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4.
There was however a school of philosophical speculation, which might
have led to the foundation of a theory of Progress, if the
historical outlook of the Greeks had been larger and if their temper
had been different. The Atomic theory of Democritus seems to us now,
in many ways, the most wonderful achievement of Greek thought, but
it had a small range of influence in Greece, and would have had less
if it had not convinced the brilliant mind of Epicurus. The
Epicureans developed it, and it may be that the views which they put
forward as to the history of the human race are mainly their own
superstructure. These philosophers rejected entirely the doctrine of
a Golden Age and a subsequent degeneration, which was manifestly
incompatible with their theory that the world was mechanically
formed from atoms without the intervention of a Deity. For them, the
earliest condition of men resembled that of the beasts, and from
this primitive and miserable condition they laboriously reached the
existing state of civilisation, not by external guidance or as a
consequence of some initial design, but simply by the exercise of
human intelligence throughout a long period. [Footnote: Lucretius v.
1448 sqq. (where the word PROGRESS is pronounced):
Usus et impigrae simul experientia mentis
Paulatim docuit pedetemtim progredientis.
Sic unum quicquid paulatim protrahit aetas
In medium ratioque in luminis erigit oras.
Namque alid ex alio clarescere et ordine debet
Artibus, ad summum donee uenere cacumen.]
The gradual amelioration of their existence was marked by the
discovery of fire and the use of metals, the invention of language,
the invention of weaving, the growth of arts and industries,
navigation, the development of family life, the establishment of
social order by means of kings, magistrates, laws, the foundation of
cities. The last great step in the amelioration of life, according
to Lucretius, was the illuminating philosophy of Epicurus, who
dispelled the fear of invisible powers and guided man from
intellectual darkness to light.
But Lucretius and the school to which he belonged did not look
forward to a steady and continuous process of further amelioration
in the future. They believed that a time would come when the
universe would fall into ruins, [Footnote: Ib. 95.] but the
intervening period did not interest them. Like many other
philosophers, they thought that their own philosophy was the final
word on the universe, and they did not contemplate the possibility
that important advances in knowledge might be achieved by subsequent
generations. And, in any case, their scope was entirely
individualistic; all their speculations were subsidiary to the aim
of rendering the life of the individual as tolerable as possible
here and now. Their philosophy, like Stoicism, was a philosophy of
resignation; it was thoroughly pessimistic and therefore
incompatible with the idea of Progress. Lucretius himself allows an
underlying feeling of scepticism as to the value of civilisation
occasionally to escape. [Footnote: His eadem sunt omnia semper (iii.
945) is the constant refrain of Marcus Aurelius.]
Indeed, it might be said that in the mentality of the ancient Greeks
there was a strain which would have rendered them indisposed to take
such an idea seriously, if it had been propounded. No period of
their history could be described as an age of optimism. They were
never, by their achievements in art or literature, in mathematics or
philosophy, exalted into self-complacency or lured into setting high
hopes on human capacity. Man has resourcefulness to meet everything-
-[words in Greek],--they did not go further than that.
This instinctive pessimism of the Greeks had a religious tinge which
perhaps even the Epicureans found it hard entirely to expunge. They
always felt that they were in the presence of unknown incalculable
powers, and that subtle dangers lurked in human achievements and
gains. Horace has taken this feeling as the motif of a criticism on
man's inventive powers. A voyage of Virgil suggests the reflection
that his friend's life would not be exposed to hazards on the high
seas if the art of navigation had never been discovered--if man had
submissively respected the limits imposed by nature. But man is
audacious:
Nequiquam deus abscidit
Prudens oceano dissociabili Terras.
In vain a wise god sever'd lands
By the dissociating sea.
Daedalus violated the air, as Hercules invaded hell. The discovery
of fire put us in possession of a forbidden secret. Is this
unnatural conquest of nature safe or wise? Nil mortalibus ardui est:
Man finds no feat too hard or high;
Heaven is not safe from man's desire.
Our rash designs move Jove to ire,
He dares not lay his thunder by.
The thought of this ode [Footnote: i. 3.] roughly expresses what
would have been the instinctive sense of thoughtful Greeks if the
idea of Progress had been presented to them. It would have struck
them as audacious, the theory of men unduly elated and perilously at
ease in the presence of unknown incalculable powers.
