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

J.B. Bury

Section 18 of 21 - Table of Contents
CHAPTER XVI

THE SEARCH FOR A LAW OF PROGRESS: II. COMTE

1.

Auguste Comte did more than any preceding thinker to establish the
idea of Progress as a luminary which could not escape men's vision.
The brilliant suggestions of Saint-Simon, the writings of Bazard and
Enfantin, the vagaries of Fourier, might be dismissed as curious
rather than serious propositions, but the massive system wrought out
by Comte's speculative genius--his organic scheme of human
knowledge, his elaborate analysis of history, his new science of
sociology--was a great fact with which European thought was forced
to reckon. The soul of this system was Progress, and the most
important problem he set out to solve was the determination of its
laws.

His originality is not dimmed by the fact that he owed to Saint-
Simon more than he afterwards admitted or than his disciples have
been willing to allow. He collaborated with him for several years,
and at this time enthusiastically acknowledged the intellectual
stimulus he received from the elder savant. [Footnote: Comte
collaborated with Saint-Simon from 1818-1822. The final rupture came
in 1824. The question of their relations is cleared up by Weill
(Saint-Simon, chap. xi.). On the quarrel see also Ostwald, Auguste
Comte (1914), 13 sqq.] But he derived from Saint-Simon much more
than the stimulation of his thoughts in a certain direction. He was
indebted to him for some of the characteristic ideas of his own
system. He was indebted to him for the principle which lay at the
very basis of his system, that the social phenomena of a given
period and the intellectual state of the society cohere and
correspond. The conception that the coming age was to be a period of
organisation like the Middle Ages, and the idea of the government of
savants, are pure Saint-Simonian doctrine. And the fundamental idea
of a POSITIVE philosophy had been apprehended by Saint-Simon long
before he was acquainted with his youthful associate.

But Comte had a more methodical and scientific mind, and he thought
that Saint-Simon was premature in drawing conclusions as to the
reformation of societies and industries before the positive
philosophy had been constructed. He published--he was then only
twenty-two--in 1822 a "Plan of the scientific operations necessary
for the re-organisation of society," which was published under
another title two years later by Saint-Simon, and it was over this
that the friends quarrelled. This work contains the principles of
the positive philosophy which he was soon to begin to work out; it
announces already the "law of the Three Stages."

The first volume of the "Cours de philisophie positive" appeared in
1830; it took him twelve years more to complete the exposition of
his system. [Footnote: With vol. vi., 1842.]

2.

The "law of Three Stages" is familiar to many who have never read a
line of his writings. That men first attempted to explain natural
phenomena by the operation of imaginary deities, then sought to
interpret them by abstractions, and finally came to see that they
could only be understood by scientific methods, observation, and
experiment--this was a generalisation which had already been thrown
out by Turgot. Comte adopted it as a fundamental psychological law,
which has governed every domain of mental activity and explains the
whole story of human development. Each of our principal conceptions,
every branch of knowledge, passes successively through these three
states which he names the theological, the metaphysical, and the
positive or scientific. In the first, the mind invents; in the
second, it abstracts; in the third, it submits itself to positive
facts; and the proof that any branch of knowledge has reached the
third stage is the recognition of invariable natural laws.

But, granting that this may be the key to the history of the
sciences, of physics, say, or botany, how can it explain the history
of man, the sequence of actual historical events? Comte replies that
history has been governed by ideas; "the whole social mechanism is
ultimately based on opinions." Thus man's history is essentially a
history of his opinions; and these are subject to the fundamental
psychological law.

It must, however, be observed that all branches of knowledge are not
in the same stage simultaneously. Some may have reached the
metaphysical, while others are still lagging behind in the
theological; some may have become scientific, while others have not
passed from the metaphysical. Thus the study of physical phenomena
has already reached the positive stage; but the study of social
phenomena has not. The central aim of Comte, and his great
achievement in his own opinion, was to raise the study of social
phenomena from the second to the third stage.

