and the sensational philosophy on which they
founded their speculations, Cousin appealed to the orthodox and all
those to whom Voltairianism was an accursed thing, and for a
generation he exercised a considerable influence. But his work--and
this is the important point for us--helped to diffuse the idea,
which the ideologists were diffusing on very different lines--that
human history has been a progressive development.

Progressive development was also the theme of Jouffroy in his slight
but suggestive introduction to the philosophy of history (1825),
[Footnote: "Reflexions sur la philosophie de l'histoire," in
Melanges philosophiques, 2nd edition, 1838.] in which he posed the
same problem which, as we shall see, Saint-Simon and Comte were
simultaneously attempting to solve. He had not fallen under the
glamour of German idealism, and his results have more affinity with
Vico's than with Hegel's.

He begins with some simple considerations which conduct to the
doubtful conclusion that all the historical changes in man's
condition are due to the operation of his intelligence. The
historian's business is to trace the succession of the actual
changes. The business of the philosopher of history is to trace the
succession of ideas and study the correspondence between the two
developments. This is the true philosophy of history: "the glory of
our age is to understand it."

Now it is admitted to-day, he says, that the human intelligence
obeys invariable laws, so that a further problem remains. The actual
succession of ideas has to be deduced from these necessary laws.
When that deduction is effected--a long time hence--history will
disappear; it will be merged in science.

Jouffroy then presented the world with what he calls the FATALITY OF
INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT, to take the place of Providence or
Destiny. It is a fatality, he is careful to explain, which, so far
from compromising, presupposes individual liberty. For it is not
like the fatality of sensual impulse which guides the brute
creation. What it implies is this: if a thousand men have the same
idea of what is good, this idea will govern their conduct in spite
of their passions, because, being reasonable and free, they are not
blindly submissive to passion, but can deliberate and choose.

This explanation of history as a necessary development of society
corresponding to a necessary succession of ideas differs in two
important points from the explanations of Hegel and Cousin. The
succession of ideas is not conceived as a transcendent logic, but is
determined by the laws of the HUMAN mind and belongs to the domain
of psychology. Here Jouffroy is on the same ground as Vico. In the
second place, it is not a closed system; room remains for an
indefinite development in the future.

6.

While Cousin was discoursing on philosophy at Paris in the days of
the last Bourbon king, Guizot was drawing crowded audiences to his
lectures on the history of European civilisation, [Footnote:
Histoire de la civilisation en Europe.] and the keynote of these
lectures was Progress. He approached it with a fresh mind,
unencumbered with any of the philosophical theories which had
attended and helped its growth.

Civilisation, he said, is the supreme fact so far as man is
concerned, "the fact par excellence, the general and definite fact
in which all other facts merge." And "civilisation" means progress
or development. The word "awakens, when it is pronounced, the idea
of a people which is in motion, not to change its place but to
change its state, a people whose condition is expanding and
improving. The idea of progress, development, seems to me to be the
fundamental idea contained in the word CIVILISATION."

There we have the most important positive idea of eighteenth century
speculation, standing forth detached and independent, no longer
bound to a system. Fifty years before, no one would have dreamed of
defining civilisation like that and counting on the immediate
acquiescence of his audience. But progress has to be defined. It
does not merely imply the improvement of social relations and public
well-being. France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was
behind Holland and England in the sum and distribution of well-being
among individuals, and yet she can claim that she was the most
"civilised" country in those ages. The reason is that civilisation
also implies the development of the individual life, of men's
private faculties, sentiments, and ideas. The progress of man
therefore includes both these developments. But they are intimately
connected. We may observe how moral reformers generally recommend
their proposals by promising social amelioration as a result, and
that progressive politicians maintain that the progress of society
necessarily induces moral improvement. The connection may not always
be apparent, and at different times one or other kind of progress
predominates. But one is followed by the other ultimately, though it
may be after a long interval, for "la Providence a ses aises dans le
temps." The rise of Christianity was one of the crises of
civilisation, yet it did not in its early stages aim at any
improvement of social conditions; it did not attack the great
injustices which were wrought in the world. It meant a great crisis
because it changed the beliefs and sentiments of individuals; social
effects came afterwards.

The civilisation of modern Europe has grown through a period of
fifteen centuries and is still progressing. The rate of progress has
been slower than that of Greek civilisation, but on the other hand
it has been continuous, uninterrupted, and we can see "the vista of
an immense career."

The effects of Guizot's doctrine in propagating the idea of Progress
were all the greater for its divorce from philosophical theory. He
did not touch perplexing questions like fatality, or discuss the
general plan of the world; he did not attempt to rise above common-
sense; and he did not essay any premature scheme of the universal
history of man. His masterly survey of the social history of Europe
exhibited progressive movement as a fact, in a period in which to
the thinkers of the eighteenth century it had been almost invisible.
This of course was far from proving that Progress is the key to the
history of the world and human destinies. The equation of
civilisation with progress remains an assumption. For the question
at once arises: Can civilisation reach a state of equilibrium from
which no further advance is possible; and if it can, does it cease
to be civilisation? Is Chinese civilisation mis-called, or has there
been here too a progressive movement all the time, however slow?
Such questions were not raised by Guizot. But his view of history
was effective in helping to establish the association of the two
ideas of civilisation and progress, which to-day is taken for
granted as evidently true.

7.

The views of these eminent thinkers Cousin, Jouffroy, and Guizot
show that--quite apart from the doctrines of ideologists and of the
"positivists," Saint-Simon and Comte, of whom I have still to speak-
-there was a common trend in French thought in the Restoration
period towards the conception of history as a progressive movement.
Perhaps there is no better illustration of the infectiousness of
this conception than in the Historical Studies which Chateaubriand
gave to the world in 1831. He had learned much, from books as well
as from politics, since he wrote the GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY. He had
gained some acquaintance with German philosophy and with Vico. And
in this work of his advanced age he accepts the idea of Progress, so
far as it could be accepted by an orthodox son of the Church. He
believes that the advance of knowledge will lead to social progress,
and that society, if it seems sometimes to move backward, is always
really moving forward. Bossuet, for whom he had no word of criticism
thirty years before, he now convicts of "an imposing error." That
great man, he writes, "has confined historical events in a circle as
rigorous as his genius. He has imprisoned them in an inflexible
Christianity--a terrible hoop in which the human race would turn in
a sort of eternity, without progress or improvement." The admission
from such a quarter shows eloquently how the wind was setting.

The notions of development and continuity which were to control all
departments of historical study in the later nineteenth century were
at the same time being independently promoted by the young
historical school in Germany which is associated with the names of
Eichhorn, Savigny, and Niebuhr. Their view that laws and
institutions are a natural growth or the expression of a people's
mind, represents another departure from the ideas of the eighteenth
century. It was a repudiation of that "universal reason" which
desired to reform the world and its peoples indiscriminately without
taking any account of their national histories.
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