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

J.B. Bury

CHAPTER V

THE PROGRESS OF KNOWLEDGE: FONTENELLE

1.

Nine months before the first part of Perrault's work appeared a
younger and more brilliant man had formulated, in a short tract, the
essential points of the doctrine of the progress of knowledge. It
was Fontenelle.

Fontenelle was an anima naturaliter moderna. Trained in the
principles of Descartes, he was one of those who, though like
Descartes himself, too critical to swear by a master, appreciated
unreservedly the value of the Cartesian method. Sometimes, he says,
a great man gives the tone to his age; and this is true of
Descartes, who can claim the glory of having established a new art
of reasoning. He sees the effects in literature. The best books on
moral and political subjects are distinguished by an arrangement and
precision which he traces to the esprit geometrique characteristic
of Descartes. [Footnote: Sur l'utilite des mathematiques el de la
physique (Oeuvres, iii. p. 6, ed. 1729).] Fontenelle himself had
this "geometrical mind," which we see at its best in Descartes and
Hobbes and Spinoza.

He had indeed a considerable aptitude for letters. He wrote poor
verses, and could not distinguish good poetry from bad. That perhaps
was the defect of l'esprit geometrique. But he wrote lucid prose.
There was an ironical side to his temper, and he had an ingenious
paradoxical wit, which he indulged, with no little felicity, in his
early work, Dialogues of the Dead. These conversations, though they
show no dramatic power and are simply a vehicle for the author's
satirical criticisms on life, are written with a light touch, and
are full of surprises and unexpected turns. The very choice of the
interlocutors shows a curious fancy, which we do not associate with
the geometrical intellect. Descartes is confronted with the Third
False Demetrius, and we wonder what the gourmet Apicius will find to
say to Galileo.

2.

In the Dialogues of the Dead, which appeared in 1683, the Ancient
and Modern controversy is touched on more than once, and it is the
subject of the conversation between Socrates and Montaigne. Socrates
ironically professes to expect that the age of Montaigne will show a
vast improvement on his own; that men will have profited by the
experience of many centuries; and that the old age of the world will
be wiser and better regulated than its youth. Montaigne assures him
that it is not so, and that the vigorous types of antiquity, like
Pericles, Aristides, and Socrates himself, are no longer to be
found. To this assertion Socrates opposes the doctrine of the
permanence of the forces of Nature. Nature has not degenerated in
her other works; why should she cease to produce reasonable men?

He goes on to observe that antiquity is enlarged and exalted by
distance: "In our own day we esteemed our ancestors more than they
deserved, and now our posterity esteems us more than we deserve.
There is really no difference between our ancestors, ourselves, and
our posterity. C'est toujours la meme chose." But, objects
Montaigne, I should have thought that things were always changing;
that different ages had their different characters. Are there not
ages of learning and ages of ignorance, rude ages and polite? True,
replies Socrates, but these are only externalities. The heart of man
does not change with the fashions of his life. The order of Nature
remains constant (l'ordre general de la Nature a l'air bien
constant).

This conclusion harmonises with the general spirit of the Dialogues.
The permanence of the forces of Nature is asserted, but for the
purpose of dismissing the whole controversy as rather futile.
Elsewhere modern discoveries, like the circulation of the blood and
the motions of the earth, are criticised as useless; adding nothing
to the happiness and pleasures of mankind. Men acquired, at an early
period, a certain amount of useful knowledge, to which they have
added nothing; since then they have been slowly discovering things
that are unnecessary. Nature has not been so unjust as to allow one
age to enjoy more pleasures than another. And what is the value of
civilisation? It moulds our words, and embarrasses our actions; it
does not affect our feelings. [Footnote: See the dialogues of Harvey
with Erasistratus (a Greek physician of the third century B.C.);
Galileo with Apicius; Montezuma with Fernando Cortez.]

One might hardly have expected the author of these Dialogues to come
forward a few years later as a champion of the Moderns, even though,
in the dedicatory epistle to Lucian, he compared France to Greece.
But he was seriously interested in the debated question, as an
intellectual problem, and in January 1688 he published his
Digression on the Ancients and Moderns, a short pamphlet, but
weightier and more suggestive than the large work of his friend
Perrault, which began to appear nine months later.

3.

The question of pre-eminence between the Ancients and Moderns is
reducible to another. Were trees in ancient times greater than to-
day? If they were, then Homer, Plato, and Demosthenes cannot be
equalled in modern times; if they were not, they can.

Fontenelle states the problem in this succinct way at the beginning
of the Digression. The permanence of the forces of Nature had been
asserted by Saint Sorlin and Perrault; they had offered no proof,
and had used the principle rather incidentally and by way of
illustration. But the whole inquiry hinged on it. If it can be shown
that man has not degenerated, the cause of the Moderns is
practically won. The issue of the controversy must be decided not by
rhetoric but by physics. And Fontenelle offers what he regards as a
formal Cartesian proof of the permanence of natural forces.