When we proceed to apply the law of the three stages to the general
course of historical development, we are met at the outset by the
difficulty that the advance in all the domains of activity is not
simultaneous. If at a given period thought and opinions are partly
in the theological, partly in the metaphysical, and partly in the
scientific state, how is the law to be applied to general
development? One class of ideas, Comte says, must be selected as the
criterion, and this class must be that of social and moral ideas,
for two reasons. In the first place, social science occupies the
highest rank in the hierarchy of sciences, on which he laid great
stress. [Footnote: Cours de phil. pos. v. 267. Law of consensus: op.
cit. iv. 347 sqq., 364, 505, 721, 735.] In the second, those ideas
play the principal part for the majority of men, and the most
ordinary phenomena are the most important to consider. When, in
other classes of ideas, the advance is at any time more rapid, this
only means an indispensable preparation for the ensuing period.

The movement of history is due to the deeply rooted though complex
instinct which pushes man to ameliorate his condition incessantly,
to develop in all ways the sum of his physical, moral, and
intellectual life. And all the phenomena of his social life are
closely cohesive, as Saint-Simon had pointed out. By virtue of this
cohesion, political, moral, and intellectual progress are
inseparable from material progress, and so we find that the phases
of his material development correspond to intellectual changes. The
principle of consensus or "solidarity," which secures harmony and
order in the development, is as important as the principle of the
three stages which governs the onward movement. This movement,
however, is not in a right line, but displays a series of
oscillations, unequal and variable, round a mean motion which tends
to prevail. The three general causes of variation, according to
Comte, are race, climate, and deliberate political action (such as
the retrograde policies of Julian the Apostate or Napoleon). But
while they cause deflections and oscillation, their power is
strictly limited; they may accelerate or retard the movement, but
they cannot invert its order; they may affect the intensity of the
tendencies in a given situation, but cannot change their nature.

3.

In the demonstration of his laws by the actual course of
civilisation, Comte adopts what he calls "the happy artifice of
Condorcet," and treats the successive peoples who pass on the torch
as if they were a single people running the race. This is "a
rational fiction," for a people's true successors are those who
pursue its efforts. And, like Bossuet and Condorcet, he confined his
review to European civilisation; he considered only the ELITE or
advance guard of humanity. He deprecated the introduction of China
or India, for instance, as a confusing complication. He ignored the
ROLES of Brahmanism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism. His synthesis,
therefore, cannot claim to be a synthesis of universal history; it
is only a synthesis of the movement of European history. In
accordance with the law of the three stages, the development falls
into three great periods. The first or Theological came to an end
about A.D. 1400, and the second or Metaphysical is now nearing its
close, to make way for the third or Positive, for which Comte was
preparing the way.

The Theological period has itself three stages, in which Fetishism,
Polytheism, and Monotheism successively prevail. The chief social
characteristics of the Polytheistic period are the institution of
slavery and the coincidence or "confusion" of the spiritual and
temporal powers. It has two stages: the theocratic, represented by
Egypt, and the military, represented by Rome, between which Greece
stands in a rather embarrassing and uneasy position.

The initiative for the passage to the Monotheistic period came from
Judaea, and Comte attempts to show that this could not have been
otherwise. His analysis of this period is the most interesting part
of his survey. The chief feature of the political system
corresponding to monotheism is the separation of the spiritual and
temporal powers; the function of the spiritual power being concerned
with education, and that of the temporal with action, in the wide
senses of those terms. The defects of this dual system were due to
the irrational theology. But the theory of papal infallibility was a
great step in intellectual and social progress, by providing a final
jurisdiction, without which society would have been troubled
incessantly by contests arising from the vague formulae of dogmas.
Here Comte had learned from Joseph de Maistre. But that thinker
would not have been edified when Comte went on to declare that in
the passage from polytheism to monotheism the religious spirit had
really declined, and that one of the merits of Catholicism was that
it augmented the domain of human wisdom at the expense of divine
inspiration. [Footnote: Cours de philosophic positive, vi. 354.] If
it be said that the Catholic system promoted the empire of the
clergy rather than the interests of religion, this was all to the
good; for it placed the practical use of religion in "the
provisional elevation of a noble speculative corporation eminently
able to direct opinions and morals."

