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