There we have the most important positive idea of eighteenth century speculation, standing forth detached and independent, no longer bound to a system. Fifty years before, no one would have dreamed of defining civilisation like that and counting on the immediate acquiescence of his audience. But progress has to be defined. It does not merely imply the improvement of social relations and public well-being. France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was behind Holland and England in the sum and distribution of well-being among individuals, and yet she can claim that she was the most "civilised" country in those ages. The reason is that civilisation also implies the development of the individual life, of men's private faculties, sentiments, and ideas. The progress of man therefore includes both these developments. But they are intimately connected. We may observe how moral reformers generally recommend their proposals by promising social amelioration as a result, and that progressive politicians maintain that the progress of society necessarily induces moral improvement. The connection may not always be apparent, and at different times one or other kind of progress predominates. But one is followed by the other ultimately, though it may be after a long interval, for "la Providence a ses aises dans le temps." The rise of Christianity was one of the crises of civilisation, yet it did not in its early stages aim at any improvement of social conditions; it did not attack the great injustices which were wrought in the world. It meant a great crisis because it changed the beliefs and sentiments of individuals; social effects came afterwards.
The civilisation of modern Europe has grown through a period of fifteen centuries and is still progressing. The rate of progress has been slower than that of Greek civilisation, but on the other hand it has been continuous, uninterrupted, and we can see "the vista of an immense career."
The effects of Guizot's doctrine in propagating the idea of Progress were all the greater for its divorce from philosophical theory. He did not touch perplexing questions like fatality, or discuss the general plan of the world; he did not attempt to rise above common-sense; and he did not essay any premature scheme of the universal history of man. His masterly survey of the social history of Europe exhibited progressive movement as a fact, in a period in which to the thinkers of the eighteenth century it had been almost invisible. This of course was far from proving that Progress is the key to the history of the world and human destinies. The equation of civilisation with progress remains an assumption. For the question at once arises: Can civilisation reach a state of equilibrium from which no further advance is possible; and if it can, does it cease to be civilisation? Is Chinese civilisation mis-called, or has there been here too a progressive movement all the time, however slow? Such questions were not raised by Guizot. But his view of history was effective in helping to establish the association of the two ideas of civilisation and progress, which to-day is taken for granted as evidently true.
7.
The views of these eminent thinkers Cousin, Jouffroy, and Guizot show that—quite apart from the doctrines of ideologists and of the "positivists," Saint-Simon and Comte, of whom I have still to speak—there was a common trend in French thought in the Restoration period towards the conception of history as a progressive movement. Perhaps there is no better illustration of the infectiousness of this conception than in the Historical Studies which Chateaubriand gave to the world in 1831. He had learned much, from books as well as from politics, since he wrote the GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY. He had gained some acquaintance with German philosophy and with Vico. And in this work of his advanced age he accepts the idea of Progress, so far as it could be accepted by an orthodox son of the Church. He believes that the advance of knowledge will lead to social progress, and that society, if it seems sometimes to move backward, is always really moving forward. Bossuet, for whom he had no word of criticism thirty years before, he now convicts of "an imposing error." That great man, he writes, "has confined historical events in a circle as rigorous as his genius. He has imprisoned them in an inflexible Christianity—a terrible hoop in which the human race would turn in a sort of eternity, without progress or improvement." The admission from such a quarter shows eloquently how the wind was setting.
The notions of development and continuity which were to control all departments of historical study in the later nineteenth century were at the same time being independently promoted by the young historical school in Germany which is associated with the names of Eichhorn, Savigny, and Niebuhr. Their view that laws and institutions are a natural growth or the expression of a people's mind, represents another departure from the ideas of the eighteenth century. It was a repudiation of that "universal reason" which desired to reform the world and its peoples indiscriminately without taking any account of their national histories.
CHAPTER XV. THE SEARCH FOR A LAW OF PROGRESS:
I. SAINT-SIMON
Amid the intellectual movements in France described in the last chapter the idea of Progress passed into a new phase of its growth. Hitherto it had been a vague optimistic doctrine which encouraged the idealism of reformers and revolutionaries, but could not guide them. It had waited like a handmaid on the abstractions of Nature and Reason; it had hardly realised an independent life. The time had come for systematic attempts to probe its meaning and definitely to ascertain the direction in which humanity is moving. Kant had said that a Kepler or a Newton was needed to find the law of the movement of civilisation. Several Frenchmen now undertook to solve the problem. They did not solve it; but the new science of sociology was founded; and the idea of Progress, which presided at its birth, has been its principal problem ever since.