Part 10 (1/2)
”One consideration especially that we ought never to lose from sight,”
says Diderot, ”is that, if we ever banish a man, or the thinking and contemplative being, from above the surface of the earth, this pathetic and sublime spectacle of nature becomes no more than a scene of melancholy and silence... It is the presence of man that gives its interest to the existence of other beings... Why should we not make him a common centre?... Man is the single term from which we ought to set out.” [Footnote: The pa.s.sage from Diderot's article Encyclopedie is given as translated by Morley, Diderot, i, 145.] Hence psychology, morals, the structure of society, were the subjects which riveted attention instead of the larger supra-human problems which had occupied Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibnitz. It mattered little whether the universe was the best that could be constructed; what mattered was the relation of man's own little world to his will and capacities.
Physical science was important only in so far as it could help social science and minister to the needs of man. The closest a.n.a.logy to this development of thought is not offered by the Renaissance, to which the description HUMANISTIC has been conventionally appropriated, but rather by the age of illumination in Greece in the latter half of the fifth century B.C., represented by Protagoras, Socrates, and others who turned from the ultimate problems of the cosmos, hitherto the main study of philosophers, to man, his nature and his works.
In this revised form of ”anthropo-centrism” we see how the general movement of thought has instinctively adapted itself to the astronomical revolution. On the Ptolemaic system it was not incongruous or absurd that man, lord of the central domain in the universe, should regard himself as the most important cosmic creature. This is the view, implicit in the Christian scheme, which had been constructed on the old erroneous cosmology. When the true place of the earth was shown and man found himself in a tiny planet attached to one of innumerable solar worlds, his cosmic importance could no longer be maintained. He was reduced to the condition of an insect creeping on a ”tas de boue,” which Voltaire so vividly ill.u.s.trated in Micromegas. But man is resourceful; [words in Greek]. Displaced, along with his home, from the centre of things, he discovers a new means of restoring his self-importance; he interprets his humiliation as a deliverance. Finding himself in an insignificant island floating in the immensity of s.p.a.ce, he decides that he is at last master of his own destinies; he can fling away the old equipment of final causes, original sin, and the rest; he can construct his own chart and, bound by no cosmic scheme, he need take the universe into account only in so far as he judges it to be to his own profit. Or, if he is a philosopher, he may say that, after all, the universe for him is built out of his own sensations, and that by virtue of this relativity ”anthropo-centrism” is restored in a new and more effective form.
Built out of his own sensations: for the philosophy of Locke was now triumphant in France. I have used the term Cartesianism to designate, not the metaphysical doctrines of Descartes (innate ideas, two substances, and the rest), but the great principles which survived the pa.s.sing of his metaphysical system--the supremacy of reason, and the immutability of natural laws, not subject to providential interventions.
These principles still controlled thought, but the particular views of Descartes on mental phenomena were superseded in France by the psychology of Locke, whose influence was established by Voltaire and Condillac. The doctrine that all our ideas are derived from the senses lay at the root of the whole theory of man and society, in the light of which the revolutionary thinkers, Diderot, Helvetius, and their fellows, criticised the existing order and exposed the reigning prejudices. This sensationalism (which went beyond what Locke himself had really meant) involved the strict relativity of knowledge and led at once to the old pragmatic doctrine of Protagoras, that man is the measure of all things.
And the spirit of the French philosophers of the eighteenth century was distinctly pragmatic. The advantage of man was their principle, and the value of speculation was judged by its definite service to humanity.
”The value and rights of truth are founded on its utility,” which is ”the unique measure of man's judgements,” one thinker a.s.serts; another declares that ”the useful circ.u.mscribes everything,” l'utile circonscrit tout; another lays down that ”to be virtuous is to be useful; to be vicious is to be useless or harmful; that is the sum of morality.”
Helvetius, antic.i.p.ating Bentham, works out the theory that utility is the only possible basis of ethics. Bacon, the utilitarian, was extolled like Locke. [Footnote: The pa.s.sages quoted on utility are from d'Holbach, Systems de la nature, i. c. 12, p. 224; c. 15, p. 312; Diderot, De I'interpretation de la nature in OEuvres, ii. p. 13; Raynal, Histoire des deux Indes, vii. p. 416. The effectiveness of the teaching may be ill.u.s.trated from the Essay on Man, by Antoine Rivarol, whom Burke called the Tacitus of the Revolution. ”The virtues are only virtues because they are useful to the human race.” OEuvres choisis (ed. de Lescure), i. p. 211.] As, a hundred years before, his influence had inspired the foundation of the Royal Society, so now his name was invoked by the founders of the Encyclopaedia. [Footnote: See d'Alembert's tribute to him in the Discours preliminaire.]
Beneath all philosophical speculation there is an undercurrent of emotion, and in the French philosophers of the eighteenth century this emotional force was strong and even violent. They aimed at practical results. Their work was a calculated campaign to transform the principles and the spirit of governments and to destroy sacerdotalism.
The problem for the human race being to reach a state of felicity by its own powers, these thinkers believed that it was soluble by the gradual triumph of reason over prejudice and knowledge over ignorance. Violent revolution was far from their thoughts; by the diffusion of knowledge they hoped to create a public opinion which would compel governments to change the tenor of their laws and administration and make the happiness of the people their guiding principle. The optimistic confidence that man is perfectible, which means capable of indefinite improvement, inspired the movement as a whole, however greatly particular thinkers might differ in their views.
Belief in Progress was their sustaining faith, although, occupied by the immediate problems of amelioration, they left it rather vague and ill-defined. The word itself is seldom p.r.o.nounced in their writings. The idea is treated as subordinate to the other ideas in the midst of which it had grown up: Reason, Nature, Humanity, Illumination (lumieres). It has not yet entered upon an independent life of its own and received a distinct label, though it is already a vital force.
In reviewing the influences which were forming a new public opinion during the forty years before the Revolution, it is convenient for the present purpose to group together the thinkers (including Voltaire) a.s.sociated with the Encyclopaedia, who represented a critical and consciously aggressive force against traditional theories and existing inst.i.tutions. The constructive thinker Rousseau was not less aggressive, but he stands apart and opposed, by his hostility to modern civilisation. Thirdly, we must distinguish the school of Economists, also reformers and optimists, but of more conservative temper than the typical Encyclopaedists.
2.
The Encyclopaedia (1751-1765) has rightly been p.r.o.nounced 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 princ.i.p.al 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 a.s.sociated 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 editors.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sistance 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 a.s.sociated 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 superst.i.tion 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 inst.i.tutions. This had been, as we saw, a.s.sumed 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 circ.u.mstances.
Genius itself is not a gift of nature; the man of genius is a product of circ.u.mstances--social, not physical, for Helvetius rejects the influence of climate. It follows that if you change education and social inst.i.tutions 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 inst.i.tutions 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, bia.s.sed by their studies in heredity, have been p.r.o.ne 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 impa.s.sable 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 circ.u.mstances; 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.
4.
This doctrine of the possibility of indefinitely moulding the characters of men by laws and inst.i.tutions--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.