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

J.B. Bury

CHAPTER VI

THE GENERAL PROGRESS OF MAN: ABBE DE SAINT-PIERRE

The revolutionary speculations on the social and moral condition of
man which were the outstanding feature of the eighteenth century in
France, and began about 1750, were the development of the
intellectual movement of the seventeenth, which had changed the
outlook of speculative thought. It was one continuous rationalistic
movement. In the days of Racine and Perrault men had been
complacently conscious of the enlightenment of the age in which they
were living, and as time went on, this consciousness became stronger
and acuter; it is a note of the age of Voltaire. In the last years
of Louis XIV., and in the years which followed, the contrast between
this mental enlightenment and the dark background--the social evils
and miseries of the kingdom, the gross misgovernment and oppression-
-began to insinuate itself into men's minds. What was the value of
the achievements of science, and the improvement of the arts of
life, if life itself could not be ameliorated? Was not some radical
reconstruction possible, in the social fabric, corresponding to the
radical reconstruction inaugurated by Descartes in the principles of
science and in the methods of thought? Year by year the obscurantism
of the ruling powers became more glaring, and the most gifted
thinkers, towards the middle of the century, began to concentrate
their brains on the problems of social science and to turn the light
of reason on the nature of man and the roots of society. They
wrought with unscrupulous resolution and with far-reaching effects.

With the extension of rationalism into the social domain, it came
about naturally that the idea of intellectual progress was enlarged
into the idea of the general Progress of man. The transition was
easy. If it could be proved that social evils were due neither to
innate and incorrigible disabilities of the human being nor to the
nature of things, but simply to ignorance and prejudices, then the
improvement of his state, and ultimately the attainment of felicity,
would be only a matter of illuminating ignorance and removing
errors, of increasing knowledge and diffusing light. The growth of
the "universal human reason"--a Cartesian phrase, which had figured
in the philosophy of Malebranche--must assure a happy destiny to
humanity.

Between 1690 and 1740 the conception of an indefinite progress of
enlightenment had been making its way in French intellectual
circles, and must often have been a topic of discussion in the
salons, for instance, of Madame de Lambert, Madame de Tencin, and
Madame Dupin, where Fontenelle was one of the most conspicuous
guests. To the same circle belonged his friend the Abbe de Saint-
Pierre, and it is in his writings that we first find the theory
widened in its compass to embrace progress towards social
perfection. [Footnote: For his life and works the best book is J.
Drouet's monograph, L'Abbe de Saint-Pierre: l'homme et l'oeuvre
(1912), but on some points Goumy's older study (1859) is still worth
consulting. I have used the edition of his works in 12 volumes
published during his lifetime at Rotterdam, 1733-37.]

1.

He was brought up on Cartesian principles, and he idealised
Descartes somewhat as Lucretius idealised Epicurus. But he had no
aptitude for philosophy, and he prized physical science only as far
as it directly administered to the happiness of men. He was a
natural utilitarian, and perhaps no one was ever more consistent in
making utility the criterion of all actions and theories. Applying
this standard he obliterated from the roll of great men most of
those whom common opinion places among the greatest. Alexander,
Julius Caesar, Charlemagne receive short shrift from the Abbe de
Saint-Pierre. [Footnote: Compare Voltaire, Lettres sur les Anglais,
xii., where Newton is acclaimed as the greatest man who ever lived.]
He was superficial in his knowledge both of history and of science,
and his conception of utility was narrow and a little vulgar. Great
theoretical discoverers like Newton and Leibnitz he sets in a lower
rank than ingenious persons who used their scientific skill to
fashion some small convenience of life. Monuments of art, like Notre
Dame, possessed little value in his eyes compared with a road, a
bridge, or a canal.

Like most of his distinguished contemporaries he was a Deist. On his
deathbed he received the usual rites of the Church in the presence
of his household, and then told the priest that he did not believe a
word of all that. His real views are transparent in some of his
works through the conventional disguises in which prudent writers of
the time were wont to wrap their assaults on orthodoxy. To attack
Mohammedanism by arguments which are equally applicable to
Christianity was a device for propagating rationalism in days when
it was dangerous to propagate it openly. This is what the Abbe did
in his Discourse against Mohammedanism. Again, in his Physical
Explanation of an Apparition he remarks: "To diminish our fanatical
proclivities, it would be useful if the Government were to establish
an annual prize, to be awarded by the Academy of Sciences, for the
best explanation, by natural laws, of the extraordinary effects of
imagination, of the prodigies related in Greek and Latin literature,
and of the pretended miracles told by Protestants, Schismatics, and
Mohammedans." The author carefully keeps on the right side of the
fence. No Catholic authorities could take exception to this. But no
intelligent reader could fail to see that all miracles were
attacked. The miracles accepted by the Protestants were also
believed in by the Catholics.