This feeling or attitude was connected with the idea of Moira. If we
were to name any single idea as generally controlling or pervading
Greek thought from Homer to the Stoics, [Footnote: The Stoics
identified Moira with Pronoia, in accordance with their theory that
the universe is permeated by thought.] it would perhaps be Moira,
for which we have no equivalent. The common rendering "fate" is
misleading. Moira meant a fixed order in the universe; but as a fact
to which men must bow, it had enough in common with fatality to
demand a philosophy of resignation and to hinder the creation of an
optimistic atmosphere of hope. It was this order which kept things
in their places, assigned to each its proper sphere and function,
and drew a definite line, for instance, between men and gods. Human
progress towards perfection--towards an ideal of omniscience, or an
ideal of happiness, would have been a breaking down of the bars
which divide the human from the divine. Human nature does not alter;
it is fixed by Moira.
5.
We can see now how it was that speculative Greek minds never hit on
the idea of Progress. In the first place, their limited historical
experience did not easily suggest such a synthesis; and in the
second place, the axioms of their thought, their suspiciousness of
change, their theories of Moira, of degeneration and cycles,
suggested a view of the world which was the very antithesis of
progressive development. Epicurean, philosophers made indeed what
might have been an important step in the direction of the doctrine
of Progress, by discarding the theory of degeneration, and
recognising that civilisation had been created by a series of
successive improvements achieved by the effort of man alone. But
here they stopped short. For they had their eyes fixed on the lot of
the individual here and now, and their study of the history of
humanity was strictly subordinate to this personal interest. The
value of their recognition of human progress in the past is
conditioned by the general tenor and purpose of their theory of
life. It was simply one item in their demonstration that man owed
nothing to supernatural intervention and had nothing to fear from
supernatural powers. It is however no accident that the school of
thought which struck on a path that might have led to the idea of
Progress was the most uncompromising enemy of superstition that
Greece produced.
It might be thought that the establishment of Roman rule and order
in a large part of the known world, and the civilising of barbarian
peoples, could not fail to have opened to the imagination of some of
those who reflected on it in the days of Virgil or of Seneca, a
vista into the future. But there was no change in the conditions of
life likely to suggest a brighter view of human existence. With the
loss of freedom pessimism increased, and the Greek philosophies of
resignation were needed more than ever. Those whom they could not
satisfy turned their thoughts to new mystical philosophies and
religions, which were little interested in the earthly destinies of
human society.
II
1.
The idea of the universe which prevailed throughout the Middle Ages,
and the general orientation of men's thoughts were incompatible with
some of the fundamental assumptions which are required by the idea
of Progress. According to the Christian theory which was worked out
by the Fathers, and especially by St. Augustine, the whole movement
of history has the purpose of securing the happiness of a small
portion of the human race in another world; it does not postulate a
further development of human history on earth. For Augustine, as for
any medieval believer, the course of history would be satisfactorily
complete if the world came to an end in his own lifetime. He was not
interested in the question whether any gradual amelioration of
society or increase of knowledge would mark the period of time which
might still remain to run before the day of Judgment. In Augustine's
system the Christian era introduced the last period of history, the
old age of humanity, which would endure only so long as to enable
the Deity to gather in the predestined number of saved people. This
theory might be combined with the widely-spread belief in a
millennium on earth, but the conception of such a dispensation does
not render it a theory of Progress.
Again, the medieval doctrine apprehends history not as a natural
development but as a series of events ordered by divine intervention
and revelations. If humanity had been left to go its own way it
would have drifted to a highly undesirable port, and all men would
have incurred the fate of everlasting misery from which supernatural
interference rescued the minority. A belief in Providence might
indeed, and in a future age would, be held along with a belief in
Progress, in the same mind; but the fundamental assumptions were
incongruous, and so long as the doctrine of Providence was
undisputedly in the ascendant, a doctrine of Progress could not
arise. And the doctrine of Providence, as it was developed in
Augustine's "City of God," controlled the thought of the Middle
Ages.
There was, moreover, the doctrine of original sin, an insuperable
obstacle to the moral amelioration of the race by any gradual
process of development. For since, so long as the human species
endures on earth, every child will be born naturally evil and worthy
of punishment, a moral advance of humanity to perfection is plainly
impossible. [Footnote: It may be added that, as G. Monod observed,
"les hommes du moyen age n'avaient pas conscience des modifications
successives que le temps apporte avec lui dans les choses humaines"
(Revue Historique, i. p. 8).]
2.
