Part 14 (1/2)
The explanation of this argument was the psychological theory of Helvetius. He taught, as we saw, and G.o.dwin developed the view in his own way, that the natures and characters of men are moulded entirely by their environment--not physical, but intellectual and moral environment, and therefore can be indefinitely modified. A man is born into the world without innate tendencies. His conduct depends on his opinions. Alter men's opinions and they will act differently. Make their opinions conformable to justice and benevolence, and you will have a just and benevolent society. Virtue, as Socrates taught, is simply a question of knowledge. The situation, therefore, is not hopeless. For it is not due to the radical nature of man; it is caused by ignorance and prejudice, by governments and inst.i.tutions, by kings and priests. Transform the ideas of men, and society will be transformed. The French philosopher considered that a reformed system of educating children would be one of the most powerful means for promoting progress and bringing about the reign of reason; and Condorcet worked out a scheme of universal state education. This was entirely opposed to G.o.dwin's principles. State schools would only be another instrument of power in the hands of a government, worse even than a state Church. They would strengthen the poisonous influence of kings and statesmen, and establish instead of abolis.h.i.+ng prejudices. He seems to have relied entirely on the private efforts of enlightened thinkers to effect a gradual conversion of public opinion.
In his study of the perfectibility of man and the prospect of a future reign of general justice and benevolence, G.o.dwin was even more visionary than Condorcet, as in his political views he was more radical than the Revolutionists. Condorcet had at least sought to connect his picture of the future with a reasoned survey of the past, and to find a chain of connection, but the perfectibility of G.o.dwin hung in the air, supported only by an abstract theory of the nature of man.
It can hardly be said that he contributed anything to the theoretical problem of civilisation. His significance is that he proclaimed in England at an opportune moment, and in a more impressive and startling way than a sober apostle like Priestley, the creed of progress taught by French philosophers, though considerably modified by his own anarchical opinions.
5.
Perfectibility, as expounded by Condorcet and G.o.dwin, encountered a drastic criticism from Malthus, whose Essay on the Principle of Population appeared in its first form anonymously in 1798. Condorcet had foreseen an objection which might be raised as fatal to the realisation of his future state. Will not the progress of industry and happiness cause a steady increase in population, and must not the time come when the number of the inhabitants of the globe will surpa.s.s their means of subsistence? Condorcet did not grapple with this question. He contented himself with saying that such a period must be very far away, and that by then ”the human race will have achieved improvements of which we can now scarcely form an idea.” Similarly G.o.dwin, in his fancy picture of the future happiness of mankind, notices the difficulty and s.h.i.+rks it.
”Three-fourths of the habitable globe are now uncultivated. The parts already cultivated are capable of immeasurable improvement. Myriads of centuries of still increasing population may pa.s.s away and the earth be still found sufficient for the subsistence of its inhabitants.”
Malthus argued that these writers laboured under an illusion as to the actual relations between population and the means of subsistence. In present conditions the numbers of the race are only kept from increasing far beyond the means of subsistence by vice, misery, and the fear of misery. [Footnote: This observation had been made (as Hazlitt pointed out) before Malthus by Robert Wallace (see A Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind, p. 13, 1753). It was another book of Wallace that suggested the difficulty to G.o.dwin.] In the conditions imagined by Condorcet and G.o.dwin these checks are removed, and consequently the population would increase with great rapidity, doubling itself at least in twenty-five years. But the products of the earth increase only in an arithmetical progression, and in fifty years the food supply would be too small for the demand. Thus the oscillation between numbers and food supply would recur, and the happiness of the species would come to an end.
G.o.dwin and his adherents could reply that one of the checks on over-population is prudential restraint, which Malthus himself recognised, and that this would come more extensively into operation with that progress of enlightenment which their theory a.s.sumed.