If the Ancients had better intellects than ours, the brains of that
age must have been better arranged, formed of firmer or more
delicate fibres, fuller of "animal spirits." But if such a
difference existed, Nature must have been more vigorous; and in that
case the trees must have profited by that superior vigour and have
been larger and finer. The truth is that Nature has in her hands a
certain paste which is always the same, which she is ever turning
over and over again in a thousand ways, and of which she forms men,
animals, and plants. She has not formed Homer, Demosthenes, and
Plato of a finer or better kneaded clay than our poets, orators, and
philosophers. Do not object that minds are not material. They are
connected by a material bond with the brain, and it is the quality
of this material bond that determines intellectual differences.

But although natural processes do not change from age to age, they
differ in their effects in different climates. "It is certain that
as a result of the reciprocal dependence which exists between all
parts of the material world, differences of climate, which so
clearly affect the life of plants, must also produce some effect on
human brains." May it not be said then that, in consequence of
climatic conditions, ancient Greece and Rome produced men of mental
qualities different from those which could be produced in France?
Oranges grow easily in Italy; it is more difficult to cultivate them
in France. Fontenelle replies that art and cultivation exert a much
greater influence on human brains than on the soil; ideas can be
transported more easily from one country to another than plants; and
as a consequence of commerce and mutual influence, peoples do not
retain the original mental peculiarities due to climate. This may
not be true of the extreme climates in the torrid and glacial zones,
but in the temperate zone we may discount entirely climatic
influence. The climates of Greece and Italy and that of France are
too similar to cause any sensible difference between the Greeks or
Latins and the French.

Saint Sorlin and Perrault had argued directly from the permanence of
vigour in lions or trees to the permanence of vigour in man. If
trees are the same as ever, brains must also be the same. But what
about the minor premiss? Who knows that trees are precisely the
same? It is an indemonstrable assumption that oaks and beeches in
the days of Socrates and Cicero were not slightly better trees than
the oaks and beeches of to-day. Fontenelle saw the weakness of this
reasoning. He saw that it was necessary to prove that the trees, no
less than human brains, have not degenerated. But his a priori proof
is simply a statement of the Cartesian principle of the stability of
natural processes, which he put in a thoroughly unscientific form.
The stability of the laws of nature is a necessary hypothesis,
without which science would be impossible. But here it was put to an
illegitimate use. For it means that, given precisely the same
conditions, the same physical phenomena will occur. Fontenelle
therefore was bound to show that conditions had not altered in such
a way as to cause changes in the quality of nature's organic
productions. He did not do this. He did not take into consideration,
for instance, that climatic conditions may vary from age to age as
well as from country to country.

4.

Having established the natural equality of the Ancients and Moderns,
Fontenelle inferred that whatever differences exist are due to
external conditions--(1) time; (2) political institutions and the
estate of affairs in general.

The ancients were prior in time to us, therefore they were the
authors of the first inventions. For that, they cannot be regarded
as our superiors. If we had been in their place we should have been
the inventors, like them; if they were in ours, they would add to
those inventions, like us. There is no great mystery in that. We
must impute equal merit to the early thinkers who showed the way and
to the later thinkers who pursued it. If the ancient attempts to
explain the universe have been recently replaced by the discovery of
a simple system (the Cartesian), we must consider that the truth
could only be reached by the elimination of false routes, and in
this way the numbers of the Pythagoreans, the ideas of Plato, the
qualities of Aristotle, all served indirectly to advance knowledge.
"We are under an obligation to the ancients for having exhausted
almost all the false theories that could be formed." Enlightened
both by their true views and by their errors, it is not surprising
that we should surpass them.

But all this applies only to scientific studies, like mathematics,
physics, and medicine, which depend partly on correct reasoning and
partly on experience. Methods of reasoning improve slowly, and the
most important advance which has been made in the present age is the
method inaugurated by Descartes. Before him reasoning was loose; he
introduced a more rigid and precise standard, and its influence is
not only manifest in our best works on physics and philosophy, but
is even discernible in books on ethics and religion.

We must expect posterity to excel us as we excel the Ancients,
through improvement of method, which is a science in itself--the
most difficult and least studied of all--and through increase of
experience. Evidently the process is endless (il est evident que
tout cela n'a point de fin), and the latest men of science must be
the most competent.

