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

J.B. Bury

CHAPTER I

SOME INTERPRETATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY: BODIN AND LE ROY

1.

It is a long descent from the genius of Machiavelli to the French
historian, Jean Bodin, who published his introduction to historical
studies [Footnote: Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem,
1566.] about forty years after Machiavelli's death. His views and
his method differ widely from those of that great pioneer, whom he
attacks. His readers were not arrested by startling novelties or
immoral doctrine; he is safe, and dull.

But Bodin had a much wider range of thought than Machiavelli, whose
mind was entirely concentrated on the theory of politics; and his
importance for us lies not in the political speculations by which he
sought to prove that monarchy is the best form of government
[Footnote: Les six livres de la Republique, 1576.], but in his
attempt to substitute a new theory of universal history for that
which prevailed in the Middle Ages. He rejected the popular
conception of a golden age and a subsequent degeneration of mankind;
and he refuted the view, generally current among medieval
theologians, and based on the prophecies of Daniel, which divided
the course of history into four periods corresponding to the
Babylonian Persian, Macedonian, and Roman monarchies, the last of
which was to endure till the day of Judgement. Bodin suggests a
division into three great periods: the first, of about two thousand
years, in which the South-Eastern peoples were predominant; the
second, of the same duration, in which those whom he calls the
Middle (Mediterranean) peoples came to the front; the third, in
which the Northern nations who overthrew Rome became the leaders in
civilisation. Each period is stamped by the psychological character
of the three racial groups. The note of the first is religion, of
the second practical sagacity, of the third warfare and inventive
skill. This division actually anticipates the synthesis of Hegel.
[Footnote: Hegel's division is (1) the Oriental, (2) a, the Greek,
b, the Roman, and (3) the Germanic worlds.] But the interesting
point is that it is based on anthropological considerations, in
which climate and geography are taken into account; and,
notwithstanding the crudeness of the whole exposition and the
intrusion of astrological arguments, it is a new step in the study
of universal history. [Footnote: Climates and geography. The fullest
discussion will be found in the Republique, Book v. cap. i. Here
Bodin anticipated Montesquieu. There was indeed nothing new in the
principle; it had been recognised by Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle,
Polybius, and other Greeks, and in a later age by Roger Bacon.

But Bodin first developed and applied it methodically. This part of
his work was ignored, and in the eighteenth century Montesquieu's
speculations on the physical factors in history were applauded as a
new discovery.]

I have said that Bodin rejected the theory of the degeneration of
man, along with the tradition of a previous age of virtue and
felicity. [Footnote: See especially Methodus, cap. v. pp. 124, 130,
136.] The reason which he alleged against it is important. The
powers of nature have always been uniform. It is illegitimate to
suppose that she could at one time produce the men and conditions
postulated by the theory of the golden age, and not produce them at
another. In other words, Bodin asserts the principle of the
permanent and undiminishing capacities of nature, and, as we shall
see in the sequel, this principle was significant. It is not to be
confounded with the doctrine of the immutability of human things
assumed by Machiavelli. The human scene has vastly changed since the
primitive age of man; "if that so-called golden age could be revoked
and compared with our own, we should consider it iron." [Footnote:
Methodus, cap. VII. p. 353.] For history largely depends on the will
of men, which is always changing; every day new laws, new customs,
new institutions, both secular and religious, come into being, and
new errors. [Footnote: Ib. cap. I. p. 12.]

But in this changing scene we can observe a certain regularity, a
law of oscillation. Rise is followed by fall, and fall by rise; it
is a mistake to think that the human race is always deteriorating.
[Footnote: Ib. cap. VII. p. 361: "cum aeterna quadam lege naturae
conversio rerum omnium velut in orbem redire videatur, ut aeque
vitia virtutibus, ignoratio scientiae, turpe honesto consequens sit,
atque tenebrae luci, fallunt qui genus hominum semper deterius
seipso evadere putant."] If that were so, we should long ago have
reached the lowest stage of vice and iniquity. On the contrary,
there has been, through the series of oscillations, a gradual
ascent. In the ages which have been foolishly designated as gold and
silver men lived like the wild beasts; and from that state they have
slowly reached the humanity of manners and the social order which
prevail to-day. [Footnote: Ib. p. 356.]