[Footnote: This is urged by Hazlitt in his criticism of Malthus in the Spirit of the Age.] But the criticisms of Malthus dealt a trenchant blow to the doctrine that human reason, acting through legislation and government, has a virtually indefinite power of modifying the condition of society. The difficulty, which he stated so vividly and definitely, was well calculated to discredit the doctrine, and to suggest that the development of society could be modified by the conscious efforts of man only within restricted limits. [Footnote: The recent conclusions of Mr.
Knibbs, statistician to the Commonwealth of Australia, in vol. i. of his Appendix to the Census of the Commonwealth, have an interest in this connection. I quote from an article in the Times of August 5, 1918: ”An eminent geographer, the late Mr. E. G. Ravenstein, some years ago, when the population of the earth was estimated at 1400 million, foretold that about the middle of this century population would have reached a limit beyond which increase would be disastrous. Mr. Knibbs is not so pessimistic and is much more precise; though he defers the disastrous culmination, he has no doubt as to its inevitability. The limits of human expansion, he a.s.sures us, are much nearer than popular opinion imagines; the difficulty of food supplies will soon be most grave; the exhaustion of sources of energy necessary for any notable increase of population, or advance in the standards of living, or both combined, is perilously near. The present rate of increase in the world's population cannot continue for four centuries.”]
6.
The Essay of Malthus afterwards became one of the sacred books of the Utilitarian sect, and it is interesting to notice what Bentham himself thought of perfectibility. Referring to the optimistic views of Chastellux and Priestley on progressive amelioration he observed that ”these glorious expectations remind us of the golden age of poetry.”
For perfect happiness ”belongs to the imaginary region of philosophy and must be cla.s.sed with the universal elixir and the philosopher's stone.”
There will always be jealousies through the unequal gifts of nature and of fortune; interests will never cease to clash and hatred to ensue; ”painful labour, daily subjection, a condition nearly allied to indigence, will always be the lot of numbers”; in art and poetry the sources of novelty will probably be exhausted. But Bentham was far from being a pessimist. Though he believes that ”we shall never make this world the abode of happiness,” he a.s.serts that it may be made a most delightful garden ”compared with the savage forest in which men so long have wandered.” [Footnote: Works, vol. i. p. 193 seq.]
7.
The book of Malthus was welcomed at the moment by all those who had been thoroughly frightened by the French Revolution and saw in the ”modern philosophy,” as it was called, a serious danger to society. [Footnote: Both Hazlitt and Sh.e.l.ley thought that Malthus was playing to the boxes, by sophisms ”calculated to lull the oppressors of mankind into a security of everlasting triumph” (Revolt of Islam, Preface). Bentham refers in his Book of Fallacies (Works, ii. p. 462) to the unpopularity of the views of Priestley, G.o.dwin, and Condorcet: ”to aim at perfection has been p.r.o.nounced to be utter folly or wickedness.”] Vice and misery and the inexorable laws of population were a G.o.dsend to rescue the state from ”the precipice of perfectibility.” We can understand the alarm occasioned to believers in the established const.i.tution of things, for G.o.dwin's work--now virtually forgotten, while Malthus is still appealed to as a discoverer in social science--produced an immense effect on impressionable minds at the time. All who prized liberty, sympathised with the downtrodden, and were capable of falling in love with social ideals, hailed G.o.dwin as an evangelist. ”No one,” said a contemporary, ”was more talked of, more looked up to, more sought after; and wherever liberty, truth, justice was the theme, his name was not far off.” Young graduates left the Universities to throw themselves at the feet of the new Gamaliel; students of law and medicine neglected their professional studies to dream of ”the renovation of society and the march of mind.” G.o.dwin carried with him ”all the most sanguine and fearless understandings of the time.” [Footnote: Hazlitt, Spirit of the Age: article on G.o.dwin (written in 1814).]
The most famous of his disciples were the poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and afterwards Sh.e.l.ley. Wordsworth had been an ardent sympathiser with the French Revolution. In its early days he had visited Paris:
An emporium then Of golden expectations and receiving Freights every day from a new world of hope.