But this does not apply to poetry or eloquence, round which the
controversy has most violently raged. For poetry and eloquence do
not depend on correct reasoning. They depend principally on vivacity
of imagination, and "vivacity of imagination does not require a long
course of experiments, or a great multitude of rules, to attain all
the perfection of which it is capable." Such perfection might be
attained in a few centuries. If the ancients did achieve perfection
in imaginative literature, it follows that they cannot be surpassed;
but we have no right to say, as their admirers are fond of
pretending, that they cannot be equalled.

5.

Besides the mere nature of time, we have to take into account
external circumstances in considering this question.

If the forces of nature are permanent, how are we to explain the
fact that in the barbarous centuries after the decline of Rome--the
term Middle Ages has not yet come into currency--ignorance was so
dense and deep? This breach of continuity is one of the plausible
arguments of the advocates of the Ancients. Those ages, they say,
were ignorant and barbarous because the Greek and Latin writers had
ceased to be read; as soon as the study of the classical models
revived there was a renaissance of reason and good taste. That is
true, but it proves nothing. Nature never forgot how to mould the
head of Cicero or Livy. She produces in every age men who might be
great men; but the age does not always allow them to exert their
talents. Inundations of barbarians, universal wars, governments
which discourage or do not favour science and art, prejudices which
assume all variety of shapes--like the Chinese prejudice against
dissecting corpses--may impose long periods of ignorance or bad
taste.

But observe that, though the return to the study of the ancients
revived, as at one stroke, the aesthetic ideals which they had
created and the learning which they had accumulated, yet even if
their works had not been preserved we should, though it would have
cost us many long years of labour, have discovered for ourselves
"ideas of the true and the beautiful." Where should we have found
them? Where the ancients themselves found them, after much groping.

6.

The comparison of the life of collective humanity to the life of a
single man, which had been drawn by Bacon and Pascal, Saint Sorlin
and Perrault, contains or illustrates an important truth which bears
on the whole question. Fontenelle puts it thus. An educated mind is,
as it were, composed of all the minds of preceding ages; we might
say that a single mind was being educated throughout all history.
Thus this secular man, who has lived since the beginning of the
world, has had his infancy in which he was absorbed by the most
urgent needs of life; his youth in which he succeeded pretty well in
things of imagination like poetry and eloquence, and even began to
reason, but with more courage than solidity. He is now in the age of
manhood, is more enlightened, and reasons better; but he would have
advanced further if the passion for war had not distracted him and
given him a distaste for the sciences to which he has at last
returned.

Figures, if they are pressed, are dangerous; they suggest
unwarrantable conclusions. It may be illuminative to liken the
development of humanity to the growth of an individual; but to infer
that the human race is now in its old age, merely on the strength of
the comparison, is obviously unjustifiable. That is what Bacon and
the others had done. The fallacy was pointed out by Fontenelle.

From his point of view, an "old age" of humanity, which if it meant
anything meant decay as well as the wisdom of experience, was
contrary to the principle of the permanence of natural forces. Man,
he asserts, will have no old age. He will be always equally capable,
of achieving the successes of his youth; and he will become more and
more expert in the things which become the age of virility. Or "to
drop metaphor, men will never degenerate." In ages to come we may be
regarded--say in America--with the same excess of admiration with
which we regard the ancients. We might push the prediction further.
In still later ages the interval of time which divides us from the
Greeks and Romans will appear so relatively small to posterity that
they will classify us and the ancients as virtually contemporary;
just in the same way as we group together the Greeks and Romans,
though the Romans in their own day were moderns in relation to the
Greeks. In that remote period men will be able to judge without
prejudice the comparative merits of Sophocles and Corneille.

Unreasonable admiration for the ancients is one of the chief
obstacles to progress (le progres des choses). Philosophy not only
did not advance, but even fell into an abyss of unintelligible
ideas, because, through devotion to the authority of Aristotle, men
sought truth in his enigmatic writings instead of seeking it in
nature. If the authority of Descartes were ever to have the same
fortune, the results would be no less disastrous.

7.

This memorable brochure exhibits, without pedantry, perspicuous
arrangement and the "geometrical" precision on which Fontenelle
remarked as one of the notes of the new epoch introduced by
Descartes. It displays too the author's open-mindedness, and his
readiness to follow where the argument leads. He is able already to
look beyond Cartesianism; he knows that it cannot be final. No man
of his time was more open-minded and free from prejudice than
Fontenelle. This quality of mind helped him to turn his eyes to the
future. Perrault and his predecessors were absorbed in the interest
of the present and the past. Descartes was too much engaged in his
own original discoveries to do more than throw a passing glance at
posterity.