He was one of the remarkable figures of his age. We might almost say
that he was a new type--a nineteenth century humanitarian and
pacifist in an eighteenth century environment. He was a born
reformer, and he devoted his life to the construction of schemes for
increasing human happiness. He introduced the word bienfaisance into
the currency of the French language, and beneficence was in his eyes
the sovran virtue. There were few departments of public affairs in
which he did not point out the deficiencies and devise ingenious
plans for improvement. Most of his numerous writings are projets--
schemes of reform in government, economics, finance, education, all
worked out in detail, and all aiming at the increase of pleasure and
the diminution of pain. The Abbe's nimble intelligence had a weak
side, which must have somewhat compromised his influence. He was so
confident in the reasonableness of his projects that he always
believed that if they were fairly considered the ruling powers could
not fail to adopt them in their own interests. It is the nature of a
reformer to be sanguine, but the optimism of Saint-Pierre touched
naivete. Thousands might have agreed with his view that the celibacy
of the Catholic clergy was an unwholesome institution, but when he
drew up a proposal for its abolition and imagined that the Pope,
unable to resist his arguments, would immediately adopt it, they
might be excused for putting him down as a crank who could hardly be
taken seriously. The form in which he put forward his memorable
scheme for the abolition of war exhibits the same sanguine
simplicity. All his plans, Rousseau observed, showed a clear vision
of what their effects would be, "but he judged like a child of means
to bring them about." But his abilities were great, and his actual
influence was considerable. It would have been greater if he had
possessed the gift of style.

2.

He was not the first to plan a definite scheme for establishing a
perpetual peace. Long ago Emeric Cruce had given to the world a
proposal for a universal league, including not only the Christian
nations of Europe, but the Turks, Persians, and Tartars, which by
means of a court of arbitration sitting at Venice should ensure the
settlement of all disputes by peaceful means. [Footnote: Le Nouveau
Cynee (Paris, 1623). It has recently been reprinted with an English
translation by T. W. Balch, Philadelphia (1909).] The consequence of
universal peace, he said, will be the arrival of "that beautiful
century which the ancient theologians promise after there have
rolled by six thousand years. For they say that then the world will
live happily and in repose. Now it happens that that time has nearly
expired, and even if it is not, it depends only on the Princes to
give beforehand this happiness to their peoples." Later in the
century, others had ventilated similar projects in obscure
publications, but the Abbe does not refer to any of his
predecessors.

He was not blinded by the superficial brilliancy of the reign of
Louis XIV. to the general misery which the ambitious war-policy of
that sovran brought both upon France and upon her enemies. His
Annales politiques are a useful correction to the Siecle de Louis
Quatorze. It was in the course of the great struggle of the Spanish
Succession that he turned his attention to war and came to the
conclusion that it is an unnecessary evil and even an absurdity. In
1712 he attended the congress at Utrecht in the capacity of
secretary to Cardinal de Polignac, one of the French delegates. His
experiences there confirmed his optimistic mind in the persuasion
that perpetual peace was an aim which might readily be realised; and
in the following year he published the memoir which he had been
preparing, in two volumes, to which he added a third four years
later.

Though he appears not to have known the work of Cruce he did not
claim originality. He sheltered his proposal under an august name,
entitling it Project of Henry the Great to render Peace Perpetual,
explained by the Abbe de Saint-Pierre. The reference is to the
"great design" ascribed to Henry IV. by Sully, and aimed at the
abasement of the power of Austria: a federation of the Christian
States of Europe arranged in groups and under a sovran Diet, which
would regulate international affairs and arbitrate in all quarrels.
[Footnote: It is described in Sully's Memoires, Book XXX.] Saint-
Pierre, ignoring the fact that Sully's object was to eliminate a
rival power, made it the text for his own scheme of a perpetual
alliance of all the sovrans of Europe to guarantee to one another
the preservation of their states and to renounce war as a means of
settling their differences. He drew up the terms of such an
alliance, and taking the European powers one by one demonstrated
that it was the plain interest of each to sign the articles. Once
the articles were signed the golden age would begin. [Footnote: For
Sully's grand Design compare the interesting article of Sir Geoffrey
Butler in the Edinburgh Review, October 1919.]

