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

by J. B. Bury

2.

The Encyclopaedia (1751-1765) has rightly been pronounced the central work of the rationalistic movement which made the France of 1789 so different from the France of 1715. [Footnote: The general views which governed the work may be gathered from d'Alembert's introductory discourse and from Diderot's article Encyclopedie. An interesting sketch of the principal contributors will be found in Morley's Diderot, i. chap. v. Another modern study of the Encyclopaedic movement is the monograph of L. Ducros, Les Encyclopidistes (1900). Helvetius has recently been the subject of a study by Albert Keim (Helvetius, sa vie et son oeuvre, 1907). Among other works which help the study of the speculations of this age from various points of view may be mentioned: Marius Roustan, Les Philosophes et la societe francaise au xviii siecle(1906); Espinas, La Philosophie sociale du xviii siecle et la Revolution (1898); Lichtenberger, Le Socialisme au xviii siecle(1895). I have not mentioned in the text Boullanger (1722-1758), who contributed to the Encyclopaedia the article on Political Economy (which has nothing to do with economics but treats of ancient theocracies); the emphasis laid on his views on progress by Buchez (op. cit. i. III sqq.) is quite excessive.] It was the organised section of a vast propaganda, speculative and practical, carried on by men of the most various views, most of whom were associated directly with it. As has well been observed, it did for the rationalism of the eighteenth century in France much what the Fortnightly Review, under the editorship of Mr. Morley (from 1868 to 1882) did for that of the nineteenth in England, as an organ for the penetrating criticism of traditional beliefs. If Diderot, who directed the Encyclopaedia with the assistance of d'Alembert the mathematician, had lived a hundred years later he would probably have edited a journal.

We saw that the "solidarity" of the sciences was one of the conceptions associated with the theory of intellectual progress, and that the popularisation of knowledge was another. Both these conceptions inspired the Encyclopaedia, which was to gather up and concentrate the illumination of the modern age. It was to establish the lines of communication among all departments, "to enclose in the unity of a system the infinitely various branches of knowledge." And it was to be a library of popular instruction. But it was also intended to be an organ of propaganda. In the history of the intellectual revolution it is in some ways the successor of the Dictionary of Bayle, which, two generations before, collected the material of war to demolish traditional doctrines. The Encyclopaedia carried on the campaign against authority and superstition by indirect methods, but it was the work of men who were not sceptics like Bayle, but had ideals, positive purposes, and social hopes. They were not only confident in reason and in science, but most of them had also a more or less definite belief in the possibility of an advance of humanity towards perfection.

As one of their own band afterwards remarked, they were less occupied in enlarging the bounds of knowledge than in spreading the light and making war on prejudice. [Footnote: Condorcet, Esquisse, p. 206 (ed. 1822).] The views of the individual contributors differed greatly, and they cannot be called a school, but they agreed so far in common tendencies that they were able to form a co-operative alliance.

The propaganda of which the Encyclopaedia was the centre was reinforced by the independent publications of some of the leading men who collaborated or were closely connected with their circle, notably those of Diderot himself, Baron d'Holbach, and Helvetius.

3.

The optimism of the Encyclopaedists was really based on an intense consciousness of the enlightenment of their own age. The progressiveness of knowledge was taken as axiomatic, but was there any guarantee that the light, now confined to small circles, could ever enlighten the world and regenerate mankind? They found the guarantee they required, not in an induction from the past experience of the race, but in an a priori theory: the indefinite malleability of human nature by education and institutions. This had been, as we saw, assumed by the Abbe de Saint-Pierre. It pervaded the speculation of the age, and was formally deduced from the sensational psychology of Locke and Condillac. It was developed, in an extreme form, in the work of Helvetius, De l'esprit (1758).

In this book, which was to exert a large influence in England, Helvetius sought, among other things, to show that the science of morals is equivalent to the science of legislation, and that in a well-organised society all men are capable of rising to the highest point of mental development. Intellectual and moral inequalities between man and man arise entirely from differences in education and social circumstances. Genius itself is not a gift of nature; the man of genius is a product of circumstances—social, not physical, for Helvetius rejects the influence of climate. It follows that if you change education and social institutions you can change the character of men.

The error of Helvetius in ignoring the irremovable physical differences between individuals, the varieties of cerebral organisation, was at once pointed out by Diderot. This error, however, was not essential to the general theory of the immeasurable power of social institutions over human character, and other thinkers did not fall into it. All alike, indeed, were blind to the factor of heredity. But the theory in its collective application contains a truth which nineteenth century critics, biassed by their studies in heredity, have been prone to overlook. The social inheritance of ideas and emotions to which the individual is submitted from infancy is more important than the tendencies physically transmitted from parent to child. The power of education and government in moulding the members of a society has recently been illustrated on a large scale in the psychological transformation of the German people in the life of a generation.

It followed from the theory expounded by Helvetius that there is no impassable barrier between the advanced and the stationary or retrograde races of the earth. [Footnote: The most informing discussion of the relations between the Advanced and Backward races is Bryce's Romanes Lecture (1902).] "True morality," Baron d'Holbach wrote, "should be the same for all the inhabitants of the globe. The savage man and the civilised; the white man, the red man, the black man; Indian and European, Chinaman and Frenchman, Negro and Lapp have the same nature. The differences between them are only modifications of the common nature produced by climate, government, education, opinions, and the various causes which operate on them. Men differ only in the ideas they form of happiness and the means which they have imagined to obtain it." Here again the eighteenth century theorists held a view which can no longer be dismissed as absurd. Some are coming round to the opinion that enormous differences in capacity which seem fundamental are a result of the differences in social inheritance, and that these again are due to a long sequence of historical circumstances; and consequently that there is no people in the world doomed by nature to perpetual inferiority or irrevocably disqualified by race from playing a useful part in the future of civilisation.