Now the prospect of the future was one of the two elements which
were still needed to fashion the theory of the progress of
knowledge. All the conditions for such a theory were present. Bodin
and Bacon, Descartes and the champions of the Moderns--the reaction
against the Renaissance, and the startling discoveries of science--
had prepared the way; progress was established for the past and
present. But the theory of the progress of knowledge includes and
acquires its value by including the indefinite future. This step was
taken by Fontenelle. The idea had been almost excluded by Bacon's
misleading metaphor of old age, which Fontenelle expressly rejects.
Man will have no old age; his intellect will never degenerate; and
"the sound views of intellectual men in successive generations will
continually add up."

But progress must not only be conceived as extending indefinitely
into the future; it must also be conceived as necessary and certain.
This is the second essential feature of the theory. The theory would
have little value or significance, if the prospect of progress in
the future depended on chance or the unpredictable discretion of an
external will. Fontenelle asserts implicitly the certainty of
progress when he declares that the discoveries and improvements of
the modern age would have been made by the ancients if they
exchanged places with the moderns; for this amounts to saying that
science will progress and knowledge increase independently of
particular individuals. If Descartes had not been born, some one
else would have done his work; and there could have been no
Descartes before the seventeenth century. For, as he says in a later
work, [Footnote: Preface des elemens de la geometrie de l'infini
(OEuvres, x. p. 40, ed. 1790).] "there is an order which regulates
our progress. Every science develops after a certain number of
preceding sciences have developed, and only then; it has to await
its turn to burst its shell."

Fontenelle, then, was the first to formulate the idea of the
progress, of knowledge, as a complete doctrine. At the moment the
import and far-reaching effects of the idea were not realised,
either by himself or by others, and his pamphlet, which appeared in
the company of a perverse theory of pastoral poetry, was acclaimed
merely as an able defence of the Moderns.

8.

If the theory of the indefinite progress of knowledge is true, it is
one of those truths which were originally established by false
reasoning. It was established on a principle which excluded
degeneration, but equally excluded evolution; and the whole
conception of nature which Fontenelle had learned from Descartes is
long since dead and buried.

But it is more important to observe that this principle, which
seemed to secure the indefinite progress of knowledge, disabled
Fontenelle from suggesting a theory of the progress of society. The
invariability of nature, as he conceived it, was true of the
emotions and the will, as well as of the intellect. It implied that
man himself would be psychically always the same--unalterable,
incurable. L'ordre general de la Nature a Fair bien constant. His
opinion of the human race was expressed in the Dialogues of the
Dead, [Footnote: It may be seen too in the Plurality of Worlds.] and
it never seems to have varied. The world consists of a multitude of
fools, and a mere handful of reasonable men. Men's passions will
always be the same and will produce wars in the future as in the
past. Civilisation makes no difference; it is little more than a
veneer.

Even if theory had not stood in his way, Fontenelle was the last man
who was likely to dream dreams of social improvement. He was
temperamentally an Epicurean, of the same refined stamp as Epicurus
himself, and he enjoyed throughout his long life--he lived to the
age of a hundred--the tranquillity which was the true Epicurean
ideal. He was never troubled by domestic cares, and his own modest
ambition was satisfied when, at the age of forty, he was appointed
permanent Secretary of the Academy of Sciences. He was not the man
to let his mind dwell on the woes and evils of the world; and the
follies and perversities which cause them interested him only so far
as they provided material for his wit.

It remains, however, noteworthy that the author of the theory of the
progress of knowledge, which was afterwards to expand into a general
theory of human Progress, would not have allowed that this extension
was legitimate; though it was through this extension that
Fontenelle's idea acquired human value and interest and became a
force in the world.

9.

Fontenelle did a good deal more than formulate the idea. He
reinforced it by showing that the prospect of a steady and rapid
increase of knowledge in the future was certified.

The postulate of the immutability of the laws of nature, which has
been the indispensable basis for the advance of modern science, is
fundamental with Descartes. But Descartes did not explicitly insist
on it, and it was Fontenelle, perhaps more than any one else, who
made it current coin. That was a service performed by the disciple;
but he seems to have been original in introducing the fruitful idea
of the sciences as confederate and intimately interconnected
[Footnote: Roger Bacon, as we saw, had a glimpse of this
principle.]; not forming a number of isolated domains, as hitherto,
but constituting a system in which the advance of one will
contribute to the advance of the others. He exposed with masterly
ability the reciprocal relations of physics and mathematics. No man
of his day had a more comprehensive view of all the sciences, though
he made no original contributions to any. His curiosity was
universal, and as Secretary of the Academy he was obliged, according
to his own high standard of his duty, to keep abreast of all that
was being done in every branch of knowledge. That was possible then;
it would be impossible now.

