II. Cournot and Renouvier regard Progress in a different light, owing to their ideas on Freedom—They look upon it as a possibility only, but not assured, not inevitable—Renouvier’s study of history in relation to progress and his view of immortality as Progress—No law of progress exists.
III. The new spiritualist group emphasise the lack of any law of progress, by their insistence on the spontaneity of the spirit, creativeness and contingency—Difficulties of finalsm or teleology in relation to progress as free—No law or guarantee of progress.
CONCLUSION : Complete change from earlier period regarding Progress—New view of it developed—Facile optimism rejected.
CHAPTER V
PROGRESS
Intimately bound up with the idea of freedom is that of progress. For, although our main approach to the discussion of freedom was made by way of the natural sciences, by a critique of physical determinism, and also by way of the problem of personal action, involving a critique of psychological determinism, it must be noted that there have appeared throughout the discussion very clear indications of the vital bearing of freedom upon the wide field of humanity’s development considered as a whole—in short, its history. The philosopher must give some account of history, if he is to leave no gap in his view of the universe. The philosophy of history will obviously be vastly different if it be based on determinism rather than on freedom. When the philosopher looks at history his thoughts must inevitably centre around the idea of progress. He may believe in it or may reject it as an illusion, but his attitude to it will be very largely a reflection of the doctrine which he has formed regarding freedom.
The notion of progress is probably the most characteristic feature which distinguishes modern civilisation from those of former times. It would have seemed to the Greeks foolishness. We owe it to the people who, in the modern world, have been what Greece was in the ancient world, the glorious mother of ideas. The eighteenth century was marked in France by a growing belief in progress, which was encouraged by the Encyclopaedists and rose to enthusiasm at the Revolution. Its best expression was that given by Condorcet, himself an Encyclopaedist, and originally a supporter of the Revolution. His Sketch of an Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind was written in 1793 (while its author was threatened with the guillotine[[1]]), published two years later, and became, in the early years of the nineteenth century, a powerful stimulus to thought concerning progress. Much of the work is defective, but it had a great influence upon Saint-Simon, the early socialists, and upon the doctrines of Auguste Comte, which themselves are immediate antecedents of our own period. We may note briefly here, that Condorcet believed in a sure and infallible progress in knowledge and in social welfare. This is the important doctrine which Saint-Simon and Comte both accepted from him. His ideal of progress is contained in the three watchwords of the Revolution, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, particularly the last two. He forecasts an abandonment of militarism, prophesies an era of universal peace, and the reign of equality between the sexes. Equality is a point which he insists upon very keenly, and, although he did not speak of sociology as did Comte, nor of socialism as did Saint-Simon, he claimed that the true history of mankind is the history of the great mass of workers: it is not diplomatic and military, not the record of dazzling deeds of great men. Condorcet, however, was dogmatic in his belief in progress, and he did not work out any “law” of progress, although he believed progress to be a law of the universe, in general, and an undeniable truth in regard to the life-history of mankind.
[1] He was ultimately imprisoned and driven to suicide.
Later, his friend Cabanis upheld a similarly optimistic view, and endeavoured to argue for it, against the Traditionalists, who we may remember endeavoured to restate Catholicism, and to make an appeal to those whom the events of the Revolution had disturbed and disillusioned. The outcome of the Terror had somewhat shaken the belief in a straightforward progress, but enthusiastic exponents of the doctrine were neither lacking nor silent. Madame de Staël continued the thought of Condorcet, thus forming a link between him and Saint-Simon and Comte. The influence of the Traditionalists and the general current of thought and literature known as Romanticism, helped also to solve a difficulty which distinguishes Condorcet from Comte. This difficulty lay in the eighteenth-century attitude to the Middle Ages, which Condorcet had accepted, and which seriously damaged his thesis of general progress, for in the eighteenth century the Middle Ages were looked upon as a black, dark regress, for which no thinker had a good word to say. The change of view is seen most markedly when we come to Comte, whose admiration of the Middle Ages is a conspicuous feature of his work. While, however, Saint-Simon and Comte were working out their ideas, great popularity was given to the belief in progress by the influence of Cousin, Jouffroy, Guizot, and by Michelet’s translation of the Scienza nuova of the Italian thinker Vico, a book then a century old but practically unknown in France. For Cousin, the world process was a result of a necessary evolution of thought, which he conceived in rather Hegelian fashion. Jouffroy agreed with this fatal progress, although he endeavoured to reconcile it with that of personal freedom. Guizot’s main point was that progress and civilisation are the same thing, or rather, that civilisation is to be defined only by progress, for that is its fundamental idea. His definition of progress is not, however, strikingly clear, and he calls attention to two types of progress—one involving an improvement in social welfare, the other in the spiritual or intellectual life. Although Guizot tried to show that progress in both these forms is a fact, he did not touch ultimate questions, nor did he successfully show that progress is the universal key to human history. He did not really support his argument that civilisation is progress in any convincing way, but he gave a stimulus to reflection on the question of the relationship of these two. Michelet’s translation of Vico came at an appropriate time, and served a useful purpose. It showed to France a thinker who, while not denying a certain progress over short periods, denied it over the long period, and reverted rather to the old notion of an eternal recurrence. For Vico, the course of human history was not rectilineal but rather spiral, although he, too, refrained from indicating any law. He claimed clearly enough that each civilisation must give way to barbarism and anarchy, and the cycle be again begun.
Such were the ideas upon progress which were current at the time when Saint-Simon, Fourier and Comte were busily thinking out their doctrines, the main characteristics of which we have already noted in our Introduction on the immediate antecedents of our period. The thought given to the question of progress in modern France is almost unintelligible save in the light of the doctrines current from Condorcet, through Saint-Simon to Comte, for the second half of the century is again characterised by a criticism and indeed a reaction against the idea professed in the first half. This was true in regard to Science and to Freedom. We shall see a similar type of development illustrated again respecting Progress.
Already we have noted the general aim and object which both Saint-Simon and Comte had in view. The important fact for our discussion here is that Saint-Simon, by his respect for the Middle Ages, and for the power of religion, was able to rectify the defects which the ideas of the eighteenth century had left in Condorcet’s doctrine of progress. Moreover, he claimed, as Condorcet had not done, to indicate a “law of progress,” which gives rise alternately to “organic” and to “critical” periods. The Middle Ages were, in the opinion of Saint-Simon, an admirable period, displaying as they did an organic society, where there was a temporal and spiritual authority. With Luther began an anarchical, critical period. According to Saint-Simon s law of progress a new organic period will succeed this, and the characteristic of that period will be socialism. He advocated a gradual change, not a violent revolutionary one, but he saw in socialism the inevitable feature of the new era. With its triumph would come a new world organisation and a league of peoples in which war would be no more, and in which the lot of the proletariat would be free from oppression and misery. The Saint-Simonist School became practically a religious sect, and the chief note in its gospel was “Progress.”