Thus Bodin recognises a general progress in the past. That is
nothing new; it was the view, for instance, of the Epicureans. But
much had passed in the world since the philosophy of Epicurus was
alive, and Bodin had to consider twelve hundred years of new
vicissitudes. Could the Epicurean theory be brought up to date?

2.

Bodin deals with the question almost entirely in respect to human
knowledge. In definitely denying the degeneration of man, Bodin was
only expressing what many thinkers of the sixteenth century had been
coming to feel, though timidly and obscurely. The philosophers and
men of science, who criticised the ancients in special departments,
did not formulate any general view on the privileged position of
antiquity. Bodin was the first to do so.

Knowledge, letters, and arts have their vicissitudes, he says; they
rise, increase, and nourish, and then languish and die. After the
decay of Rome there was a long fallow period; but this was followed
by a splendid revival of knowledge and an intellectual productivity
which no other age has exceeded. The scientific discoveries of the
ancients deserve high praise; but the moderns have not only thrown
new light on phenomena which they had incompletely explained, they
have made new discoveries of equal or indeed greater importance.
Take, for instance, the mariner's compass which has made possible
the circumnavigation of the earth and a universal commerce, whereby
the world has been changed, as it were, into a single state.
[Footnote: Cardan had already signalised the compass, printing, and
gunpowder as three modern inventions, to which "the whole of
antiquity has nothing equal to show." He adds, "I pass over the
other inventions of this age which, though wonderful, form rather a
development of ancient arts than surpass the intellects of our
ancestors." De subtilitate, lib. 3 ad init. (Opera, iii. p. 609).]
Take the advances we have made in geography and astronomy; the
invention of gunpowder; the development of the woollen and other
industries. The invention of printing alone can be set against
anything that the ancients achieved. [Footnote: Methodus, cap. VII.,
pp. 359-61. Bodin also points out that there was an improvement, in
some respects, in manners and morals since the early Roman Empire;
for instance, in the abolition of gladiatorial spectacles (p. 359).]

An inference from all this, obvious to a modern reader, would be
that in the future there will be similar oscillations, and new
inventions and discoveries as remarkable as any that have been made
in the past. But Bodin does not draw this inference. He confines
himself to the past and present, and has no word to say about the
vicissitudes of the future. But he is not haunted by any vision of
the end of the world, or the coming of Antichrist; three centuries
of humanism lay between him and Roger Bacon.

3.

And yet the influence of medievalism, which it had been the work of
those three centuries to overcome, was still pervasively there.
Still more the authority of the Greeks and Romans, which had been
set up by the revival of learning, was, without their realising it,
heavy even upon thinkers like Bodin, who did not scruple freely to
criticise ancient authors. And so, in his thoughtful attempt to find
a clew to universal history, he was hampered by theological and
cosmic theories, the legacy of the past. It is significant of the
trend of his mind that when he is discussing the periodic decline of
science and letters, he suggests that it may be due to the direct
action of God, punishing those who misapplied useful sciences to the
destruction of men.

But his speculations were particularly compromised by his belief in
astrology, which, notwithstanding the efforts of humanists like
Petrarch, Aeneas Sylvius, and Pico to discredit it, retained its
hold over the minds of many eminent, otherwise emancipated, thinkers
throughout the period of the Renaissance. [Footnote: Bodin was also
a firm believer in sorcery. His La Demonomanie (1578) is a monument
of superstition.] Here Bodin is in the company of Machiavelli and
Lord Bacon. But not content with the doctrine of astral influence on
human events, he sought another key to historical changes in the
influence of numbers, reviving the ideas of Pythagoras and Plato,
but working them out in a way of his own. He enumerates the
durations of the lives of many famous men, to show that they can be
expressed by powers of 7 and 9, or the product of these numbers.
Other numbers which have special virtues are the powers of 12, the
perfect number [Footnote: I.e. a number equal to the sum of all its
factors.] 496, and various others. He gives many examples to prove
that these mystic numbers determine the durations of empires and
underlie historical chronology. For instance, the duration of the
oriental monarchies from Ninus to the Conquest of Persia by
Alexander the Great was 1728 (= 12 cubed) years. He gives the Roman
republic from the foundation of Rome to the battle of Actium 729 (=9
cubed) years. [Footnote: Methodus, cap. v. pp. 265 sqq.]

4.