He became a G.o.dwinian in 1795, when the Terror had destroyed his faith in Revolutionary France. Southey, who had come under the influence of Rousseau, was initiated by Coleridge into G.o.dwin's theories, and in their utopian enthusiasm they formed the design of founding a ”pantisocratic” settlement in America, to show how happiness could be realised in a social environment in which duty and interest coincide and consequently all are virtuous. The plan antic.i.p.ated the experiments of Owen and Cabet; but the pantisocrats did not experience the disappointments of the socialists, for it was never carried out.
Coleridge and Southey as well as Wordsworth soon abandoned their G.o.dwinian doctrines. [Footnote: In letters of 1797 and 1798 Coleridge repudiated the French doctrines and G.o.dwin's philosophy. See Cestre, La Revolution francaise et les poetes anglais (1789-1809), pp. 389, 414.]
They had, to use a phrase of Hazlitt, lost their way in Utopia, and they gave up the abstract and mechanical view of society which the French philosophy of the eighteenth century taught, for an organic conception in which historic sentiment and the wisdom of our ancestors had their due place. Wordsworth could presently look back and criticise his G.o.dwinian phase as that of
A proud and most presumptuous confidence In the transcendent wisdom of the age And its discernment. [Footnote: Excursion, Book ii.]
He and Southey became conservative pillars of the state. Yet Southey, reactionary as he was in politics, never ceased to believe in social Progress. [Footnote: See his Colloquies; and Sh.e.l.ley, writing in 1811, says that Southey ”looks forward to a state when all shall be perfected and matter become subjected to the omnipotence of mind” (Dowden, Life of Sh.e.l.ley, i. p. 212). Compare below, p. 325.] Amelioration was indeed to be effected by slow and cautious reforms, with the aid of the Church, but the intellectual aberrations of his youth had left an abiding impression.
While these poets were sitting at G.o.dwin's feet, Sh.e.l.ley was still a child. But he came across Political Justice at Eton; in his later life he reread it almost every year; and when he married G.o.dwin's daughter he was more G.o.dwinian than G.o.dwin himself. Hazlitt, writing in 1814, says that G.o.dwin's reputation had ”sunk below the horizon,” but Sh.e.l.ley never ceased to believe in his theory, though he came to see that the regeneration of man would be a much slower process than he had at first imagined. In the immature poem Queen Mab the philosophy of G.o.dwin was behind his description of the future, and it was behind the longer and more ambitious poems of his maturer years. The city of gold, of the Revolt of Islam, is G.o.dwin's future society, and he describes that poem as ”an experiment on the temper of the public mind as to how far a thirst for a happier condition of moral and political society survives, among the enlightened and refined, the tempests which have shaken the age in which we live.” As to Prometheus Unbound his biographer observes: [Footnote: Dowden, ib. ii. p. 264. Elsewhere Dowden remarks on the singular insensibility of Sh.e.l.ley's mind ”to the wisdom or sentiment of history” (i. p. 55).]
All the glittering fallacies of ”Political Justice”--now sufficiently tarnished--together with all its encouraging and stimulating truths, may be found in the caput mortuum left when the critic has reduced the poetry of the ”Prometheus” to a series of doctrinaire statements.
The same dream inspired the final chorus of h.e.l.las. Sh.e.l.ley was the poet of perfectibility.
8.
The attraction of perfectibility reached beyond the ranks of men of letters, and in Robert Owen, the benevolent millowner of Lanark, it had an apostle who based upon it a very different theory from that of Political Justice and became one of the founders of modern socialism.
The success of the idea of Progress has been promoted by its a.s.sociation with socialism. [Footnote: The word was independently invented in England and France. An article in the Poor Man's Guardian (a periodical edited by H. Hetherington, afterwards by Bronterre O'Brien), Aug. 24, 1833, is signed ”A Socialist”; and in 1834 socialisme is opposed to individualism by P. Leroux in an article in the Revue Encyclopedique.