But Catholic monotheism could not escape dissolution. The
metaphysical spirit began to operate powerfully on the notions of
moral philosophy, as soon as the Catholic organisation was complete;
and Catholicism, because it could not assimilate this intellectual
movement, lost its progressive character and stagnated.

The decay began in the fourteenth century, where Comte dates the
beginning of the Metaphysical period--a period of revolution and
disorder. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the movement is
spontaneous and unconscious; from the sixteenth till to-day it has
proceeded under the direction of a philosophical spirit which is
negative and not constructive. This critical philosophy has only
accelerated a decomposition which began spontaneously. For as
theology progresses it becomes less consistent and less durable, and
as its conceptions become less irrational, the intensity of the
emotions which they excite decreases. Fetishism had deeper roots
than polytheism and lasted longer; and polytheism surpassed
monotheism in vigour and vitality.

Yet the critical philosophy was necessary to exhibit the growing
need of solid reorganisation and to prove that the decaying system
was incapable of directing the world any longer. Logically it was
very imperfect, but it was justified by its success. The destructive
work was mainly done in the seventeenth century by Hobbes, Spinoza,
and Bayle, of whom Hobbes was the most effective. In the eighteenth
all prominent thinkers participated in developing this negative
movement, and Rousseau gave it the practical stimulus which saved it
from degenerating into an unfruitful agitation. Of particular
importance was the great fallacy, which Helvetius propagated, that
human intellects are equal. This error was required for the full
development of the critical doctrine. For it supported the dogmas of
popular sovranty and social equality, and justified the principle of
the right of private judgement.

These three principles--popular sovranty, equality, and what he
calls the right of free examination--are in Comte's eyes vicious and
anarchical.[Footnote #1 Op. cit. iv. 36-38.] But it was necessary
that they should be promulgated, because the transition from one
organised social system to another cannot be direct; it requires an
anarchical interregnum. Popular sovranty is opposed to orderly
institutions and condemns all superior persons to dependence on the
multitude of their inferiors. Equality, obviously anarchical in its
tendency, and obviously untrue (for, as men are not equal or even
equivalent to one another, their rights cannot be identical), was
similarly necessary to break down the old institutions. The
universal claim to the right of free judgement merely consecrates
the transitional state of unlimited liberty in the interim between
the decline of theology and the arrival of positive philosophy.
Comte further remarks that the fall of the spiritual power had led
to anarchy in international relations, and if the spirit of
nationality were to prevail too far, the result would be a state of
things inferior to that of the Middle Ages.

But Comte says for the metaphysical spirit in France that with all
its vices it was more disengaged from the prejudices of the old
theological regime, and nearer to a true rational positivism than
either the German mysticism or the English empiricism of the same
period.

The Revolution was a necessity, to disclose the chronic
decomposition of society from which it resulted, and to liberate the
modern social elements from the grip of the ancient powers. Comte
has praise for the Convention, which he contrasts with the
Constituent Assembly with its political fictions and
inconsistencies. He pointed out that the great vice in the
"metaphysics" of the crisis--that is, in the principles of the
revolutionaries--lay in conceiving society out of relation to the
past, in ignoring the Middle Ages, and borrowing from Greek and
Roman society retrograde and contradictory ideals.

Napoleon restored order, but he was more injurious to humanity than
any other historical person. His moral and intellectual nature was
incompatible with the true direction of Progress, which involves the
extinction of the theological and military regime of the past. Thus
his work, like Julian the Apostate's, exhibits an instance of
deflection from the line of Progress. Then came the parliamentary
system of the restored Bourbons which Comte designates as a
political Utopia, destitute of social principles, a foolish attempt
to combine political retrogression with a state of permanent peace.

4.

