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