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

J.B. Bury

Section 20 of 21 - Table of Contents
CHAPTER XVIII

MATERIAL PROGRESS: THE EXHIBITION OF 1851

1.

It is not easy for a new idea of the speculative order to penetrate
and inform the general consciousness of a community until it has
assumed some external and concrete embodiment or is recommended by
some striking material evidence. In the case of Progress both these
conditions were fulfilled in the period 1820 to 1850. In the Saint-
Simonian Church, and in the attempts of Owen and Cabet to found
ideal societies, people saw practical enterprises inspired by the
idea. They might have no sympathy with these enterprises, but their
attention was attracted. And at the same time they were witnessing a
rapid transformation of the external conditions of life, a movement
to the continuation of which there seemed no reason for setting any
limit in the future. The spectacular results of the advance of
science and mechanical technique brought home to the mind of the
average man the conception of an indefinite increase of man's power
over nature as his brain penetrated her secrets. This evident
material progress which has continued incessantly ever since has
been a mainstay of the general belief in Progress which is prevalent
to-day.

England was the leader in this material progress, of which the
particulars are familiar and need not be enumerated here. The
discovery of the power of steam and the potentialities of coal
revolutionised the conditions of life. Men who were born at the
beginning of the century had seen, before they had passed the age of
thirty, the rapid development of steam navigation, the illumination
of towns and houses by gas, the opening of the first railway.

It was just before this event, the opening of the Liverpool and
Manchester railway, which showed how machinery would abbreviate
space as it had SIR THOMAS MORE, OR COLLOQUIES ON THE PROGRESS OF
SOCIETY (1829). There we see the effect of the new force on his
imagination. "Steam," he says, "will govern the world next, ... and
shake it too before its empire is established." The biographer of
Nelson devotes a whole conversation to the subject of "steam and
war." But the theme of the book is the question of moral and social
progress, on which the author inclines to the view that "the world
will continue to improve, even as it has hitherto been continually
improving; and that the progress of knowledge and the diffusion of
Christianity will bring about at last, when men become Christian in
reality as well as in name, something like that Utopian state of
which philosophers have loved to dream." This admission of Progress,
cautious though it was, circumscribed by reserves and compromised by
hesitations, coming from such a conservative pillar of Church and
State as Southey, is a notable sign of the times, when we remember
that the idea was still associated then with revolution and heresy.

It is significant too that at the same time an octogenarian
mathematician of Aberdeen was composing a book on the same subject.
Hamilton's PROGRESS OF SOCIETY is now utterly forgotten, but it must
have contributed in its day to propagating the same moderate view of
Progress, consistent with orthodoxy, which Southey held. "The belief
of the perfectibility of human nature and the attainment of a golden
age in which vice and misery have no place, will only be entertained
by an enthusiast; but an inquiry into the means of improving our
nature and enlarging our happiness is consistent with sober reason,
and is the most important subject, merely human, that can engage the
mind of man."[Footnote: P. 13. The book was published posthumously
by Murray in 1830, a year after the author's death.] [Footnote:
"Progress of Society." The phrase was becoming common; e.g.
Russell's History of Modern Europe (1822) has the sub-title A view
of the Progress of Society, etc. The didactic poem of Payne Knight,
The Progress of Civil Society (1796), a very dull performance, was
quite unaffected by the dreams of Priestley or Godwin. It was
towards the middle of the nineteenth century that Progress, without
any qualifying phrase, came into use.]

2.

We have been told by Tennyson that when he went by the first train
from Liverpool to Manchester (1830) he thought that the wheels ran
in grooves.

"Then I made this line:

Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of
change." [Footnote: See Tennyson, Memoir by his Son, vol. i. p.
195.]

LOCKSLEY HALL, which was published in 1842, illustrates how the idea
of Progress had begun to creep into the imagination of Englishmen.
Though subsidiary to a love story, it is the true theme of the poem.
The pulsation of eager interest in the terrestrial destinies of
humanity, the large excitement of living in a "wondrous Mother-age,"
dreams of the future, quicken the passion of the hero's youth. His
disappointment in love disenchants him; he sees the reverse side of
civilisation, but at last he finds an anodyne for his palsied heart
in a more sober version of his earlier faith, a chastened belief in
his Mother-age. He can at least discern an increasing purpose in
history, and can be sure that "the thoughts of men are widened with
the process of the suns." The novelty of the poem lay in finding a
cathartic cure for a private sorrow, not in religion or in nature,
but in the modern idea of Progress. It may be said to mark a stage
in the career of the idea.

The view of civilisation which Tennyson took as his MOTIF had no
revolutionary implications, suggested no impatience or anger with
the past. The startling prospect unfolding itself before "the long
result of time," and history is justified by the promise of to-day:

The centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed.