 It is not to our present purpose to comment on this plan which the
author with his characteristic simplicity seriously pressed upon the
attention of statesmen. It is easy to criticise it in the light of
subsequent history, and to see that, if the impossible had happened
and the experiment had been tried and succeeded, it might have
caused more suffering than all the wars from that day to this. For
it was based on a perpetuation of the political status quo in
Europe. It assumed that the existing political distribution of power
was perfectly satisfactory and conformable to the best interests of
all the peoples concerned. It would have hindered the Partition of
Poland, but it would have maintained the Austrian oppression of
Italians. The project also secured to the sovrans the heritage of
their authority and guarded against civil wars. This assumed that
the various existing constitutions were fundamentally just. The
realisation of the scheme would have perpetuated all the evils of
autocratic governments. Its author did not perceive that the radical
evil in France was irresponsible power. It needed the reign of Louis
XV. and the failure of attempts at reform under his successor to
bring this home. The Abbe even thought that an increase of the
despotic authority of the government was desirable, provided this
were accompanied by an increase in the enlightenment and virtue of
its ministers.

In 1729 he published an abridgment of his scheme, and here he looks
beyond its immediate results to its value for distant posterity. No
one, he says, can imagine or foresee the advantages which such an
alliance of European states will yield to Europe five hundred years
after its establishment. Now we can see the first beginnings, but it
is beyond the powers of the human mind to discern its infinite
effects in the future. It may produce results more precious than
anything hitherto experienced by man. He supports his argument by
observing that our primitive ancestors could not foresee the
improvements which the course of ages would bring in their
rudimentary arrangements for securing social order.

3.

It is characteristic that the Abbe de Saint-Pierre's ideas about
Progress were a by-product of his particular schemes. In 1773 he
published a Project to Perfect the Government of States, and here he
sketched his view of the progressive course of civilisation. The old
legend of the golden age, when men were perfectly happy, succeeded
by the ages of silver, bronze, and iron, exactly reverses the truth
of history. The age of iron came first, the infancy of society, when
men were poor and ignorant of the arts; it is the present condition
of the savages of Africa and America. The age of bronze ensued, in
which there was more security, better laws, and the invention of the
most necessary arts began. There followed the age of silver, and
Europe has not yet emerged from it. Our reason has indeed reached
the point of considering how war may be abolished, and is thus
approaching the golden age of the future; but the art of government
and the general regulation of society, notwithstanding all the
improvements of the past, is still in its infancy. Yet all that is
needed is a short series of wise reigns in our European states to
reach the age of gold or, in other words, a paradise on earth.

A few wise reigns. The Abbe shared the illusion of many that
government is omnipotent and can bestow happiness on men. The
imperfections of governments were, he was convinced, chiefly due to
the fact that hitherto the ablest intellects had not been dedicated
to the study of the science of governing. The most essential part of
his project was the formation of a Political Academy which should do
for politics what the Academy of Sciences did for the study of
nature, and should act as an advisory body to ministers of state on
all questions of the public welfare. If this proposal and some
others were adopted, he believed that the golden age would not long
be delayed. These observations--hardly more than obiter dicta--show
that Saint-Pierre's general view of the world was moulded by a
conception of civilisation progressing towards a goal of human
happiness. In 1737 he published a special work to explain this
conception: the Observations on the Continuous Progress of Universal
Reason.

He recurs to the comparison of the life of collective humanity to
that of an individual, and, like Fontenelle and Terrasson,
accentuates the point where the analogy fails. We may regard our
race as composed of all the nations that have been and will be--and
assign to it different ages. For instance, when the race is ten
thousand years old a century will be what a single year is in the
life of a centenarian. But there is this prodigious difference. The
mortal man grows old and loses his reason and happiness through the
enfeeblement of his bodily machine; whereas the human race, by the
perpetual and infinite succession of generations, will find itself
at the end of ten thousand years more capable of growing in wisdom
and happiness than it was at the end of four thousand.