The critical doctrine has performed its historical function, and the
time has come for man to enter upon the Positive stage of his
career. To enable him to take this step forward, it is necessary
that the study of social phenomena should become a positive science.
As social science is the highest in the hierarchy of sciences, it
could not develop until the two branches of knowledge which come
next in the scale, biology and chemistry, assumed a scientific form.
This has recently been achieved, and it is now possible to found a
scientific sociology.

This science, like mechanics and biology, has its statics and its
dynamics. The first studies the laws of co-existence, the second
those of succession; the first contains the theory of order, the
second that of progress. The law of consensus or cohesion is the
fundamental principle of social statics; the law of the three stages
is that of social dynamics. Comte's survey of history, of which I
have briefly indicated the general character, exhibits the
application of these sociological laws.

The capital feature of the third period, which we are now
approaching, will be the organisation of society by means of
scientific sociology. The world will be guided by a general theory,
and this means that it must be controlled by those who understand
the theory and will know how to apply it. Therefore society will
revive the principle which was realised in the great period of
Monotheism, the distinction of a spiritual and a temporal order. But
the spiritual order will consist of savants who will direct social
life not by theological fictions but by the positive truths of
science. They will administer a system of universal education and
will draw up the final code of ethics. They will be able, more
effectively than the Church, to protect the interests of the lower
classes.

Comte's conviction that the world is prepared for a transformation
of this kind is based principally on signs of the decline of the
theological spirit and of the military spirit, which he regarded as
the two main obstacles to the reign of reason. Catholicism, he says,
is now no more than "an imposing historical ruin." As for
militarism, the epoch has arrived in which serious and lasting
warfare among the ELITE nations will totally cease. The last general
cause of warfare has been the competition for colonies. But the
colonial policy is now in its decadence (with the temporary
exception of England), so that we need not look for future trouble
from this source. The very sophism, sometimes put forward to justify
war, that it is an instrument of civilisation, is a homage to the
pacific nature of modern society.

We need not follow further the details of Comte's forecast of the
Positive period, except to mention that he did not contemplate a
political federation. The great European nations will develop each
in its own way, with their separate "temporal" organisations. But he
contemplated the intervention of a common "spiritual" power, so that
all nationalities "under the direction of a homogeneous speculative
class will contribute to an identical work, in a spirit of active
European patriotism, not of sterile cosmopolitanism."

Comte claimed, like Saint-Simon, that the data of history,
scientifically interpreted, afford the means of prevision. It is
interesting to observe how he failed himself as a diviner; how
utterly he misapprehended the vitality of Catholicism, how
completely his prophecy as to the cessation of wars was belied by
the event. He lived to see the Crimean war. [Footnote: He died in
1857.] As a diviner he failed as completely as Saint-Simon and
Fourier, whose dream that the nineteenth century would see the
beginning of an epoch of harmony and happiness was to be fulfilled
by a deadly struggle between capitalism and labour, the civil war in
America, the war of 1870, the Commune, Russian pogroms, Armenian
massacres, and finally the universal catastrophe of 1914.

5.

For the comprehension of history we have perhaps gained as little
from Comte's positive laws as from Hegel's metaphysical categories.
Both thinkers had studied the facts of history only slightly and
partially, a rather serious drawback which enabled them to impose
their own constructions with the greater ease. Hegel's method of a
PRIORI synthesis was enjoined by his philosophical theory; but in
Comte we also find a tendency to a PRIORI treatment. He expressly
remarks that the chief social features of the Monotheistic period
might almost be constructed a PRIORI.