In the famous series of obituary discourses which he delivered on
savants who were members of the Academy, Fontenelle probably thought
that he was contributing to the realisation of this ideal of
"solidarity," for they amounted to a chronicle of scientific
progress in every department. They are free from technicalities and
extraordinarily lucid, and they appealed not only to men of science,
but to those of the educated public who possessed some scientific
curiosity. This brings us to another important role of Fontenelle--
the role of interpreter of the world of science to the world
outside. It is closely related to our subject.

For the popularisation of science, which was to be one of the
features of the nineteenth century, was in fact a condition of the
success of the idea of Progress. That idea could not insinuate
itself into the public mind and become a living force in civilised
societies until the meaning and value of science had been generally
grasped, and the results of scientific discovery had been more or
less diffused. The achievements of physical science did more than
anything else to convert the imaginations of men to the general
doctrine of Progress.

Before the later part of the seventeenth century, the remarkable
physical discoveries of recent date had hardly escaped beyond
academic circles. But an interest in these subjects began to become
the fashion in the later years of Louis XIV. Science was talked in
the salons; ladies studied mechanics and anatomy. Moliere's play,
Les Femmes savantes, which appeared in 1672, is one of the first
indications. In 1686 Fontenelle published his Conversations on the
Plurality of Worlds, in which a savant explains the new astronomy to
a lady in the park of a country house. [Footnote: The Marquise of
the Plurality of Worlds is supposed to be Madame de la Mesangere,
who lived near Rouen, Fontenelle's birthplace. He was a friend and a
frequent visitor at her chateau. See Maigron, Fontenelle, p. 42. The
English translation of 1688 was by Glanvill. A new translation was
published at Dublin as late as 1761.] It is the first book--at least
the first that has any claim to be remembered--in the literature of
popular science, and it is one of the most striking. It met with the
success which it deserved. It was reprinted again and again, and it
was almost immediately translated into English.

The significance of the Plurality of Worlds is indeed much greater
than that of a pioneer work in popularisation and a model in the art
of making technical subjects interesting. We must remember that at
this time the belief that the sun revolves round the earth still
prevailed. Only the few knew better. The cosmic revolution which is
associated with the names of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo was
slow in producing its effects. It was rejected by Bacon; and the
condemnation of Galileo by the Church made Descartes, who dreaded
nothing so much as a collision with the ecclesiastical authorities
unwilling to insist on it. [Footnote: Cp. Bouillier, Histoire de la
philosophie cartesienne, i. p. 42-3.] Milton's Raphael, in the
Eighth Book of Paradise Lost (published 1667), does not venture to
affirm the Copernican system; he explains it sympathetically, but
leaves the question open. [Footnote: Masson (Milton's Poetical
Works, vol. 2) observes that Milton's life (1608-74) "coincides with
the period of the struggle between the two systems" (p. 90).
Milton's friends, the Smectymnians, in answer to Bishop Hall's
Humble Remonstrance (1641), "had cited the Copernican doctrine as an
unquestionable instance of a supreme absurdity." Masson has some
apposite remarks on the influence of the Ptolemaic system "upon the
thinkings and imaginations of mankind everywhere on all subjects
whatsoever till about two hundred years ago."] Fontenelle's book was
an event. It disclosed to the general public a new picture of the
universe, to which men would have to accustom their imaginations.

We may perhaps best conceive all that this change meant by supposing
what a difference it would make to us if it were suddenly discovered
that the old system which Copernicus upset was true after all, and
that we had to think ourselves back into a strictly limited universe
of which the earth is the centre. The loss of its privileged
position by our own planet; its degradation, from a cosmic point of
view, to insignificance; the necessity of admitting the probability
that there may be many other inhabited worlds--all this had
consequences ranging beyond the field of astronomy. It was as if a
man who dreamed that he was living in Paris or London should awake
to discover that he was really in an obscure island in the Pacific
Ocean, and that the Pacific Ocean was immeasurably vaster than he
had imagined. The Marquise, in the Plurality of Worlds, reacts to
the startling illumination: "Voila l'univers si grand que je m'y
perds, je ne sais plus ou je suis; je ne suis plus rien.--La terre
est si effroyablement petite!"

Such a revolution in cosmic values could not fail to exert a
penetrating influence on human thought. The privileged position of
the earth had been a capital feature of the whole doctrine, as to
the universe and man's destinies, which had been taught by the
Church, and it had made that doctrine more specious than it might
otherwise have seemed. Though the Churches could reform their
teaching to meet the new situation, the fact remained that the
Christian scheme sounded less plausible when the central importance
of the human race was shown to be an illusion. Would man, stripped
of his cosmic pretensions, and finding himself lost in the
immensities of space, invent a more modest theory of his destinies
confined to his own little earth--si effroyablement petite? The
eighteenth century answered this question by the theory of Progress.

10.