Very different was the spirit in which another great poet composed,
nearly twenty years later, a wonderful hymn of Progress. Victor
Hugo's PLEIN CEIL, in his epic LA LEGENDE DES SIECLES,[Footnote:
A.D. 1859.] announces a new era of the world in which man, the
triumphant rebel, delivered from his past, will move freely forward
on a glorious way. The poet is inspired not by faith in a continuous
development throughout the ages, but by the old spirit of the
Revolution, and he sees in the past only a heavy chain which the
race at last flings off. The horrible past has gone, not to return:
"ce monde est mort"; and the poem is at once a paean on man's
victorious rebellion against it and a dithyramb on the prospect of
his future.

Man is imagined as driving through the heavens an aerial car to
which the four winds are harnessed, mounting above the clouds, and
threatening to traverse the ether.

Superbe, il plane, avec un hymne en ses agres;
 Et l'on voit voir passer la strophe du progres.
 Il est la nef, il est le phare!
 L'homme enfin prend son sceptre et jette son baton.
 Et l'on voit s'envoler le calcul de Newton
 Monte sur l'ode de Pindare.


But if this vision foreshadows the conquest of the air, its
significance is symbolic rather than literal, and, like Pindar
checking the steeds of his song, Hugo returns to earth:

Pas si loin! pas si haut! redescendons. Restons
 L'homme, restons Adam; mais non l'homme a tatons,
 Mais non l'Adam tombe! Tout autre reve altere
 L'espece d'ideal qui convient a la terre.
 Contentons-nous du mot: meilleur! ecrit partout.


Dawn has appeared, after six thousand years in the fatal way, and
man, freed by "the invisible hand" from the weight of his chains,
has embarked for new shores:

Ou va-t-il ce navire? II va, de jour vetu,
 A l'avenir divin et pur, a la vertu,
 A la science qu'on voit luire,
 A la mort des fleaux, a l'oubli genereux,
 A l'abondance, au caime, au rire, a l'homme heureux,
 Il va, ce glorieux navire.


Oh! ce navire fait le voyage sacre!
 C'est l'ascension bleue a son premier degre;
 Hors de l'antique et vil decombre,
 Hors de la pesanteur, c'est l'avenir fonde;
 C'est le destin de l'homme a la fin evade,
 Qui leve l'ancre et sort de l'ombre!


The union of humanity in a universal commonwealth, which Tennyson
had expressed as "the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the
World," the goal of many theorists of Progress, becomes in Hugo's
imagination something more sublime. The magic ship of man's destiny
is to compass the cosmopolis of the Stoics, a terrestrial order in
harmony with the whole universe.

Nef magique et supreme! elle a, rien qu'eri marchant,
 Change le cri terrestre en pur et joyeux chant,
 Rajeuni les races fletries,
 Etabli l'ordre vrai, montre le chemin sur,
 Dieu juste! et fait entrer dans l'homme tant d'azur
 Qu'elle a supprime les patries!


Faisant a l'homme avec le ciel une cite,
 Une pensee avec toute l'immensite,
 Elle abolit les vieilles regles;
 Elle abaisse les monts, elle annule les tours;
 Splendide, elle introduit les peuples, marcheurs lourds,
 Dans la communion des aigles.


3.

Between 1830 and 1850 railway transport spread throughout Great
Britain and was introduced on the Continent, and electricity was
subdued to man's use by the invention of telegraphy. The great
Exhibition of London in 1851 was, in one of its aspects, a public
recognition of the material progress of the age and the growing
power of man over the physical world. Its aim, said a contemporary,
was "to seize the living scroll of human progress, inscribed with
every successive conquest of man's intellect."[Footnote: Edinburgh
Review (October 1851), p. 562, in a review of the Official Catalogue
of the Exhibition.] The Prince Consort, who originated the
Exhibition, explained its significance in a public speech:

"Nobody who has paid any attention to the peculiar features of our
present era will doubt for a moment that we are living at a period
of most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to accomplish that
great end to which indeed all history points--THE REALISATION OF THE
UNITY OF MANKIND. ... The distances which separated the different
nations and parts of the globe are rapidly vanishing before the
achievements of modern invention, and we can traverse them with
incredible ease; the languages of all nations are known, and their
acquirements placed within the reach of everybody; thought is
communicated with the rapidity, and even by the power, of lightning.
On the other hand, the GREAT PRINCIPLE OF DIVISION OF LABOUR, which
may be called the moving power of civilisation, is being extended to
all branches of science, industry, and art... Gentlemen, the
Exhibition of 1851 is to give us a true test and a living picture of
the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived
in this great task, and a new starting-point from which all nations
will be able to direct their further exertions." [Footnote: Martin,
Life of the Prince Consort (ed. 3), iii. p. 247. The speech was
delivered at a banquet at the Mansion House on March 21, 1850.]

The point emphasised here is the "solidarity" of the world. The
Exhibition is to bring home to men's consciousness the community of
all the inhabitants of the earth. The assembled peoples, wrote
Thackeray, in his "May-day Ode," [Footnote: Published in the Times,
April 30, 1851. The Exhibition was opened on May I.] See the
sumptuous banquet set, The brotherhood of nations met Around the
feast.