But there are certain features in the medieval theory of which we
must not ignore the significance. In the first place, while it
maintained the belief in degeneration, endorsed by Hebrew mythology,
it definitely abandoned the Greek theory of cycles. The history of
the earth was recognised as a unique phenomenon in time; it would
never occur again or anything resembling it. More important than all
is the fact that Christian theology constructed a synthesis which
for the first time attempted to give a definite meaning to the whole
course of human events, a synthesis which represents the past as
leading up to a definite and desirable goal in the future. Once this
belief had been generally adopted and prevailed for centuries men
might discard it along with the doctrine of Providence on which it
rested, but they could not be content to return again to such views
as satisfied the ancients, for whom human history, apprehended as a
whole, was a tale of little meaning. [Footnote: It may be observed
that Augustine (De Civ. Dei, x. 14) compares the teaching (recta
eruditio) of the people of God, in the gradual process of history,
to the education of an individual. Prudentius has a similar
comparison for a different purpose (c. Symmachum, ii. 315 sqq.):
Tardis semper processibus aucta Crescit vita hominis et longo
proficit usu. Sic aevi mortalis habet se mobilis ordo, Sic variat
natura vices, infantia repit, etc.
Floras (Epitome, ad init.) had already divided Roman history into
four periods corresponding to infancy, adolescence, manhood, and old
age.]
They must seek for some new synthesis to replace it.
Another feature of the medieval theory, pertinent to our inquiry,
was an idea which Christianity took over from Greek and Roman
thinkers. In the later period of Greek history, which began with the
conquests of Alexander the Great, there had emerged the conception
of the whole inhabited world as a unity and totality, the idea of
the whole human race as one. We may conveniently call it the
ecumenical idea--the principle of the ecumene or inhabited world, as
opposed to the principle of the polis or city. Promoted by the vast
extension of the geographical limits of the Greek world resulting
from Alexander's conquests, and by his policy of breaking down the
barriers between Greek and barbarian, the idea was reflected in the
Stoic doctrine that all men are brothers, and that a man's true
country is not his own particular city, but the ecumene. [Footnote:
Plutarch long ago saw the connection between the policy of Alexander
and the cosmopolitan teaching of Zeno. De Alexandri Magni virtute,
i. Sec. 6.] It soon became familiar, popularised by the most popular
of the later philosophies of Greece; and just as it had been implied
in the imperial aspiration and polity of Alexander, so it was
implied, still more clearly, in the imperial theory of Rome. The
idea of the Roman Empire, its theoretical justification, might be
described as the realisation of the unity of the world by the
establishment of a common order, the unification of mankind in a
single world-embracing political organism. The term "world," orbis
(terrarum), which imperial poets use freely in speaking of the
Empire, is more than a mere poetical or patriotic exaggeration; it
expresses the idea, the unrealised ideal of the Empire. There is a
stone from Halicarnassus in the British Museum, on which the idea is
formally expressed from another point of view. The inscription is of
the time of Augustus, and the Emperor is designated as "saviour of
the community of mankind." There we have the notion of the human
race apprehended as a whole, the ecumenical idea, imposing upon Rome
the task described by Virgil as regere imperio populos, and more
humanely by Pliny as the creation of a single fatherland for all the
peoples of the world. [Footnote: Pliny, Nat. Hist. iii. 6. 39.]
This idea, which in the Roman Empire and in the Middle Ages took the
form of a universal State and a universal Church, passed afterwards
into the conception of the intercohesion of peoples as contributors
to a common pool of civilisation--a principle which, when the idea
of Progress at last made its appearance in the world, was to be one
of the elements in its growth.
3.
One remarkable man, the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, [Footnote: c.
A.D. 1210-92. Of Bacon's Opus Majus the best and only complete
edition is that of J. H. Bridges, 2 vols. 1897 (with an excellent
Introduction). The associated works, Opus Minus and Opus Tertium,
have been edited by Brewer, Fr. Rogeri Bacon Opera Inedita,
1859.]who stands on an isolated pinnacle of his own in the Middle
Ages, deserves particular consideration. It has been claimed for him
that he announced the idea of Progress; he has even been compared to
Condorcet or Comte. Such claims are based on passages taken out of
their context and indulgently interpreted in the light of later
theories. They are not borne out by an examination of his general
conception of the universe and the aim of his writings.