Fontenelle is one of the most representative thinkers of that
period--we have no distinguishing name for it--which lies between
the characteristic thinkers of the seventeenth century and the
characteristic thinkers of the eighteenth. It is a period of over
sixty years, beginning about 1680, for though Montesquieu and
Voltaire were writing long before 1740, the great influential works
of the "age of illumination" begin with the Esprit des lois in 1748.
The intellectual task of this intervening period was to turn to
account the ideas provided by the philosophy of Descartes, and use
them as solvents of the ideas handed down from the Middle Ages. We
might almost call it the Cartesian period for, though Descartes was
dead, it was in these years that Cartesianism performed its task and
transformed human thought.

When we speak of Cartesianism we do not mean the metaphysical system
of the master, or any of his particular views such as that of innate
ideas. We mean the general principles, which were to leave an
abiding impression on the texture of thought: the supremacy of
reason over authority, the stability of the laws of Nature, rigorous
standards of proof. Fontenelle was far from accepting all the views
of Descartes, whom he does not scruple to criticise; but he was a
true Cartesian in the sense that he was deeply imbued with these
principles, which generated, to use an expression of his own, "des
especes de rebelles, qui conspiraient contre l'ignorance et les
prejuges dominants." [Footnote: Eloge de M. Lemery.] And of all
these rebels against ruling prejudices he probably did more than any
single man to exhibit the consequences of the Cartesian ideas and
drive them home.

The Plurality of Worlds was a contribution to the task of
transforming thought and abolishing ancient error; but the History
of Oracles which appeared in the following year was more
characteristic. It was a free adaptation of an unreadable Latin
treatise by a Dutchman, which in Fontenelle's skilful hands becomes
a vehicle for applying Cartesian solvents to theological authority.
The thesis is that the Greek oracles were a sacerdotal imposture,
and not, as ecclesiastical tradition said, the work of evil spirits,
who were stricken silent at the death of Jesus Christ. The effect
was to discredit the authority of the early Fathers of the Church,
though the writer has the discretion to repudiate such an intention.
For the publication was risky; and twenty years later a Jesuit
Father wrote a treatise to confute it, and exposed the secret
poison, with consequences which might have been disastrous for
Fontenelle if he had not had powerful friends among the Jesuits
themselves. Fontenelle had none of the impetuosity of Voltaire, and
after the publication of the History of Oracles he confined his
criticism of tradition to the field of science. He was convinced
that "les choses fort etablies ne peuvent etre attaquees que par
degrez." [Footnote: Eloge de M. Lemery.]

The secret poison, of which Fontenelle prepared this remarkable dose
with a touch which reminds us of Voltaire, was being administered in
the same Cartesian period, and with similar precautions, by Bayle.
Like Fontenelle, this great sceptic, "the father of modern
incredulity" as he was called by Joseph de Maistre, stood between
the two centuries and belonged to both. Like Fontenelle, he took a
gloomy view of humanity; he had no faith in that goodness of human
nature which was to be a characteristic dogma of the age of
illumination. But he was untouched by the discoveries of science; he
took no interest in Galileo or Newton; and while the most important
work of Fontenelle was the interpretation of the positive advances
of knowledge, Bayle's was entirely subversive.

The principle of unchangeable laws in nature is intimately connected
with the growth of Deism which is a note of this period. The
function of the Deity was virtually confined to originating the
machine of nature, which, once regulated, was set beyond any further
interference on His part, though His existence might be necessary
for its conservation. A view so sharply opposed to the current
belief could not have made way as it did without a penetrating
criticism of the current theology. Such criticism was performed by
Bayle. His works were a school for rationalism for about seventy
years. He supplied to the thinkers of the eighteenth century,
English as well as French, a magazine of subversive arguments, and
he helped to emancipate morality both from theology and from
metaphysics.

This intellectual revolutionary movement, which was propagated in
salons as well as by books, shook the doctrine of Providence which
Bossuet had so eloquently expounded. It meant the enthronement of
reason--Cartesian reason--before whose severe tribunal history as
well as opinions were tried. New rules of criticism were introduced,
new standards of proof. When Fontenelle observed that the existence
of Alexander the Great could not be strictly demonstrated and was no
more than highly probable, [Footnote: Plurality des mondes, sixieme
soir.] it was an undesigned warning that tradition would receive
short shrift at the hands of men trained in analytical Cartesian
methods.

11.

That the issue between the claims of antiquity and the modern age
should have been debated independently in England and France
indicates that the controversy was an inevitable incident in the
liberation of the human spirit from the authority of the ancients.
Towards the end of the century the debate in France aroused
attention in England and led to a literary quarrel, less important
but not less acrimonious than that which raged in France. Sir
William Temple's Essay, Wotton's Reflexions, and Swift's satire the
Battle of the Books are the three outstanding works in the episode,
which is however chiefly remembered on account of its connection
with Bentley's masterly exposure of the fabricated letters of
Phalaris.

