The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain / Nineteenth Century Europe

by J. A. Cramb

This is the faith for which the Girondins perish, and in dying bequeath to the nineteenth century the theory of man's destiny which informs its poetry, its speculative science, its systematic philosophy. It is the faith of Shelley and of Fichte, of Herbart and of Comte, of John Stuart Mill, Lassaulx, Quinet, not less than of Tennyson, last of the Girondins. For the ideal of the Third Age, freedom, knowledge, the federation of the world, passes as the ideals of the First and of the Second Age pass. Not in political any more than in religious freedom could man's unrest find a panacea. The new heavens and the new earth which Voltaire proclaimed vanished like the city which Tertullian saw beyond the sunset.

And knowledge—of what avail is knowledge?—or to scan the abysses of space and search the depths of time? If the utmost dreams of science, and all the moral and political aims of Girondinism were realized, if the foundations of life and of being were laid bare, if the curve of every star were traced, its laws determined, and its structure analysed, if the revolutions of this globe from its first hour, and the annals of all the systems that wheel in space, were by some miracle brought within our scrutiny—it still would leave the spirit unsatisfied as when these crystal walls did first environ its infinitude.

The defects, the nobility, and the beauty of the ideal of the Third Age are conspicuous in the great last work of Condorcet. As Mirabeau, the intellectual Catiline of his age, is the protagonist of Rebellion, that principle which has drawn the deepest utterances from the world-soul, from Job to Prometheus and Farinata, so Condorcet, whose countenance in its high and gentle benevolence seems the very expression of that bienfaisance which the Abbé de Saint-Pierre made fashionable, may be styled the high-priest of Girondinism, and he carries his faith beyond the grave, hallowing the altar of Freedom with his blood. In over a hundred pamphlets during the four years of his life as a Revolutionist, Condorcet disseminates his ideas—fortnightly pamphlets, many of them even now worth reading, lighting up now this, now that aspect of his faith—kingship, slavery, the destiny of man, two Houses, assignats, education of the people, finance, the rights of man, economics, free trade, the rights of women, the Progress of the Human Mind. It is in this last, written with the shadow of death upon him, that the central thought of his system is developed. He may have derived it from Turgot,[[5]] his master, and the subject of one of his noblest biographies, but he gave it a consecration of his own, and later writers have done little more than elaborate, vary, or reduce to scientific rule and line his living thought. Where they most are faithful, there his followers are greatest.

In the theory of evolution Condorcet's principles appear to find scientific expression and warrant, but it is pathetic to observe the speculative science of a modern systematizer advancing through volume after volume with the cumbrous but massive force of a traction-engine, only to find rest at last in a vision of Utopia some centuries hence, tedious as the Paradise of mediaeval poets or the fabulous Edens of earlier times.

Indeed, the conception of the infinite perfectibility of man, and of an eternal progress, carried its own doom in the familiar observation that there where progress can be traced, there the divine is least immanent. A distinguished statesman and writer, and a believer in evolution, recently avowed his perplexity that an age like the present, which has invented steam, electricity, and the kinematograph, should in painting and poetry not surpass the Renaissance, nor in sculpture the age of Phidias. In such perplexity is it not as if one heard again the threat of Mummius, charging his crew to give good heed to the statues of Praxiteles, on the peril of replacing them if broken!

Goethe, as the wrecks of his drama on Liberty prove, felt the might of the ideal of the Third Age with all the vibrating emotion which genius imparts.[[6]] But he was the first to discover its hollowness, and bade the world, in epigram or in prose tale, in lyric or in drama, to seek its peace where he himself had found it, in Art. So the labour of the scientific theorist, negatively beneficent by the impulsion of man's spirit beyond science, brings also a reward of its own to the devotee. The sun of Art falls in a kind of twilight upon his soul, working obscurely in words, and then does he most know the Unknowable when, in the passion of self-imposed ignorance, he rises to a kind of eloquence in proclaiming its unknowableness. Glimmerings from the Eternal visit the obscure study where the soul in travail records patiently the incidents of Time, and elaborates a theory of man's history as if it were framed to end like an Adelphi melodrama or a three-volume novel.

§ 4. THE IDEAL OF THE FOURTH AGE

But from those very failures, those dissatisfactions, the ideal of the Fourth Age is born, and the law of a greater progress divined. For the soul, revolting at last against the fleeting illusions of time, the deceiving Edens of saint, reformer, and revolutionist, freedom from the body, freedom from religious, or freedom from political oppression, sets steadily towards the lodestar of its being, whose rising is not in Time nor its going down in Space. Nor is it in knowledge, whether of the causes of things, or of the achievements of statesmen, warriors, legislators, that the peace of the infinite is to be found, but in a vision of that which was when Time and Cause were not. Then instruction and the massed treasures of knowledge, established or theoretic, concerning the past and the future of the planet on which man plays his part, or of other planets on which other forms of being play their parts, do indeed dissolve and are rolled together like a scroll. The Timeless, the Infinite, like a burst of clear ether, an azure expanse washed of clouds, lures on the delighted spirit, tranced in ecstasy.

For the symbol of this universe and of man's destiny is not the prolongation of a line, nor of groups of lines organically co-ordinate, but, as it were, a sphere shapen from within and moulded by that Presence whose immanence, ever intensifying, is the Thought which time realizes as the Deed. Man looks to the future and the coming of Eternity. How shall the Eternal come or the Infinite be far off? Behold, the Eternal is now, and the Infinite is here. And if the high-upreared architecture of the stars, and the changing fabric of the worlds, be but shadows, and the pageantry of time but a dream, yet the dreamer and the dream are God.

If all be Illusion, yet this faith that all is Illusion can be none. There the realm of Illusion ends, here Reality begins. And thus the spirit of man, having touched the mother-abyss, arises victorious in defeat to fix its gaze at last, steadfast and calm, upon the Eternal.