The law of the Three Stages is discredited. It may be contended that
general Progress depends on intellectual progress, and that
theology, metaphysics, and science have common roots, and are
ultimately identical, being merely phases in the movement of the
intelligence. But the law of this movement, if it is to rank as a
scientific hypothesis, must be properly deduced from known causes,
and must then be verified by a comparison with historical facts.
Comte thought that he fulfilled these requirements, but in both
respects his demonstration was defective. [Footnote: Criticism of
Comte's assumption that civilisation begins with animism: Weber's
criticisms from this point of view are telling (Le Rythme du
progres, 73-95). He observes that if Comte had not left the
practical and active side of intelligence in the shade and
considered only its speculative side, he could not have formulated
the law of the Three Stages. He would have seen that "the positive
explanation of phenomena has played in every period a preponderant
role, though latent, in the march of the human mind." Weber himself
suggests a scheme of two states (corresponding to the two-sidedness
of the intellect), technical and speculative, practical and
theoretical, through the alternation of which intellectual progress
has been effected. The first stage was probably practical (he calls
it proto-technic). It is to be remembered that when Comte was
constructing his system palaeontology was in its infancy.]

The gravest weakness perhaps in his historical sketch is the
gratuitous assumption that man in the earliest stage of his
existence had animistic beliefs and that the first phase of his
progress was controlled by fetishism. There is no valid evidence
that fetishism is not a relatively late development, or that in the
myriads of years stretching back beyond our earliest records, during
which men decided the future of the human species by their technical
inventions and the discovery of fire, they had any views which could
be called religious or theological. The psychology of modern savages
is no clew to the minds of the people who wrought tools of stone in
the world of the mammoth and the RHINOCEROS TICHIRHINUS. If the
first stage of man's development, which was of such critical
importance for his destinies, was pre-animistic, Comte's law of
progress fails, for it does not cover the ground.

In another way, Comte's system may be criticised for failing to
cover the ground, if it is regarded as a philosophy of history. In
accordance with "the happy artifice of Condorcet," he assumes that
the growth of European civilisation is the only history that
matters, and discards entirely the civilisations, for instance, of
India and China. This assumption is much more than an artifice, and
he has not scientifically justified it. [Footnote: A propos of the
view that only European civilisation matters it has been well
observed that "human history is not unitary but pluralistic": F. J.
Teggart, The Processes of History, p. 24 (1918).]

The reader of the PHILOSOPHIE POSITIVE will also observe that Comte
has not grappled with a fundamental question which has to be faced
in unravelling the woof of history or seeking a law of events. I
mean the question of contingency. It must be remembered that
contingency does not in the least affect the doctrine of
determinism; it is compatible with the strictest interpretation of
the principle of causation. A particular example may be taken to
show what it implies. [Footnote: On contingency and the "chapter of
accidents" see Cournot, Considerations sur la marche des idees et
des evenements dans les temps modernes (1872), i. 16 sqq. I have
discussed the subject and given some illustrations in a short paper,
entitled "Cleopatra's Nose," in the Annual of the Rationalist Press
Association for 1916.]

It may plausibly be argued that a military dictatorship was an
inevitable sequence of the French Revolution. This may not be true,
but let us assume it. Let us further assume that, given Napoleon, it
was inevitable that he should be the dictator. But Napoleon's
existence was due to an independent causal chain which had nothing
whatever to do with the course of political events. He might have
died in his boyhood by disease or by an accident, and the fact that
he survived was due to causes which were similarly independent of
the causal chain which, as we are assuming, led necessarily to an
epoch of monarchical government. The existence of a man of his
genius and character at the given moment was a contingency which
profoundly affected the course of history. If he had not been there
another dictator would have grasped the helm, but obviously would
not have done what Napoleon did.

It is clear that the whole history of man has been modified at every
stage by such contingencies, which may be defined as the collisions
of two independent causal chains. Voltaire was perfectly right when
he emphasised the role of chance in history, though he did not
realise what it meant. This factor would explain the oscillations
and deflections which Comte admits in the movement of historical
progression. But the question arises whether it may not also have
once and again definitely altered the direction of the movement. Can
the factor be regarded as virtually negligible by those who, like
Comte, are concerned with the large perspective of human development
and not with the details of an episode? Or was Renouvier right in
principle when he maintained "the real possibility that the sequence
of events from the Emperor Nerva to the Emperor Charlemagne might
have been radically different from what it actually was"? [Footnote:
He illustrated this proposition by a fanciful reconstruction of
European history from l00 to 800 A.D. in his UCHRONIE, 1876. He
contended that there is no definite law of progress: "The true law
lies in the equal possibility of progress or regress for societies
as for individuals."]