From a believer in such a theory, which illustrates the limitations
of men's outlook on the world in the Renaissance period, we could
perhaps hardly expect a vision of Progress. The best that can be
said for it is that, both here and in his astrological creed, Bodin
is crudely attempting to bring human history into close connection
with the rest of the universe, and to establish the view that the
whole world is built on a divine plan by which all the parts are
intimately interrelated. [Footnote: Cp. Baudrillart, J. Bodin et son
temps, p. 148 (1853). This monograph is chiefly devoted to a full
analysis of La Republique.] He is careful, however, to avoid
fatalism. He asserts, as we have seen, that history depends largely
on the will of men. And he comes nearer to the idea of Progress than
any one before him; he is on the threshold.

For if we eliminate his astrological and Pythagorean speculations,
and various theological parentheses which do not disturb his
argument, his work announces a new view of history which is
optimistic regarding man's career on earth, without any reference to
his destinies in a future life. And in this optimistic view there
are three particular points to note, which were essential to the
subsequent growth of the idea of Progress. In the first place, the
decisive rejection of the theory of degeneration, which had been a
perpetual obstacle to the apprehension of that idea. Secondly, the
unreserved claim that his own age was fully equal, and in some
respects superior, to the age of classical antiquity, in respect of
science and the arts. He leaves the ancients reverently on their
pedestal, but he erects another pedestal for the moderns, and it is
rather higher. We shall see the import of this when we come to
consider the intellectual movement in which the idea of Progress was
afterwards to emerge. In the third place, he had a conception of the
common interest of all the peoples of the earth, a conception which
corresponded to the old ecumenical idea of the Greeks and Romans,
[Footnote: See above, p. 23.] but had now a new significance through
the discoveries of modern navigators. He speaks repeatedly of the
world as a universal state, and suggests that the various races, by
their peculiar aptitudes and qualities, contribute to the common
good of the whole. This idea of the "solidarity" of peoples was to
be an important element in the growth of the doctrine of Progress.
[Footnote: Republique, Book v. cap. 1 (p. 690; ed. 1593); Methodus,
cap. vi. p. 194; cap. vii. p. 360.]

These ideas were in the air. Another Frenchman, the classical
scholar, Louis Le Roy, translator of Plato and Aristotle, put
forward similar views in a work of less celebrity, On the
Vicissitude or Variety of the Things in the Universe. [Footnote: De
la vicissitude ou variete des choses en l'univers, 1577, 2nd ed.
(which I have used), 1584.] It contains a survey of great periods in
which particular peoples attained an exceptional state of dominion
and prosperity, and it anticipates later histories of civilisation
by dwelling but slightly on political events and bringing into
prominence human achievements in science, philosophy, and the arts.
Beginning with the advance of man from primitive rudeness to ordered
society--a sketch based on the conjectures of Plato in the
Protagoras--Le Roy reviews the history, and estimates the merits, of
the Egyptians, Assyrians and Persians, the Greeks, Romans and
Saracens, and finally of the modern age. The facts, he thinks,
establish the proposition that the art of warfare, eloquence,
philosophy, mathematics, and the fine arts, generally flourish and
decline together.

But they do decline. Human things are not perpetual; all pass
through the same cycle--beginning, progress, perfection, corruption,
end. This, however, does not explain the succession of empires in
the world, the changes of the scene of prosperity from one people or
set of peoples to another. Le Roy finds the cause in providential
design. God, he believes, cares for all parts of the universe and
has distributed excellence in arms and letters now to Asia, now to
Europe, again to Africa, letting virtue and vice, knowledge and
ignorance travel from country to country, that all in their turn may
share in good and bad fortune, and none become too proud through
prolonged prosperity.

But what of the modern age in Western Europe? It is fully the equal,
he assevers, of the most illustrious ages of the past, and in some
respects it is superior. Almost all the liberal and mechanical arts
of antiquity, which had been lost for about 1200 years, have been
restored, and there have been new inventions, especially printing,
and the mariner's compass, and "I would give the third place to
gunnery but that it seems invented rather for the ruin than for the
utility of the human race." In our knowledge of astronomy and
cosmography we surpass the ancients." We can affirm that the whole
world is now known, and all the races of men; they can interchange
all their commodities and mutually supply their needs, as
inhabitants of the same city or world-state." And hence there has
been a notable increase of wealth.