His aim was to reform higher education and introduce into the
universities a wide, liberal, and scientific programme of secular
studies. His chief work, the "Opus Majus," was written for this
purpose, to which his exposition of his own discoveries was
subordinate. It was addressed and sent to Pope Clement IV., who had
asked Bacon to give him an account of his researches, and was
designed to persuade the Pontiff of the utility of science from an
ecclesiastical point of view, and to induce him to sanction an
intellectual reform, which without the approbation of the Church
would at that time have been impossible. With great ingenuity and
resourcefulness he sought to show that the studies to which he was
devoted--mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry--were
indispensable to an intelligent study of theology and Scripture.
Though some of his arguments may have been urged simply to capture
the Pope's good-will, there can be no question that Bacon was
absolutely sincere in his view that theology was the mistress
(dominatrix) of the sciences and that their supreme value lay in
being necessary to it.
It was, indeed, on this principle of the close interconnection of
all branches of knowledge that Bacon based his plea and his scheme
of reform. And the idea of the "solidarity" of the sciences, in
which he anticipated a later age, is one of his two chief claims to
be remembered. [Footnote: Cp. Opus Tertium, c. iv. p. 18, omnes
scientiae sunt connexae et mutuis se fovent auxiliis sicut partes
ejusdem totius, quarum quaelibet opus suum peragit non solum propter
se sed pro aliis.] It is the motif of the Opus Majus, and it would
have been more fully elaborated if he had lived to complete the
encyclopaedic work, Scriptum Principale, which he had only begun
before his death. His other title to fame is well-known. He
realised, as no man had done before him, the importance of the
experimental method in investigating the secrets of nature, and was
an almost solitary pioneer in the paths to which his greater
namesake, more than three hundred years later, was to invite the
attention of the world.
But, although Roger Bacon was inspired by these enlightened ideas,
although he cast off many of the prejudices of his time and boldly
revolted against the tyranny of the prevailing scholastic
philosophy, he was nevertheless in other respects a child of his age
and could not disencumber himself of the current medieval conception
of the universe. His general view of the course of human history was
not materially different from that of St. Augustine. When he says
that the practical object of all knowledge is to assure the safety
of the human race, he explains this to mean "things which lead to
felicity in the next life." [Footnote: Opus Majus, vii. p. 366.]
It is pertinent to observe that he not only shared in the belief in
astrology, which was then universal, but considered it one of the
most important parts of "mathematics." It was looked upon with
disfavour by the Church as a dangerous study; Bacon defended its use
in the interests of the Church itself. He maintained, like Thomas
Aquinas, the physiological influence of the celestial bodies, and
regarded the planets as signs telling us what God has decreed from
eternity to come to pass either by natural processes or by acts of
human will or directly at his own good pleasure. Deluges, plagues,
and earthquakes were capable of being predicted; political and
religious revolutions were set in the starry rubric. The existence
of six principal religions was determined by the combinations of
Jupiter with the other six planets. Bacon seriously expected the
extinction of the Mohammedan religion before the end of the
thirteenth century, on the ground of a prediction by an Arab
astrologer. [Footnote: Ib. iv. p. 266; vii. p. 389.]
One of the greatest advantages that the study of astrological lore
will bring to humanity is that by its means the date of the coming
of Anti-Christ may be fixed with certainty, and the Church may be
prepared to face the perils and trials of that terrible time. Now
the arrival of Anti-Christ meant the end of the world, and Bacon
accepted the view, which he says was held by all wise men, that "we
are not far from the times of Anti-Christ." Thus the intellectual
reforms which he urged would have the effect, and no more, of
preparing Christendom to resist more successfully the corruption in
which the rule of Anti-Christ would involve the world. "Truth will
prevail," by which he meant science will make advances, "though with
difficulty, until Anti-Christ and his forerunners appear;" and on
his own showing the interval would probably be short.