The literary debate in France, indeed, could not have failed to
reverberate across the Channel; for never perhaps did the literary
world in England follow with more interest, or appreciate more
keenly the productions of the great French writers of the time. In
describing Will's coffee-house, which was frequented by Dryden and
all who pretended to be interested in polite letters, Macaulay says,
"there was a faction for Perrault and the moderns, a faction for
Boileau and the ancients." In the discussions on this subject a
remarkable Frenchman who had long lived in England as an exile, M.
de Saint Evremond, must have constantly taken part. The disjointed
pieces of which Saint Evremond's writings consist are tedious and
superficial, but they reveal a mind of much cultivation and
considerable common sense. His judgement on Perrault's Parallel is
that the author "has discovered the defects of the ancients better
than he has made out the advantage of the moderns; his book is good
and capable of curing us of abundance of errors." [Footnote: In a
letter to the Duchess of Mazarin, Works, Eng. tr., iii. 418.] He was
not a partisan. But his friend, Sir William Temple, excited by the
French depreciations of antiquity, rushed into the lists with
greater courage than discretion.

Temple was ill equipped for the controversy, though his Essay on
Ancient and Modern Learning (1690) is far from deserving the disdain
of Macaulay, who describes its matter as "ludicrous and contemptible
to the last degree." [Footnote: The only point in it which need be
noted here is that the author questioned the cogency of Fontenelle's
argument, that the forces of nature being permanent human ability is
in all ages the same. "May there not," he asks, "many circumstances
concur to one production that do not to any other in one or many
ages?" Fontenelle speaks of trees. It is conceivable that various
conditions and accidents "may produce an oak, a fig, or a plane-
tree, that shall deserve to be renowned in story, and shall not
perhaps be paralleled in other countries or times. May not the same
have happened in the production, growth, and size of wit and genius
in the world, or in some parts or ages of it, and from many more
circumstances that contributed towards it than what may concur to
the stupendous growth of a tree or animal?"] And it must be
confessed that the most useful result of the Essay was the answer
which it provoked from Wotton. For Wotton had a far wider range of
knowledge, and a more judicious mind, than any of the other
controversialists, with the exception of Fontenelle; and in
knowledge of antiquity he was Fontenelle's superior. His inquiry
stands out as the most sensible and unprejudiced contribution to the
whole debate. He accepts as just the reasoning of Fontenelle "as to
the comparative force of the geniuses of men in the several ages of
the world and of the equal force of men's understandings absolutely
considered in all times since learning first began to be cultivated
amongst mankind." But this is not incompatible with the thesis that
in some branches the ancients excelled all who came after them. For
it is not necessary to explain such excellence by the hypothesis
that there was a particular force of genius evidently discernible in
former ages, but extinct long since, and that nature is now worn out
and spent. There is an alternative explanation. There may have been
special circumstances "which might suit with those ages which did
exceed ours, and with those things wherein they did exceed us, and
with no other age nor thing besides."

But we must begin our inquiry by sharply distinguishing two fields
of mental activity--the field of art, including poetry, oratory,
architecture, painting, and statuary; and the field of knowledge,
including mathematics, natural science, physiology, with all their
dependencies. In the case of the first group there is room for
variety of opinion; but the superiority of the Greeks and Romans in
poetry and literary style may be admitted without prejudice to the
mental equality of the moderns, for it may be explained partly by
the genius of their languages and partly by political circumstances-
-for example, in the case of oratory, [Footnote: This had been noted
by Fontenelle in his Digression.] by the practical necessity of
eloquence. But as regards the other group, knowledge is not a matter
of opinion or taste, and a definite judgement is possible. Wotton
then proceeds to review systematically the field of science, and
easily shows, with more completeness and precision than Perrault,
the superiority of modern methods and the enormous strides which had
been made.

As to the future, Wotton expresses himself cautiously. It is not
easy to say whether knowledge will advance in the next age
proportionally to its advance in this. He has some fears that there
may be a falling away, because ancient learning has still too great
a hold over modern books, and physical and mathematical studies tend
to be neglected. But he ends his Reflexions by the speculation that
"some future age, though perhaps not the next, and in a country now
possibly little thought of, may do that which our great men would be
glad to see done; that is to say, may raise real knowledge, upon
foundations laid in this age, to the utmost possible perfection to
which it may be brought by mortal men in this imperfect state."