Vice and suffering, indeed, are as grave as ever, and we are
afflicted by the trouble of heresies; but this does not prove a
general deterioration of morals. If that inveterate complaint, the
refrain chanted by old men in every age, were true, the world would
already have reached the extreme limit of wickedness, and integrity
would have disappeared utterly. Seneca long ago made the right
criticism. Hoc maiores nostri questi sunt, hoc nos querimur, hoc
posteri nostri querentur, eversos esse mores .... At ista stant loco
eodem. Perhaps Le Roy was thinking particularly of that curious book
the Apology for Herodotus, in which the eminent Greek scholar, Henri
Estienne, exposed with Calvinistic prejudice the iniquities of
modern times and the corruption of the Roman Church. [Footnote:
L'Introduction au traite de la conformite des merveilles anciennes
avec les modernes, ou traite preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote,
ed. Ristelhuber, 2 vols., 1879. The book was published in 1566.]

But if we are to judge by past experience, does it not follow that
this modern age must go the same way as the great ages of the past
which it rivals or even surpasses? Our civilisation, too, having
reached perfection, will inevitably decline and pass away: is not
this the clear lesson of history? Le Roy does not shirk the issue;
it is the point to which his whole exposition has led and he puts it
vividly.

"If the memory of the past is the instruction of the present and the
premonition of the future, it is to be feared that having reached so
great excellence, power, wisdom, studies, books, industries will
decline, as has happened in the past, and disappear--confusion
succeeding to the order and perfection of to-day, rudeness to
civilisation, ignorance to knowledge. I already foresee in
imagination nations, strange in form, complexion, and costume,
overwhelming Europe--like the Goths, Huns, Vandals, Lombards,
Saracens of old--destroying our cities and palaces, burning our
libraries, devastating all that is beautiful. I foresee in all
countries wars, domestic and foreign, factions and heresies which
will profane all things human and divine; famines, plagues, and
floods; the universe approaching an end, world-wide confusion, and
the return of things to their original chaos." [Footnote: It is
characteristic of the age that in the last sentence the author goes
beyond the issue and contemplates the possibility which still
haunted men's minds that the end of the world might not be far off.]

But having conducted us to this pessimistic conclusion Le Roy finds
it repugnant, and is unwilling to acquiesce in it. Like an
embarrassed dramatist he escapes from the knot which he has tied by
introducing the deus ex machina.

"However much these things proceed according to the fatal law of the
world, and have their natural causes, yet events depend principally
on Divine Providence which is superior to nature and alone knows the
predetermined times of events." That is to say, it depends, after
all, on Providence whether the argument from past experience is
valid. Who knows whether the modern age may not prove the exception
to the law which has hitherto prevailed? Let us act as if it would.

This is the practical moral that Le Roy enforces in the last book of
his dissertation. We must not allow ourselves to be paralysed or
dismayed by the destinies of past civilisations, but must work hard
to transmit to posterity all that has been achieved, and augment the
discoveries of the past by new researches. For knowledge is
inexhaustible. "Let us not be so simple as to believe that the
ancients have known and said everything and left nothing to their
successors. Or that nature gave them all her favours in order to
remain sterile ever after." Here Le Roy lays down Bodin's principle
which was to be asserted more urgently in the following century--the
permanence of natural forces. Nature is the same now as always, and
can produce as great intellects as ever. The elements have the same
power, the constellations keep their old order, men are made of the
same material. There is nothing to hinder the birth in this age of
men equal in brains to Plato, Aristotle, or Hippocrates.

Philosophically, Le Roy's conclusion is lame enough. We are asked to
set aside the data of experience and act on an off-chance. But the
determination of the optimist to escape from the logic of his own
argument is significant. He has no conception of an increasing
purpose or underlying unity in the history of man, but he thinks
that Providence--the old Providence of St. Augustine, who arranged
the events of Roman history with a view to the coming of Christ--
may, for some unknown reason, prolong indefinitely the modern age.
He is obeying the instinct of optimism and confidence which was
already beginning to create the appropriate atmosphere for the
intellectual revolution of the coming century.

His book was translated into English, but neither in France nor in
England had it the same influence as the speculations of Bodin. But
it insinuated, as the reader will have observed, the same three
views which Bodin taught, and must have helped to propagate them:
that the world has not degenerated; that the modern age is not
inferior to classical antiquity; and that the races of the earth
form now a sort of "mundane republic."
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