The frequency with which Bacon recurs to this subject, and the
emphasis he lays on it, show that the appearance of Anti-Christ was
a fixed point in his mental horizon. When he looked forward into the
future, the vision which confronted him was a scene of corruption,
tyranny, and struggle under the reign of a barbarous enemy of
Christendom; and after that, the end of the world. [Footnote: (1)
His coming may be fixed by astrology: Opus Majus, iv. p. 269
(inveniretur sufficiens suspicio vel magis certitudo de tempore
Antichristi; cp. p. 402). (2) His coming means the end of the world:
ib. p. 262. (3) We are not far from it: ib. p. 402. One of the
reasons which seem to have made this view probable to Bacon was the
irruption of the Mongols into Europe during his lifetime; cp. p. 268
and vii. p. 234. Another was the prevalent corruption, especially of
the clergy, which impressed him deeply; see Compendium studii
philosophiae, ed. Brewer, p. 402. (4) "Truth will prevail," etc.:
Opus Majus, i. pp. 19, 20. He claimed for experimental science that
it would produce inventions which could be usefully employed against
Antichrist: ib. vii. p. 221.] It is from this point of view that we
must appreciate the observations which he made on the advancement of
knowledge. "It is our duty," he says, "to supply what the ancients
have left incomplete, because we have entered into their labours,
which, unless we are asses, can stimulate us to achieve better
results"; Aristotle corrected the errors of earlier thinkers;
Avicenna and Averroes have corrected Aristotle in some matters and
have added much that is new; and so it will go on till the end of
the world. And Bacon quotes passages from Seneca's "Physical
Inquiries" to show that the acquisition of knowledge is gradual.
Attention has been already called to those passages, and it was
shown how perverse it is, on the strength of such remarks, to claim
Seneca as a teacher of the doctrine of Progress. The same claim has
been made for Bacon with greater confidence, and it is no less
perverse. The idea of Progress is glaringly incongruous with his
vision of the world. If his programme of revolutionising secular
learning had been accepted--it fell completely dead, and his work
was forgotten for many ages,--he would have been the author of a
progressive reform; but how many reformers have there been before
and after Bacon on whose minds the idea of Progress never dawned?
[Footnote: Bacon quotes Seneca: See Opus Majus, i. pp. 37, 55, 14.
Much has been made out of a well-known passage in his short Epistle
de secretis operibus artis et naturae et de militate magiae, c. iv.
(ed. Brewer, p. 533), in which he is said to PREDICT inventions
which have been realised in the locomotives, steam navigation, and
aeroplanes of modern times. But Bacon predicts nothing. He is
showing that science can invent curious and, to the vulgar,
incredible things without the aid of magic. All the inventions which
he enumerates have, he declares, been actually made in ancient
times, with the exception of a flying-machine (instrumentum volandi
quod non vidi nec hominem qui vidisset cognovi, sed sapientem qui
hoc artificium excogitavit explere cognosco).
Compare the remarks of S. Vogl, Die Physik Roger Bacos (1906), 98
sqq.]
4.
Thus Friar Bacon's theories of scientific reform, so far from
amounting to an anticipation of the idea of Progress, illustrate how
impossible it was that this idea could appear in the Middle Ages.
The whole spirit of medieval Christianity excluded it. The
conceptions which were entertained of the working of divine
Providence, the belief that the world, surprised like a sleeping
household by a thief in the night, might at any moment come to a
sudden end, had the same effect as the Greek theories of the nature
of change and of recurring cycles of the world. Or rather, they had
a more powerful effect, because they were not reasoned conclusions,
but dogmas guaranteed by divine authority. And medieval pessimism as
to man's mundane condition was darker and sterner than the pessimism
of the Greeks. There was the prospect of happiness in another sphere
to compensate, but this, engrossing the imagination, only rendered
it less likely that any one should think of speculating about man's
destinies on earth.
III
1.
The civilised countries of Europe spent about three hundred years in
passing from the mental atmosphere of the Middle Ages into the
mental atmosphere of the modern world. These centuries were one of
the conspicuously progressive periods in history, but the conditions
were not favourable to the appearance of an idea of Progress, though
the intellectual milieu was being prepared in which that idea could
be born. This progressive period, which is conveniently called the
Renaissance, lasted from the fourteenth into the seventeenth
century. The great results, significant for our present purpose,
which the human mind achieved at this stage of its development were
two. Self-confidence was restored to human reason, and life on this
planet was recognised as possessing a value independent of any hopes
or fears connected with a life beyond the grave.
But in discarding medieval naivete and superstition, in assuming a
freer attitude towards theological authority, and in developing a
new conception of the value of individual personality, men looked to
the guidance of Greek and Roman thinkers, and called up the spirit
of the ancient world to exorcise the ghosts of the dark ages. Their
minds were thus directed backwards to a past civilisation which, in
the ardour of new discovery, and in the reaction against
medievalism, they enthroned as ideal; and a new authority was set
up, the authority of ancient writers. In general speculation the men
of the Renaissance followed the tendencies and adopted many of the
prejudices of Greek philosophy. Although some great discoveries,
with far-reaching, revolutionary consequences, were made in this
period, most active minds were engaged in rediscovering,
elaborating, criticising, and imitating what was old. It was not
till the closing years of the Renaissance that speculation began to
seek and feel its way towards new points of departure. It was not
till then that a serious reaction set in against the deeper
influences of medieval thought.
