Part 14 (2/2)
The word is used in the New Moral World, and from 1836 was applied to the Owenites. See Dolleans, Robert Owen (1907), p. 305.] The first phase of socialism, what has been called its sentimental phase, was originated by Saint-Simon in France and Owen in England at about the same time; Marx was to bring it down from the clouds and make it a force in practical politics. But both in its earlier and in its later forms the economical doctrines rest upon a theory of society depending on the a.s.sumption, however disguised, that social inst.i.tutions have been solely responsible for the vice and misery which exist, and that inst.i.tutions and laws can be so changed as to abolish misery and vice. That is pure eighteenth century doctrine; and it pa.s.sed from the revolutionary doctrinaires of that period to the constructive socialists of the nineteenth century.
Owen learned it probably from G.o.dwin, and he did not disguise it. His numerous works enforce it ad nauseam. He began the propagation of his gospel by his ”New View of Society, or Essays on the formation of the human character, preparatory to the development of a plan for gradually ameliorating the condition of mankind,” which he dedicated to the Prince Regent. [Footnote: 3rd ed. 1817. The Essays had appeared separately in 1813-14.] Here he lays down that ”any general character, from the best to the worst, may be given to any community, even to the world at large, by the application of proper means; which means are to a great extent at the command and under the control of those who have influence in the affairs of men.” [Footnote: P. 19.] The string on which he continually harps is that it is the cardinal error in government to suppose that men are responsible for their vices and virtues, and therefore for their actions and characters. These result from education and inst.i.tutions, and can be transformed automatically by transforming those agencies.
Owen founded several short-lived journals to diffuse his theories. The first number of the New Moral World (1834-36) [Footnote: This was not a journal, but a series of pamphlets which appeared in 1836-1844. Other publications of Owen were: Outline of the Rational System of Society (6th ed., Leeds, 1840); The Revolution in the Mind and Practice of the Human Race, or the coming change from Irrationality to Rationality (1849); The Future of the Human Race, or a great, glorious and peaceful Revolution, near at hand, to be effected through the agency of departed spirits of good and superior men and women (1853); The New Existence of Man upon Earth, Parts i.-viii., 1854-55.] proclaimed the approach of an ideal society in which there will be no ignorance, no poverty, and no charity--a system ”which will ensure the happiness of the human race throughout all future ages,” to replace one ”which, so long as it shall be maintained, must produce misery to all.” His own experimental attempt to found such a society on a miniature scale in America proved a ludicrous failure.
It is to be observed that in these socialist theories the conception of Progress as indefinite tends to vanish or to lose its significance. If the millennium can be brought about at a stroke by a certain arrangement of society, the goal of development is achieved; we shall have reached the term, and shall have only to live in and enjoy the ideal state--a menagerie of happy men. There will be room for further, perhaps indefinite, advance in knowledge, but civilisation in its social character becomes stable and rigid. Once man's needs are perfectly satisfied in a harmonious environment there is no stimulus to cause further changes, and the dynamic character of history disappears.
Theories of Progress are thus differentiating into two distinct types, corresponding to two radically opposed political theories and appealing to two antagonistic temperaments. The one type is that of constructive idealists and socialists, who can name all the streets and towers of ”the city of gold,” which they imagine as situated just round a promontory. The development of man is a closed system; its term is known and is within reach. The other type is that of those who, surveying the gradual ascent of man, believe that by the same interplay of forces which have conducted him so far and by a further development of the liberty which he has fought to win, he will move slowly towards conditions of increasing harmony and happiness. Here the development is indefinite; its term is unknown, and lies in the remote future.
Individual liberty is the motive force, and the corresponding political theory is liberalism; whereas the first doctrine naturally leads to a symmetrical system in which the authority of the state is preponderant, and the individual has little more value than a cog in a well-oiled wheel: his place is a.s.signed; it is not his right to go his own way. Of this type the princ.i.p.al example that is not socialistic is, as we shall see, the philosophy of Comte.
CHAPTER XIII. GERMAN SPECULATIONS ON PROGRESS
1.
The philosophical views current in Germany during the period in which the psychology of Locke was in fas.h.i.+on in France and before the genius of Kant opened a new path, were based on the system of Leibnitz. We might therefore expect to find a theory of Progress developed there, parallel to the development in France though resting on different principles. For Leibnitz, as we saw, provided in his cosmic optimism a basis for the doctrine of human Progress, and he had himself incidentally pointed to it. This development, however, was delayed. It was only towards the close of the period--which is commonly known as the age of ”Illumination”--that Progress came to the front, and it is interesting to observe the reason.
Wolf was the leading successor and interpreter of Leibnitz. He constrained that thinker's ideas into a compact logical system which swayed Germany till Kant swept it away. In such cases it usually happens that some striking doctrines and tendencies of the master are accentuated and enforced, while others are suffered to drop out of sight.