And this was the note struck in the leading article of the Times on
the opening day: "The first morning since the creation that all
peoples have assembled from all parts of the world and done a common
act." It was claimed that the Exhibition signified a new,
intelligent, and moral movement which "marks a great crisis in the
history of the world," and foreshadows universal peace.

England, said another writer, produced Bacon and Newton, the two
philosophers "who first lent direction and force to the stream of
industrial science; we have been the first also to give the widest
possible base to the watch-tower of international progress, which
seeks the formation of the physical well-being of man and the
extinction of the meaner jealousies of commerce."[Footnote:
Edinburgh Review, loc. cit.]

These quotations show that the great Exhibition was at the time
optimistically regarded, not merely as a record of material
achievements, but as a demonstration that humanity was at last well
on its way to a better and happier state, through the falling of
barriers and the resulting insight that the interests of all are
closely interlocked. A vista was suggested, at the end of which far-
sighted people might think they discerned Tennyson's "Federation of
the World."

4.

Since the Exhibition, western civilisation has advanced steadily,
and in some respects more rapidly than any sober mind could have
predicted--civilisation, at least, in the conventional sense, which
has been not badly defined as "the development of material ease, of
education, of equality, and of aspirations to rise and succeed in
life." [Footnote: B. Kidd, Social Evolution, p. 368.] The most
striking advance has been in the technical conveniences of life--
that is, in the control over natural forces. It would be superfluous
to enumerate the discoveries and inventions since 1850 which have
abridged space, economised time, eased bodily suffering, and reduced
in some ways the friction of life, though they have increased it in
others. This uninterrupted series of technical inventions,
proceeding concurrently with immense enlargements of all branches of
knowledge, has gradually accustomed the least speculative mind to
the conception that civilisation is naturally progressive, and that
continuous improvement is part of the order of things.

So far the hopes of 1851 have been fulfilled. But against all this
technical progress, with the enormous expansion of industry and
commerce, dazzling to the man in the market-place when he pauses to
reflect, have to be set the exploitation and sufferings of
industrial workers, the distress of intense economic competition,
the heavier burdens of preparation for modern war. The very increase
of "material ease" seemed unavoidably to involve conditions
inconsistent with universal happiness; and the communications which
linked the peoples of the world together modified the methods of
warfare instead of bringing peace. "Toutes nos merveilleuses
inventions sont aussi puissantes pour le mal que pour le bien."
[Footnote: H. de Ferron, Theorie du progres (1867), ii. 439.] One
fact indeed might be taken as an index that humanity was morally
advancing--the abolition of slavery in America at the price of a
long and sanguinary war. Yet some triumphs of philanthropy hardly
seemed to endanger the conclusion that, while knowledge is
indefinitely progressive, there is no good reason for sanguine hopes
that man is "perfectible" or that universal happiness is attainable.
A thoughtful writer observed, discussing Progress in 1864, that the
innumerable individual steps in the growth of knowledge and business
organisation have not been combined, so far, to produce a general
advance in the happiness of life; each step brings increase of
pressure. [Footnote: Lotze, Microcosmus (Eng. tr.), vol. ii. p.
396.]

Yet in spite of all adverse facts and many eminent dissenters the
belief in social Progress has on the whole prevailed. This triumph
of optimism was promoted by the victory of a revolutionary
hypothesis in another field of inquiry, which suddenly electrified
the world. [Footnote: Against Lotze we might set many opinions which
do not seem to have been influenced by the doctrine of evolution.
For instance, the optimism of M. Marcellin-Berthelot in a letter to
Renan in 1863. He says (Renan, Dialogues, p. 233) that one of the
general results of historical study is "the fact of the incessant
progress of human societies in science, in material conditions, and
in morality, three correlatives. ... Societies become more and more
civilised, and I will venture to say more and more virtuous. The sum
of good is always increasing, and the sum of evil diminishing, in
the same measure as the sum of truth increases and the sum of
ignorance diminishes."

In 1867 Emerson delivered an address at Harvard on the "Progress of
Culture" (printed in his Letters and Social Aims), in which he
enumerates optimistically the indications of social advance: "the
new scope of social science; the abolition of capital punishment and
of imprisonment for debt: the improvement of prisons; the efforts
for the suppression of intemperance, vice, etc.," and asks: "Who
would live in the stone age, or the bronze, or the iron, or the
lacustrine? Who does not prefer the age of steel, of gold, of coal,
petroleum, cotton, steam, electricity, and the spectroscope?"

The discursive Thoughts on the Future of the Human Race, published
in 1866, by W. Ellis (1800-81), a disciple of J. S. Mill, would have
been remarkable if it had appeared half a century earlier. He is
untouched by the theory of evolution, and argues on common-sense
grounds that Progress is inevitable.]
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