2.
To illustrate the limitations of this period let us take
Machiavelli, one of the most original thinkers that Italy ever
produced.
There are certain fundamental principles underlying Machiavelli's
science of politics, which he has indicated incidentally in his
unsystematic way, but which are essential to the comprehension of
his doctrines. The first is that at all times the world of human
beings has been the same, varying indeed from land to land, but
always presenting the same aspect of some societies advancing
towards prosperity, and others declining. Those which are on the
upward grade will always reach a point beyond which they cannot rise
further, but they will not remain permanently on this level, they
will begin to decline; for human things are always in motion and
therefore must go up or down. Similarly, declining states will
ultimately touch bottom and then begin to ascend. Thus a good
constitution or social organisation can last only for a short time.
[Footnote: Machiavelli's principle of advance and decline: Discorsi,
ii. Introduction; Istorie fiorentine, v. ad init. For the cycle of
constitutions through which all states tend to move see Discorsi,
ii. 2 (here we see the influence of Polybius).]
It is obvious that in this view of history Machiavelli was inspired
and instructed by the ancients. And it followed from his premisses
that the study of the past is of the highest value because it
enables men to see what is to come; since to all social events at
any period there are correspondences in ancient times. "For these
events are due to men, who have and always had the same passions,
and therefore of necessity the effects must be the same." [Footnote:
Discorsi, iii. 43.]
Again, Machiavelli follows his ancient masters in assuming as
evident that a good organisation of society can be effected only by
the deliberate design of a wise legislator. [Footnote: Ib. iii. 1.
The lawgiver must assume for his purposes that all men are bad: ib.
i. 3. Villari has useful remarks on these principles in his
Machiavelli, Book ii. cap. iii.] Forms of government and religions
are the personal creations of a single brain; and the only chance
for a satisfactory constitution or for a religion to maintain itself
for any length of time is constantly to repress any tendencies to
depart from the original conceptions of its creator.
It is evident that these two assumptions are logically connected.
The lawgiver builds on the immutability of human nature; what is
good for one generation must be good for another. For Machiavelli,
as for Plato, change meant corruption. Thus his fundamental theory
excluded any conception of a satisfactory social order gradually
emerging by the impersonal work of successive generations, adapting
their institutions to their own changing needs and aspirations. It
is characteristic, and another point of resemblance with ancient
thinkers that he sought the ideal state in the past--republican
Rome.
These doctrines, the sameness of human nature and the omnipotent
lawgiver, left no room for anything resembling a theory of Progress.
If not held afterwards in the uncompromising form in which
Machiavelli presented them, yet it has well been pointed out that
they lay at the root of some of the most famous speculations of the
eighteenth century. [Footnote: Villari, loc. cit.]
Machiavelli's sameness of human nature meant that man would always
have the same passions and desires, weaknesses and vices. This
assumption was compatible with the widely prevailing view that man
had degenerated in the course of the last fifteen hundred years.
From the exaltation of Greek and Roman antiquity to a position of
unattainable superiority, especially in the field of knowledge, the
degeneration of humanity was an easy and natural inference. If the
Greeks in philosophy and science were authoritative guides, if in
art and literature they were unapproachable, if the Roman republic,
as Machiavelli thought, was an ideal state, it would seem that the
powers of Nature had declined, and she could no longer produce the
same quality of brain. So long as this paralysing theory prevailed,
it is manifest that the idea of Progress could not appear.
