The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth

by J. B. Bury

So much for the past history of mankind, during which many things conspired to make progress in the subjugation of nature slow, fitful, and fortuitous. What of the future? Bacon's answer is: if the errors of the past are understood and avoided there is every hope of steady progress in the modern age.

But it might be asked. Is there not something in the constitution of things which determines epochs of stagnation and vigour, some force against which man's understanding and will are impotent? Is it not true that in the revolutions of ages there are floods and ebbs of the sciences, which flourish now and then decline, and that when they have reached a certain point they can proceed no further? This doctrine of Returns or ricorsi [Footnote: Bodin's conversiones.] is denounced by Bacon as the greatest obstacle to the advancement of knowledge, creating, as it does, diffidence or despair. He does not formally refute it, but he marshals the reasons for an optimistic view, and these reasons supply the disproof The facts on which the fatalistic doctrine of Returns is based can be explained without resorting to any mysterious law. [Footnote: Nov. Org. i. 92 sqq.] Progress has not been steady or continuous on account of the prejudices and errors which hindered men from setting to work in the right way. The difficulties in advancing did not arise from things which are not in our power; they were due to the human understanding, which wasted time and labour on improper objects. "In proportion as the errors which have been committed impeded the past, so do they afford reason to hope for the future."

4.

But will the new period of advance, which Bacon expected and strove to secure, be of indefinite duration? He does not consider the question. His view that he lived in the old age of the world implies that he did not anticipate a vast tract of time before the end of mankind's career on earth. And an orthodox Christian of that time could hardly be expected to predict. The impression we get is that, in his sanguine enthusiasm, he imagined that a "prudent interrogation" of nature could extort all her secrets in a few generations. As a reformer he was so engaged in the immediate prospect of results that his imagination did not turn to the possibilities of a remoter future, though these would logically follow from his recognition of "the inseparable propriety of time which is ever more and more to disclose truth." He hopes everything from his own age in which learning has made her third visitation to the world, a period which he is persuaded will far surpass that of Grecian and Roman learning. [Footnote: Advancement, ii. 24.] If he could have revisited England in 1700 and surveyed what science had performed since his death his hopes might have been more than satisfied.

But, animated though he was with the progressive spirit, as Leonardo da Vinci had been before him, all that he says of the prospects of an increase of knowledge fails to amount to the theory of Progress. He prepares the way, he leads up to it; but his conception of his own time as the old age of humanity excludes the conception of an indefinite advance in the future, which is essential if the theory is to have significance and value. And in regard to progress in the past, though he is clearer and more emphatic than Bodin, he hardly adds anything to what Bodin had observed. The novelty of his view lies not in his recognition of the advance of knowledge and its power to advance still further, but in the purpose which he assigned to it. [Footnote: Campanella held its purpose to be the contemplation of the wisdom of God; cp., for instance, De sensu rerum, Bk. iv. epilogus, where the world is described as statua Dei altissimi (p. 370; ed. 1620).] The end of the sciences is their usefulness to the human race. To increase knowledge is to extend the dominion of man over nature, and so to increase his comfort and happiness, so far as these depend on external circumstances. To Plato or Seneca, or to a Christian dreaming of the City of God, this doctrine would seem material and trivial; and its announcement was revolutionary: for it implied that happiness on earth was an end to be pursued for its own sake, and to be secured by co-operation for mankind at large. This idea is an axiom which any general doctrine of Progress must presuppose; and it forms Bacon's great contribution to the group of ideas which rendered possible the subsequent rise of that doctrine.

Finally, we must remember that by Bacon, as by most of his Elizabethan contemporaries, the doctrine of an active intervening Providence, the Providence of Augustine, was taken as a matter of course, and governed more or less their conceptions of the history of civilisation. But, I think, we may say that Bacon, while he formally acknowledged it, did not press it or emphasise it. [Footnote: See Advancement, iii. II. On the influence of the doctrine on historical writing in England at the beginning of the seventeenth century see Firth, Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World (Proc. of British Academy, vol. viii., 1919), p. 8.]

5.

Bacon illustrated his view of the social importance of science in his sketch of an ideal state, the New Atlantis. He completed only a part of the work, and the fragment was published after his death. [Footnote: In 1627. It was composed about 1623. It seems almost certain that he was acquainted with the Christianopolis of Johann Valentin Andreae (1586-1654), which had appeared in Latin in 1614, and contained a plan for a scientific college to reform the civilised world. Andreae, who was acquainted both with More and with Campanella, placed his ideal society in an island which he called Caphar Salama (the name of a village in Palestine). Andreae's work had also a direct influence on the Nova Solyma of Samuel Gott (1648). See the Introduction of F. E. Held to his edition of Christianopolis (1916). In Macaria, another imaginary state of the seventeenth century (A description of the famous Kingdoms of Macaria, 1641, by Hartlib), the pursuit of science is not a feature.] It is evident that the predominating interest that moved his imagination was different from that which guided Plato. While Plato aimed at securing a permanent solid order founded on immutable principles, the design of Bacon was to enable his imaginary community to achieve dominion over nature by progressive discoveries. The heads of Plato's city are metaphysicians, who regulate the welfare of the people by abstract doctrines established once for all; while the most important feature in the New Atlantis is the college of scientific investigators, who are always discovering new truths which may alter the conditions of life. Here, though only in a restricted field, an idea of progressive improvement, which is the note of the modern age, comes in to modify the idea of a fixed order which exclusively prevailed in ancient speculation.

On the other hand, we must not ignore the fact that Bacon's ideal society is established by the same kind of agency as the ideal societies of Plato and Aristotle. It has not developed; it was framed by the wisdom of an original legislator Solamona. In this it resembles the other imaginary commonwealths of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The organisation of More's Utopia is fixed initially once for all by the lawgiver Utopus. The origin of Campanella's Civitas Solis is not expressly stated, but there can be no doubt that he conceived its institutions as created by the fiat of a single lawgiver. Harrington, in his Oceana, argues with Machiavelli that a commonwealth, to be well turned, must be the work of one man, like a book or a building. [Footnote: Harrington, Oceana, pp. 77-8, 3rd ed. (1747).]

What measure of liberty Bacon would have granted to the people of his perfect state we cannot say; his work breaks off before he comes to describe their condition. But we receive the impression that the government he conceived was strictly paternal, though perhaps less rigorous than the theocratic despotism which Campanella, under Plato's influence, set up in the City of the Sun. But even Campanella has this in common with More—and we may be sure that Bacon's conception would have agreed here—that there are no hard-and-fast lines between the classes, and the welfare and happiness of all the inhabitants is impartially considered, in contrast with Plato's scheme in the Laws, where the artisans and manual labourers were an inferior caste existing less for their own sake than for the sake of the community as a whole. [Footnote: This however does not apply to the Republic, as is so commonly asserted. See the just criticisms of A. A. Trever, A History of Greek Economic Thought (Chicago, 1916), 49 sqq.]