6.

It does not concern us here to examine the defects of Comte's view
of the course of European history. But it interests us to observe
that his synthesis of human Progress is, like Hegel's, what I have
called a closed system. Just as his own absolute philosophy marked
for Hegel the highest and ultimate term of human development, so for
Comte the coming society whose organisation he adumbrated was the
final state of humanity beyond which there would be no further
movement. It would take time to perfect the organisation, and the
period would witness a continuous increase of knowledge, but the
main characteristics were definitely fixed. Comte did not conceive
that the distant future, could he survive to experience it, could
contain any surprises for him. His theory of Progress thus differed
from the eighteenth century views which vaguely contemplate an
indefinite development and only profess to indicate some general
tendencies. He expressly repudiated this notion of INDEFINITE
progress; the data, he said, justify only the inference of
CONTINUOUS progress, which is a different thing.

A second point in which Comte in his view of Progress differed from
the French philosophers of the preceding age is this. Condorcet and
his predecessors regarded it exclusively from the eudaemonic point
of view. The goal of Progress for them was the attainment of human
felicity. With felicity Comte is hardly more concerned than Hegel.
The establishment of a fuller harmony between men and their
environment in the third stage will no doubt mean happiness. But
this consideration lies outside the theory, and to introduce it
would only intrude an unscientific element into the analysis. The
course of development is determined by intellectual ideas, and he
treats these as independent of, and indifferent to, eudaemonic
motives.

A third point to be noted is the authoritarian character of the
regime of the future. Comte's ideal state would be as ill to live in
for any unfortunate being who values personal liberty as a theocracy
or any socialistic Utopia. He had as little sympathy with liberty as
Plato or as Bossuet, and less than the eighteenth century
philosophers. This feature, common to Comte and the Saint-Simonians,
was partly due to the reaction against the Revolution, but it also
resulted from the logic of the man of science. If sociological laws
are positively established as certainly as the law of gravitation,
no room is left for opinion; right social conduct is definitely
fixed; the proper functions of every member of society admit of no
question; therefore the claim to liberty is perverse and irrational.
It is the same argument which some modern exponents of Eugenics use
to advocate a state tyranny in the matter of human breeding.

When Comte was writing, the progressive movement in Europe was
towards increase of liberty in all its forms, national, civic,
political, and economical. On one hand there was the agitation for
the release of oppressed nationalities, on the other the growth of
liberalism in England and France. The aim of the liberalism of that
period was to restrict the functions of government; its spirit was
distrust of the state. As a political theory it was defective, as
modern Liberals acknowledge, but it was an important expression of
the feeling that the interests of society are best furthered by the
free interplay of individual actions and aims. It thus implicitly
contained or pointed to a theory of Progress sharply opposed to
Comte's: that the realisation of the fullest possible measure of
individual liberty is the condition of ensuring the maximum of
energy and effectiveness in improving our environment, and therefore
the condition of attaining public felicity. Right or wrong, this
theory reckons with fundamental facts of human nature which Comte
ignored.

7.

Comte spent the later years of his life in composing another huge
work, on social reorganisation. It included a new religion, in which
Humanity was the object of worship, but made no other important
addition to the speculations of his earlier manhood, though he
developed them further.

The Course of Positive Philosophy was not a book that took the
public by storm. We are told by a competent student of social
theories in France that the author's name was little known in his
own country till about 1855, when his greatness began to win
recognition, and his influence to operate. [Footnote: Weill, Hist.
du mouvement social, p. 21.] Even then his work can hardly have been
widely read. But through men like Littre and Taine, whose
conceptions of history were moulded by his teaching, and men like
Mill, whom he stimulated, as well as through the disciples who
adopted Positivism as a religion, his leading principles, detached
from his system, became current in the world of speculation.

