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

by J. B. Bury

4.

This doctrine of the possibility of indefinitely moulding the characters of men by laws and institutions—whether combined or not with a belief in the natural equality of men's faculties—laid a foundation on which the theory of the perfectibility of humanity could be raised. It marked, therefore, an important stage in the development of the doctrine of Progress.

It gave, moreover, a new and larger content to that doctrine by its applicability, not only to the peoples which are at present in the van of civilisation, but also to those which have lagged far behind and may appear irreclaimably barbarous—thus potentially including all humanity in the prospect of the future. Turgot had already conceived "the total mass of the human race moving always slowly forward"; he had declared that the human mind everywhere contains the germs of progress and that the inequality of peoples is due to the infinite variety of their circumstances. This enlarging conception was calculated to add strength to the idea of Progress, by raising it to a synthesis comprehending not merely the western civilised nations but the whole human world.

Interest in the remote peoples of the earth, in the unfamiliar civilisations of the East, in the untutored races of America and Africa, was vivid in France in the eighteenth century. Everyone knows how Voltaire and Montesquieu used Hurons or Persians to hold up the glass to Western manners and morals, as Tacitus used the Germans to criticise the society of Rome. But very few ever look into the seven volumes of the Abbe Raynal's History of the Two Indies which appeared in 1772. It is however, one of the remarkable books of the century. Its immediate practical importance lay in the array of facts which it furnished to the friends of humanity in the movement against negro slavery. But it was also an effective attack on the Church and the sacerdotal system. The author's method was the same which his greater contemporary Gibbon employed on a larger scale. A history of facts was a more formidable indictment than any declamatory attack.

Raynal brought home to the conscience of Europeans the miseries which had befallen the natives of the New World through the Christian conquerors and their priests. He was not indeed an enthusiastic preacher of Progress. He is unable to decide between the comparative advantages of the savage state of nature and the most highly cultivated society. But he observes that "the human race is what we wish to make it," that the felicity of man depends entirely on the improvement of legislation; and in the survey of the history of Europe to which the last Book of his work is devoted, his view is generally optimistic. [Footnote: cp. Raynal, Histoire, vii. 214, 256. This book was first published anonymously; the author's name appeared in the edition of 1780.]

5. Baron d'Holbach had a more powerful brain than Helvetius, but his writings had probably less influence, though he was the spiritual father of two prominent Revolutionaries, Hebert and Chaumette. His System of Nature (1770) develops a purely naturalistic theory of the universe, in which the prevalent Deism is rejected: there is no God; material Nature stands out alone, self-sufficing, dominis privata superbis. The book suggests how the Lucretian theory of development might have led to the idea of Progress. But it sent a chilly shock to the hearts of many and probably convinced few. The effective part was the outspoken and passionate indictment of governments and religions as causes of most of the miseries of mankind.

It is in other works, especially in his Social System, that his views of Progress are to be sought. Man is simply a part of nature; he has no privileged position, and he is born neither good nor bad. Erras, as Seneca said, si existumas vitia nobiscum esse: supervenerunt, ingesta sunt. [Footnote: Seneca, Ep. 124.] We are made good or bad by education, public opinion, laws, government; and here the author points to the significance of the instinct of imitation as a social force, which a modern writer, M. Tarde, has worked into a system.

The evils, which are due to the errors of tyranny and superstition, the force of truth will gradually diminish if it cannot completely banish them; for our governments and laws may be perfected by the progress of useful knowledge. But the process will be a long one: centuries of continuous mental effort in unravelling the causes of social ill-being and repeated experiments to determine the remedies (des experiences reiterees de la societe). In any case we cannot look forward to the attainment of an unchangeable or unqualified felicity. That is a mere chimera "incompatible with the nature of a being whose feeble machine is subject to derangement and whose ardent imagination will not always submit to the guidance of reason. Sometimes to enjoy, sometimes to suffer, is the lot of man; to enjoy more often than to suffer is what constitutes well-being."

D'Holbach was a strict determinist; he left no room for freewill in the rigorous succession of cause and effect, and the pages in which he drives home the theory of causal necessity are still worth reading. From his naturalistic principles he inferred that the distinction between nature and art is not fundamental; civilisation is as rational as the savage state. Here he was at one with Aristotle.

All the successive inventions of the human mind to change or perfect man's mode of existence and render it happier were only the necessary consequence of his essence and that of the existences which act upon him. All we do or think, all we are or shall be, is only an effect of what universal nature has made us. Art is only nature acting by the aid of the instruments which she has fashioned. [Footnote: The passages of d'Holbach specially referred to are: Systeme social, i. 1, p. 13; Syst. de la nature, i. 6, p. 88; Syst. soc. i. 15, p. 271; Syst. de la n. i. 1, p. 3.]