Guyau concludes his Esquisse d’une Morale sans Obligation ni Sanction by remarking: “We are, as it were, on the Leviathan, from which a wave has torn the rudder and a blast of wind carried away the mainmast. It is lost in the ocean as our earth is lost in space. It floats thus at random, driven by the tempest, like a huge derelict, yet with men upon it, and yet it reaches port. Perhaps our earth, perhaps humanity, will also reach that unknown end which they will have created for themselves. No hand directs us; the rudder has long been broken, or rather it has never existed; we must make it: it is a great task, and it is our task.” This paragraph speaks for itself as regards Guyau’s attitude to the doctrine of an assured progress.
In his notable book L’Irreligion de l’Avenir, the importance of which we shall note more fully when we deal with the religious problem in our last chapter, Guyau indicates the possibilities of general intellectual progress in the future. The demand of life itself for fuller expression will involve the decay of cramping superstitions and ecclesiastical dogmas. The aesthetic elements will be given a larger place, and there will be intellectual freedom. Keen as Guyau is upon maintaining the sociological standpoint, he sees the central factor in progress to be the mental. “Progress,” he remarks,[[20]] “is not simply a sensible amelioration of life—it is also the achievement of a better intellectual formulation of life, it is a triumph of logic. To progress is to attain to a more complete consciousness of one’s self and of the world, and by that very fact to a more complete inner consistency of one’s theory of the world.” Guyau follows his stepfather in his view of “sociability” or fraternité (to use the watchword of the Revolution) as the desirable end at which we should progressively aim—a conclusion which is but the social application of his central concept of Life.
[20] Introduction to L’Irreligion de l’Avenir.
The next step in human progress must be in the direction of human solidarity. Guyau thinks it will arise from collective, co-operative energy (synergie sociale). Further progress must involve simultaneously sympathie sociale, a community of fellowship or comradeship, promoted by education of a true kind, not mere instruction, but a proper development and valuation of the feelings. Here art will play its part and have its place beside science, ethics and philosophy in furthering the ideal harmony in human society. Such Progress involves, therefore, that the Beautiful must be sought and appreciated no less than the True and the Good, for it is a revelation of the larger Life of which we ourselves are part. These ideals are in themselves but manifestations of the Supreme Vitality.
The same spontaneous vital activity of which Guyau makes a central doctrine characterises Bergson’s view of reality. He upholds, like Boutroux, freedom and contingency, but he will not admit finalism in any shape or form, not even a teleology which is created in the process of development. He refuses to admit as true of the universal process in nature and in human history what is certainly true of human life—the fact that we create ends as we go on living. For Bergson there is no end in the universe, unless it be that of spontaneity of life such as Guyau had maintained. There is no guarantee of progress, no law of development, but endless possibility of progress. Such a view, as we have already insisted, is not pessimistic. It is, however, a warning to facile optimism to realise that humanity, being free, may go “dead wrong.” While Boutroux maintains with Ravaisson that there is at the heart of things a tendency to superior values such as beauty, goodness and truth, and while Renan assures us that the balance of goodness in the world is a guarantee of its ultimate triumph, Bergson, like Renouvier, gives us stern warning that there is no guarantee in the nature of things that humanity should not set its heart on other values, on materialistic and egoistic conceptions, and go down in ruin quarrelling and fighting for these things. There is no power, he reminds us, keeping humanity right and in the line of desirable progress. All is change, but that is not to say that all changes are desirable or progressive. Here we arrive at a point far removed from the rosy optimism of the earlier thinkers. Progress as a comfortable doctrine, confidently accepted and dogmatically asserted, no longer holds ground; it is seen to be quite untenable.
In Bergson the difficulty which besets Ravaisson reappears more markedly—namely, the relation of spirit and matter to one another, and to the power at the heart of things, which, according to Bergson himself, is a spiritual principle. Here we seem forced to admit Ravaisson’s view of a “fall” or, as the theologians would say, a “Kenosis” of the deity in order to create the material universe. Yet in the processes of nature we see spirit having to fight against matter, and of this warfare Bergson makes a great point. These considerations lead to discussions which Bergson has not touched upon as yet. He does not follow Ravaisson and Boutroux into the realm of theological ideas. If he did he might have to make admissions which would compromise, or at least modify, other doctrines expressed by him. He will have none of Hegel or of the Absolute Idealism which sees the world process as a development of a Divine Idea. It is new and it is creation; there is no repetition. Even God himself se fait in the process, and it may be, suggests Bergson, that love is the secret of the universe. If so we may well ask with Blondel, “If God se fait in the process, then does he not already exist and, in a sense, the process with him?” Instead, however, of reverting to Ravaisson’s view of the whole affair being a search for, and return to God, Bergson claims that the development is a purely contingent one, in which a super-consciousness develops by experiment and error.
Bergson’s God, if he may be so-called, is not so much a Creator, but a power creative of creators—that is, human personalities capable of free action. The Deity is immanent in man, and, like man, is ignorant of the trend of the whole process. The universe, according to Bergson, is a very haphazard affair, in which the only permanence is change. There is no goal, and progress has little meaning if it be only and merely further change, which may be equally regress rather than progress. To live is not merely to change, but to triumph over change to set up some values as of absolute worth, and to aim at realising and furthering these. Apart from some philosophy of values the conception of progress has little meaning.
Interesting discussions of various aspects of the problem are to be found in the writings of the sociologist we have mentioned, Durkheim, particularly La Division du Travail sociale, Le Suicide and Les Formes élémentaires de la Vie religieuse. There is an interesting volume by Weber, entitled Le Rythme du Progres, and there are the numerous books of Dr. Gustave Le Bon.
Although he is not strictly a philosopher in the academic or professional sense, and his work belongs to literature rather than to the philosophy of the period, we cannot help calling attention briefly here, at the conclusion of this chapter, to the genial pessimism of Bergson’s great literary contemporary, Anatole France, the famous satirist of our age. His irony on questions like that of progress is very marked in L’Ile des Penguins and in Jérôme Coignard. A remark from one of his works, this latter, will sufficiently illustrate his view on progress. “I take little interest,” remarks his character, the Abbé Coignard, “in what is done in the King’s Cabinet, for I notice that the course of life is in no way changed, and after reforms men are as before, selfish, avaricious, cowardly, cruel, stupid and furious by turns, and there is always a nearly even number of births, marriages, cuckolds and gallows-birds, in which is made manifest the beautiful ordering of our society. This condition is stable, sir, and nothing could shake it, for it is founded on human misery and imbecility, and those are foundations which will never be wanting.” The genial old Abbé then goes on to remind socialist revolutionaries that new economic schemes will not radically change human nature. We easily see the ills in history and blind ourselves with optimism for the future. Even in Sorel, the Syndicalist, who has added to his articles on Violence (which appeared in 1907 in the periodical Le Mouvement socialiste) a work on Les Illusions du Progrès, we find the same doctrines about the vices of modern societies, which he considers no better than ancient ones in their morality; they are filled with more hypocrisy, that is all. France and Sorel only add more testimony to the utter collapse of the old doctrine of assured and general progress.
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