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

by J. B. Bury

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."