But in the course of the sixteenth century men began here and there,
somewhat timidly and tentatively, to rebel against the tyranny of
antiquity, or rather to prepare the way for the open rebellion which
was to break out in the seventeenth. Breaches were made in the proud
citadel of ancient learning. Copernicus undermined the authority of
Ptolemy and his predecessors; the anatomical researches of Vesalius
injured the prestige of Galen; and Aristotle was attacked on many
sides by men like Telesio, Cardan, Ramus, and Bruno. [Footnote: It
has been observed that the thinkers who were rebelling against the
authority of Aristotle--the most dangerous of the ancient
philosophers, because he was so closely associated with theological
scholasticism and was supported by the Church--frequently attacked
under the standard of some other ancient master; e.g. Telesio
resorted to Parmenides, Justus Lipsius to the Stoics, and Bruno is
under the influence of Plotinus and Plato (Bouillier, La Philosophie
cartesienne, vol. i. p. 5). The idea of "development" in Bruno has
been studied by Mariupolsky (Zur Geschichte des Entwicklungsbegriffs
in Berner Studien, Bd. vi. 1897), who pointed out the influence of
Stoicism on his thought.] In particular branches of science an
innovation was beginning which heralded a radical revolution in the
study of natural phenomena, though the general significance of the
prospect which these researches opened was but vaguely understood at
the time. The thinkers and men of science were living in an
intellectual twilight. It was the twilight of dawn. At one extremity
we have mysticism which culminated in the speculations of Bruno and
Campanella; at the other we have the scepticism of Montaigne,
Charron, and Sanchez. The bewildered condition of knowledge is
indicated by the fact that while Bruno and Campanella accepted the
Copernican astronomy, it was rejected by one who in many other
respects may claim to be reckoned as a modern--I mean Francis Bacon.
But the growing tendency to challenge the authority of the ancients
does not sever this period from the spirit which informed the
Renaissance. For it is subordinate or incidental to a more general
and important interest. To rehabilitate the natural man, to claim
that he should be the pilot of his own course, to assert his freedom
in the fields of art and literature had been the work of the early
Renaissance. It was the problem of the later Renaissance to complete
this emancipation in the sphere of philosophical thought. The bold
metaphysics of Bruno, for which he atoned by a fiery death, offered
the solution which was most unorthodox and complete. His deification
of nature and of man as part of nature involved the liberation of
humanity from external authority. But other speculative minds of the
age, though less audacious, were equally inspired by the idea of
freely interrogating nature, and were all engaged in accomplishing
the programme of the Renaissance--the vindication of this world as
possessing a value for man independent of its relations to any
supermundane sphere. The raptures of Giordano Bruno and the
sobrieties of Francis Bacon are here on common ground. The whole
movement was a necessary prelude to a new age of which science was
to be the mistress.
It is to be noted that there was a general feeling of complacency as
to the condition of learning and intellectual pursuits. This
optimism is expressed by Rabelais. Gargantua, in a letter to
Pantagruel, studying at Paris, enlarges to his son on the vast
improvements in learning and education which had recently, he says,
been brought about. "All the world is full of savants, learned
teachers, large libraries; and I am of opinion that neither in the
time of Plato nor of Cicero nor of Papinian were there such
facilities for study as one sees now." It is indeed the study of the
ancient languages and literatures that Gargantua considers in a
liberal education, but the satisfaction at the present diffusion of
learning, with the suggestion that here at least contemporaries have
an advantage over the ancients, is the significant point. [Footnote:
Rabelais, Book ii. chap. 8.] This satisfaction shines through the
observation of Ramus that "in one century we have seen a greater
progress in men and works of learning than our ancestors had seen in
the whole course of the previous fourteen centuries." [Footnote:
Praefat. Scholarum Mathematicarum, maiorem doctorum hominum et
operum proventum seculo uno vidimus quam totis antea 14 seculis
maiores nostri viderent. (Ed. Basel, 1569.)] [Footnote 1. Guillaume
Postel observed in his De magistratibus Atheniensium liber (1541)
that the ages are always progressing (secula semper proficere), and
every day additions are made to human knowledge, and that this
process would only cease if Providence by war, or plague, or some
catastrophe were to destroy all the accumulated stores of knowledge
which have been transmitted from antiquity in books (Praef., B
verso). What is known of the life of this almost forgotten scholar
has been collected by G. Weill (De Gulielmi Postelli vita et indole,
1892). He visited the East, brought back oriental MSS., and was more
than once imprisoned on charges of heresy. He dreamed of converting
the Mohammedans, and of uniting the whole world under the empire of
France.]
In this last stage of the Renaissance, which includes the first
quarter of the seventeenth century, soil was being prepared in which
the idea of Progress could germinate, and our history of it origin
definitely begins with the work of two men who belong to this age,
Bodin, who is hardly known except to special students of political
science, and Bacon, who is known to all the world. Both had a more
general grasp of the significance of their own time than any of
their contemporaries, and though neither of them discovered a theory
of Progress, they both made contributions to thought which directly
contributed to its subsequent appearance.
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