At present the race is apparently not more than seven or eight
thousand years old, and is only "in the infancy of human reason,"
compared with what it will be five or six thousand years hence. And
when that stage is reached, it will only have entered on what we may
call its first youth, when we consider what it will be when it is a
hundred thousand years older still, continually growing in reason
and wisdom.

Here we have for the first time, expressed in definite terms, the
vista of an immensely long progressive life in front of humanity.
Civilisation is only in its infancy. Bacon, like Pascal, had
conceived it to be in its old age. Fontenelle and Perrault seem to
have regarded it as in its virility; they set no term to its
duration, but they did not dwell on future prospects. The Abbe was
the first to fix his eye on the remote destinies of the race and
name immense periods of time. It did not occur to him to consider
that our destinies are bound up with those of the solar system, and
that it is useless to operate with millennial periods of progress
unless you are assured of a corresponding stability in the cosmic
environment.

As a test of the progress which reason has already made, Saint-
Pierre asserts that a comparison of the best English and French
works on morals and politics with the best works of Plato and
Aristotle proves that the human race has made a sensible advance.
But that advance would have been infinitely greater were it not that
three general obstacles retarded it and even, at some times and in
some countries, caused a retrogression. These obstacles were wars,
superstition, and the Jealousy of rulers who feared that progress in
the science of politics would be dangerous to themselves. In
consequence of these impediments it was only in the time of Bodin
and Bacon that the human race began to start anew from the point
which it had reached in the days of Plato and Aristotle.

Since then the rate of progress has been accelerated, and this has
been due to several causes. The expansion of sea commerce has
produced more wealth, and wealth means greater leisure, and more
writers and readers. In the second place, mathematics and physics
are more studied in colleges, and their tendency is to liberate us
from subjection to the authority of the ancients. Again, the
foundation of scientific Academies has given facilities both for
communicating and for correcting new discoveries; the art of
printing provides a means for diffusing them; and, finally, the
habit of writing in the vulgar tongue makes them accessible. The
author might also have referred to the modern efforts to popularise
science, in which his friend Fontenelle had been one of the leaders.

He proceeds, in this connection, to lay down a rather doubtful
principle, that in any two countries the difference in enlightenment
between the lowest classes will correspond to the difference between
the most highly educated classes. At present, he says, Paris and
London are the places where human wisdom has reached the most
advanced stage. It is certain that the ten best men of the highest
class at Ispahan or Constantinople will be inferior in their
knowledge of politics and ethics to the ten most distinguished sages
of Paris or London. And this will be true in all classes. The thirty
most intelligent children of the age of fourteen at Paris will be
more enlightened than the thirty most intelligent children of the
same age at Constantinople, and the same proportional difference
will be true of the lowest classes of the two cities.

But while the progress of speculative reason has been rapid,
practical reason--the distinction is the Abbe's--has made little
advance. In point of morals and general happiness the world is
apparently much the same as ever. Our mediocre savants know twenty
times as much as Socrates and Confucius, but our most virtuous men
are not more virtuous than they. The growth of science has added
much to the arts and conveniences of life, and to the sum of
pleasures, and will add more. The progress in physical science is
part of the progress of the "universal human reason," whose aim is
the augmentation of our happiness. But there are two other sciences
which are much more important for the promotion of happiness--Ethics
and Politics--and these, neglected by men of genius, have made
little way in the course of two thousand years. It is a grave
misfortune that Descartes and Newton did not devote themselves to
perfecting these sciences, so incomparably more useful for mankind
than those in which they made their great discoveries. They fell
into a prevailing error as to the comparative values of the various
domains of knowledge, an error to which we must also ascribe the
fact that while Academies of Sciences and Belles-Lettres exist there
are no such institutions for Politics or Ethics.

By these arguments he establishes to his own satisfaction that there
are no irremovable obstacles to the Progress of the human race
towards happiness, no hindrances that could not be overcome if
governments only saw eye to eye with the Abbe de Saint-Pierre.
Superstition is already on the decline; there would be no more wars
if his simple scheme for permanent peace were adopted. Let the State
immediately found Political and Ethical Academies; let the ablest
men consecrate their talents to the science of government; and in a
hundred years we shall make more progress than we should make in two
thousand at the rate we are moving. If these things are done, human
reason will have advanced so far in two or three millenniums that
the wisest men of that age will be as far superior to the wisest of
to-day as these are to the wisest African savages. This "perpetual
and unlimited augmentation of reason" will one day produce an
increase in human happiness which would astonish us more than our
own civilisation would astonish the Kaffirs.