The distinction, on which Wotton insisted, between the sciences
which require ages for their development and the imaginative arts
which may reach perfection in a short time had been recognised by
Fontenelle, whose argument on this point differs from that of his
friend Perrault. For Perrault contended that in literature and art,
as well as in science, later generations can, through the advantage
of time and longer experience, attain to a higher excellence than
their predecessors. Fontenelle, on the other hand, held that poetry
and eloquence have a restricted field, and that therefore there must
be a time at which they reach a point of excellence which cannot be
exceeded. It was his personal opinion that eloquence and history
actually reached the highest possible perfection in Cicero and Livy.

But neither Fontenelle nor Wotton came into close quarters with the
problem which was raised--not very clearly, it is true--by Perrault.
Is there development in the various species of literature and art?
Do they profit and enrich themselves by the general advance of
civilisation? Perrault, as we have seen, threw out the suggestion
that increased experience and psychological study enabled the
moderns to penetrate more deeply into the recesses of the human
soul, and therefore to bring to a higher perfection the treatment of
the character, motives, and passions of men. This suggestion admits
of being extended. In the Introduction to his Revolt of Islam,
Shelley, describing his own intellectual and aesthetic experiences,
writes:

The poetry of ancient Greece and Rome, and modern Italy, and our own
country, has been to me like external nature, a passion and an
enjoyment. ... I have considered poetry in its most comprehensive
sense; and have read the poets and the historians and the
metaphysicians whose writings have been accessible to me--and have
looked upon the beautiful and majestic scenery of the earth--as
common sources of those elements which it is the province of the
Poet to embody and combine. And he appends a note:

In this sense there may be such a thing as perfectibility in works
of fiction, notwithstanding the concession often made by the
advocates of human improvement, that perfectibility is a term
applicable only to science.

In other words, all the increases of human experience, from age to
age, all the speculative adventures of the intellect, provide the
artist, in each succeeding generation, with more abundant sources
for aesthetic treatment. As years go on, life in its widest sense
offers more and more materials "which it is the province of the Poet
to embody and combine." This is evidently true; and would it not
seem to follow that literature is not excluded from participating in
the common development of civilisation? One of the latest of the
champions of the Moderns, the Abbe Terrasson, maintained that "to
separate the general view of the progress of the human mind in
regard to natural science, and in regard to belles-lettres, would be
a fitting expedient to a man who had two souls, but it is useless to
him who has only one." [Footnote: Abbe Terrasson, 1670-1750. His
Philosophie applicable a tons les objets de l'esprit et de la raison
was issued posthumously in 1754. His Dissertation critique sur
l'Iliade appeared in 1715.]He put the matter in too abstract a way
to carry conviction; but the nineteenth century was to judge that he
was not entirely wrong. For the question was, as we shall see,
raised anew by Madame de Stael, and the theory was finally to emerge
that art and literature, like laws and institutions, are an
expression of society and therefore inextricably linked with the
other elements of social development--a theory, it may be observed,
which while it has discredited the habit of considering works of art
in a vacuum, dateless and detached, as they were generally
considered by critics of the seventeenth century, leaves the
aesthetic problem much where it was.

Perrault's suggestion as to the enrichment of the material of the
artist by new acquisitions would have served to bring literature and
art into the general field of human development, without
compromising the distinction on which Wotton and others insisted
between the natural sciences and the aesthetic arts. But that
distinction, emphatically endorsed by Voltaire, had the effect of
excluding literature and art from the view of those who in the
eighteenth century recognised progress in the other activities of
man.

12.

It is notable that in this literary controversy the Moderns, even
Fontenelle, seem curiously negligent of the import of the theory
which they were propounding of the intellectual progress of man.
They treat it almost incidentally, as part of the case for the
defence, not as an immensely important conclusion. Its bearings were
more definitely realised by the Abbe Terrasson, whom I have just
named. A geometer and a Cartesian, he took part in the controversy
in its latest stage, when La Motte and Madame Dacier were the
principal antagonists. The human mind, he said, has had its infancy
and youth; its maturity began in the age of Augustus; the barbarians
arrested its course till the Renaissance; in the seventeenth
century, through the illuminating philosophy of Descartes, it passed
beyond the stage which it had attained in the Augustan age, and the
eighteenth century should surpass the seventeenth. Cartesianism is
not final; it has its place in a development. It was made possible
by previous speculations, and it will be succeeded by other systems.
We must not pursue the analogy of humanity with an individual man
and anticipate a period of old age. For unlike the individual,
humanity "being composed of all ages," is always gaining instead of
losing. The age of maturity will last indefinitely, because it is a
progressive, not a stationary, maturity. Later generations will
always be superior to the earlier, for progress is "a natural and
necessary effect of the constitution of the human mind."
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The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan W.S. Gilbert Category: Plays Sections: 50 What's this? Table of Contents		Fiction Non Fiction Short Stories Poetry Plays Sci Fi Religion Biography