[Footnote: The influence of Comte. The manner in which ideas filter
through, as it were, underground and emerge oblivious of their
source is illustrated by the German historian Lamprecht's theory of
historical development. He surveyed the history of a people as a
series of what he called typical periods, each of which is marked by
a collective psychical character expressing itself in every
department of life. He named this a diapason. Lamprecht had never
read Comte, and he imagined that this principle, on which he based
his kulturhistorische Methode, was original. But his psychical
diapason is the psychical consensus of Comte, whose system, as we
have seen, depended on the proposition that a given social
organisation corresponds in a definite way to the contemporary stage
of mental development; and Comte had derived the principle from
Saint-Simon. Cf. his pamphlet Die kulturhistorische Methode (1900).
The succession of "typical period" was worked out for Germany in his
History of the German People.]

He laid the foundations of sociology, convincing many minds that the
history of civilisation is subject to general laws, or, in other
words, that a science of society is possible. In England this idea
was still a novelty when Mill's System of Logic appeared in 1843.

The publication of this work, which attempted to define the rules
for the investigation of truth in all fields of inquiry and to
provide tests for the hypotheses of science, was a considerable
event, whether we regard its value and range or its prolonged
influence on education. Mill, who had followed recent French thought
attentively and was particularly impressed by the system of Comte,
recognised that a new method of investigating social phenomena had
been inaugurated by the thinkers who set out to discover the "law"
of human progression. He proclaimed and welcomed it as superior to
previous methods, and at the same time pointed out its limitations.

Till about fifty years ago, he said, generalisations on man and
society have erred by implicitly assuming that human nature and
society will for ever revolve in the same orbit and exhibit
virtually the same phenomena. This is still the view of the
ostentatiously practical votaries of common sense in Great Britain;
whereas the more reflective minds of the present age, analysing
historical records more minutely, have adopted the opinion that the
human race is in a state of necessary progression. The reciprocal
action between circumstances and human nature, from which social
phenomena result, must produce either a cycle or a trajectory. While
Vico maintained the conception of periodic cycles, his successors
have universally adopted the idea of a trajectory or progress, and
are endeavouring to discover its law. [Footnote: Philosophical
writers in England in the middle of the century paid more attention
to Cousin than to Comte or Saint-Simon. J. D. Morell, in his
forgotten History and Critical View of Speculative Philosophy
(1846), says that eclecticism is the philosophy of human progress
(vol. ii. 635, 2nd ed.). He conceived the movement of humanity as
that of a spiral, ever tending to a higher perfection (638).]

But they have fallen into a misconception in imagining that if they
can find a law of uniformity in the succession of events they can
infer the future from the past terms of the series. For such a law
would only be an "empirical law"; it would not be a causal law or an
ultimate law. However rigidly uniform, there is no guarantee that it
would apply to phenomena outside those from which it was derived. It
must itself depend on laws of mind and character (psychology and
ethology). When those laws are known and the nature of the
dependence is explained, when the determining causes of all the
changes constituting the progress are understood, then the empirical
law will be elevated to a scientific law, then only will it be
possible to predict.

Thus Mill asserted that if the advanced thinkers who are engaged on
the subject succeed in discovering an empirical law from the data of
history, it may be converted into a scientific law by deducing it a
priori from the principles of human nature. In the meantime, he
argued that what is already known of those principles justifies the
important conclusion that the order of general human progression
will mainly depend on the order of progression in the intellectual
convictions of mankind.

Throughout his exposition Mill uses "progress" in a neutral sense,
without implying that the progression necessarily means improvement.
Social science has still to demonstrate that the changes determined
by human nature do mean improvement. But in warning the reader of
this he declares himself to be personally an optimist, believing
that the general tendency, saving temporary exceptions, is in the
direction of a better and happier state.

8.