4.

The Abbe de Saint-Pierre was indeed terribly at ease in confronting
the deepest and most complex problems which challenge the intellect
of man. He had no notion of their depth and complexity, and he
lightly essayed them, treating human nature, as if it were an
abstraction, by a method which he would doubtless have described as
Cartesian. He was simply operating with the ideas which were all
round him in a society saturated with Cartesianism,--supremacy of
human reason, progressive enlightenment, the value of this life for
its own sake, and the standard of utility. Given these ideas and the
particular bias of his own mind, it required no great ingenuity to
advance from the thought of the progress of science to the thought
of progress in man's moral nature and his social conditions. The
omnipotence of governments to mould the destinies of peoples, the
possibility of the creation of enlightened governments, and the
indefinite progress of enlightenment--all articles of his belief--
were the terms of an argument of the sorites form, which it was a
simple matter to develop in his brief treatise.

But we must not do him injustice. He was a much more considerable
thinker than posterity for a long time was willing to believe. It is
easy to ridicule some of his projets, and dismiss him as a crank who
was also somewhat of a bore. The truth, however, is that many of his
schemes were sound and valuable. His economic ideas, which he
thought out for himself, were in advance of his time, and he has
even been described by a recent writer as "un contemporain egare au
xviii siecle." Some of his financial proposals were put into
practice by Turgot. But his significance in the development of the
revolutionary ideas which were to gain control in the second half of
the eighteenth century has hardly been appreciated yet, and it was
imperfectly appreciated by his contemporaries.

It is easy to see why. His theories are buried in his multitudinous
projets. If, instead of working out the details of endless
particular reforms, he had built up general theories of government
and society, economics and education, they might have had no more
intrinsic value, but he would have been recognised as the precursor
of the Encyclopaedists.

For his principles are theirs. The omnipotence of government and
laws to mould the morals of peoples; the subordination of all
knowledge to the goddess of utility; the deification of human
reason; and the doctrine of Progress. His crude utilitarianism led
him to depreciate the study of mathematical and physical sciences--
notwithstanding his veneration for Descartes--as comparatively
useless, and he despised the fine arts as waste of time and toil
which might be better spent. He had no knowledge of natural science
and he had no artistic susceptibility. The philosophers of the
Encyclopaedia did not go so far, but they tended in this direction.
They were cold and indifferent towards speculative science, and they
were inclined to set higher value on artisans than on artists.

In his religious ideas the Abbe differed from Voltaire and the later
social philosophers in one important respect, but this very
difference was a consequence of his utilitarianism. Like them he was
a Deist, as we saw; he had imbibed the spirit of Bayle and the
doctrine of the English rationalists, which were penetrating French
society during the later part of his life. His God, however, was
more than the creator and organiser of the Encyclopaedists, he was
also the "Dieu vengeur et remunerateur" in whom Voltaire believed.
But here his faith was larger than Voltaire's. For while Voltaire
referred the punishments and rewards to this life, the Abbe believed
in the immortality of the soul, in heaven and hell. He acknowledged
that immortality could not be demonstrated, that it was only
probable, but he clung to it firmly and even intolerantly. It is
clear from his writings that his affection for this doctrine was due
to its utility, as an auxiliary to the magistrate and the tutor, and
also to the consideration that Paradise would add to the total of
human happiness.

But though his religion had more articles, he was as determined a
foe of "superstition" as Voltaire, Diderot, and the rest. He did not
go so far as they in aggressive rationalism--he belonged to an older
generation--but his principles were the same.

The Abbe de Saint-Pierre thus represents the transition from the
earlier Cartesianism, which was occupied with purely intellectual
problems, to the later thought of the eighteenth century, which
concentrated itself on social problems. He anticipated the
"humanistic" spirit of the Encyclopaedists, who were to make man, in
a new sense, the centre of the world. He originated, or at least was
the first to proclaim, the new creed of man's destinies, indefinite
social progress.
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