Twenty years later [Footnote: In later editions of the Logic.] Mill
was able to say that the conception of history as subject to general
laws had "passed into the domain of newspaper and ordinary political
discussion." Buckle's HISTORY OF CIVILISATION IN ENGLAND [Footnote:
2 Vol. i. appeared in 1857, vol. ii. in 1861.] which enjoyed an
immediate success, did a great deal to popularise the idea. In this
stimulating work Buckle took the fact of Progress for granted; his
purpose was to investigate its causes. Considering the two general
conditions on which all events depend, human nature and external
nature, he arrived at two conclusions: (1) In the early stage of
history the influence of man's external environment is the more
decisive factor; but as time goes on the roles are gradually
inverted, and now it is his own nature that is principally
responsible for his development. (2) Progress is determined, not by
the emotional and moral faculties, but by the intellect; [Footnote:
This was the view of Jouffroy, Comte, and Mill; Buckle popularised
it.] the emotional and moral faculties are stationary, and therefore
religion is not a decisive influence in the onward movement of
humanity. "I pledge myself to show that the progress Europe has made
from barbarism to civilisation is entirely due to its intellectual
activity. . . . In what may be called the innate and original morals
of mankind there is, so far as we are aware, no progress."
[Footnote: Buckle has been very unjustly treated by some critics,
but has found an able defender in Mr. J.M. Robertson (Buckle and his
Critics (1895)). The remarks of Benn (History of Rationalism in the
Nineteenth Century, ii. 182 sqq.) are worth reading.]

Buckle was convinced that social phenomena exhibit the same
undeviating regularity as natural phenomena. In this belief he was
chiefly influenced by the investigations of the Belgian statistician
Quetelet (1835). "Statistics," he said, "has already thrown more
light on the study of human nature than all the sciences put
together." From the regularity with which the same crimes recur in
the same state of society, and many other constant averages, he
inferred that all actions of individuals result directly from the
state of society in which they live, and that laws are operating
which, if we take large enough numbers into account, scarcely
undergo any sensible perturbation. [Footnote: Kant had already
appealed to statistics in a similar sense; see above, p. 243.] Thus
the evidence of statistics points to the conclusion that progress is
not determined by the acts of individual men, but depends on general
laws of the intellect which govern the successive stages of public
opinion. The totality of human actions at any given time depends on
the totality of knowledge and the extent of its diffusion.

There we have the theory that history is subject to general laws in
its most unqualified form, based on a fallacious view of the
significance of statistical facts. Buckle's attempt to show the
operation of general laws in the actual history of man was
disappointing. When he went on to review the concrete facts of the
historical process, his own political principles came into play, and
he was more concerned with denouncing the tendencies of which he did
not approve than with extricating general laws from the sequence of
events. His comments on religious persecution and the obscurantism
of governments and churches were instructive and timely, but they
did not do much to exhibit a set of rigid laws governing and
explaining the course of human development.

The doctrine that history is under the irresistible control of law
was also popularised by an American physiologist, J. W. Draper,
whose HISTORY OF THE INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT OF EUROPE appeared in
1864 and was widely read. His starting-point was a superficial
analogy between a society and an individual. "Social advancement is
as completely under the control of natural law as a bodily growth.
The life of an individual is a miniature of the life of a nation,"
and "particles" in the individual organism answer to persons in the
political organism. Both have the same epochs--infancy, childhood,
youth, manhood, old age--and therefore European progress exhibits
five phases, designated as Credulity, Inquiry, Faith, Reason,
Decrepitude. Draper's conclusion was that Europe, now in the fourth
period, is hastening to a long period of decrepitude. The prospect
did not dismay him; decrepitude is the culmination of Progress, and
means the organisation of national intellect. That has already been
achieved in China, and she owes to it her well-being and longevity.
"Europe is inevitably hastening to become what China is. In her we
may see what we shall be like when we are old."

Judged by any standard, Draper's work is much inferior to Buckle's,
but both these books, utterly different though they were in both
conception and treatment, performed a similar function. Each in its
own way diffused the view which had originated in France, that
civilisation is progression and, like nature, subject to general
laws.
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The Magic Egg and Other Stories Frank R. Stockton Category: Short Stories Sections: 14 What's this? Table of Contents		Fiction Non Fiction Short Stories Poetry Plays Sci Fi Religion Biography