So it was here. In the Wolfian system, Leibnitz's conception of development was suffered to drop out of sight, and the dynamic element which animated his speculation disappeared. In particular, he had laid down that the sum of motive forces in the physical world is constant.
His disciples proceeded to the inference that the sum of morality in the ethical world is constant. This dogma obviously eliminates the possibility of ethical improvement for collective humanity. And so we find Mendelssohn, who was the popular exponent of Wolf's philosophy, declaring that ”progress is only for the individual; but that the whole of humanity here below in the course of time shall always progress and perfect itself seems to me not to have been the purpose of Providence.”
[Footnote: See Bock, Jakob Wegelin als Geschichtstheoretiker, in Leipsiger Studien, ix. 4, pp. 23-7 (1902).]
The publication of the Nouveaux Essais in 1765 induced some thinkers to turn from the dry bones of Wolf to the spirit of Leibnitz himself. And at the same time French thought was penetrating. In consequence of these influences the final phase of the German ”Illumination” is marked by the appearance of two or three works in which Progress is a predominating idea.
We see this reaction against Wolf and his static school in a little work published by Herder in 1774--”a philosophy of history for the cultivation of mankind.” There is continuous development, he declares, and one people builds upon the work of another. We must judge past ages, not by the present, but relatively to their own particular conditions.
What exists now was never possible before, for everything that man accomplishes is conditioned by time, climate, and circ.u.mstances.
Six years later Lessing's pamphlet on the Education of the Human Race appeared, couched in the form of aphoristic statements, and to a modern reader, one may venture to say, singularly wanting in argumentative force. The thesis is that the drama of history is to be explained as the education of man by a progressive series of religions, a series not yet complete, for the future will produce another revelation to lift him to a higher plane than that to which Christ has drawn him up. This interpretation of history proclaimed Progress, but a.s.sumed an ideal and applied a measure very different from those of the French philosophers.
The goal is not social happiness, but a full comprehension of G.o.d.
Philosophy of religion is made the key to the philosophy of history. The work does not amount to more than a suggestion for a new synthesis, but it was opportune and arresting.
Herder meanwhile had been thinking, and in 1784 he gave the German world his survey of man's career--Ideas of the Philosophy of the History of Humanity. In this famous work, in which we can mark the influence of French thinkers, especially Montesquieu, as well as of Leibnitz, he attempted, though on very different lines, the same task which Turgot and Condorcet planned, a universal history of civilisation.
The Deity designed the world but never interferes in its process, either in the physical cosmos or in human history. Human history itself, civilisation, is a purely natural phenomenon. Events are strictly enchained; continuity is unbroken; what happened at any given time could have happened only then, and nothing else could have happened.
Herder's rigid determinism not only excludes Voltaire's chance but also suppresses the free play of man's intelligent will. Man cannot guide his own destinies; his actions and fortunes are determined by the nature of things, his physical organisation and physical environment. The fact that G.o.d exists in inactive ease hardly affects the fatalistic complexion of this philosophy; but it is perhaps a mitigation that the world was made for man; humanity is its final cause.
The variety of the phases of civilisation that have appeared on earth is due to the fact that the possible manifestations of human nature are very numerous and that they must all be realised. The lower forms are those in which the best, which means the most human, faculties of our nature are undeveloped. The highest has not yet been realised. ”The flower of humanity, captive still in its germ, will blossom out one day into the true form of man like unto G.o.d, in a state of which no terrestrial man can imagine the greatness and the majesty.” [Footnote: Ideen, v. 5.]
Herder is not a systematic thinker--indeed his work abounds in contradictions--and he has not made it clear how far this full epiphany results from the experiences of mankind in preceding phases. He believes that life is an education for humanity (he has taken the phrase of Lessing), that good progressively develops, that reason and justice become more powerful. This is a doctrine of Progress, but he distinctly opposes the hypothesis of a final and unique state of perfection as the goal of history, which would imply that earlier generations exist for the sake of the later and suffer in order to ensure the felicity of remote posterity--a theory which offends his sense of justice and fitness. On the contrary, man can realise happiness equally in every stage of civilisation. All forms of society are equally legitimate, the imperfect as well as the perfect; all are ends in themselves, not mere stages on the way to something better. And a people which is happy in one of these inferior states has a perfect right to remain in it.
Thus the Progress which Herder sees is, to use his own geometrical ill.u.s.tration, a sequence of unequal and broken curves, corresponding to different maxima and minima. Each curve has its own equation, the history of each people is subject to the laws of its own environment; but there is no general law controlling the whole career of humanity.
[Footnote: Ib. xv. 3. The power of ideas in history, which Herder failed to appreciate, was recognised by a contemporary savant from whom he might have learned. Jakob Wegelin, a Swiss, had, at the invitation of Frederick the Great, settled in Berlin, where he spent the last years of his life and devoted his study to the theory of history. His merit was to have perceived that ”external facts are penetrated and governed by spiritual forces and guiding ideas, and that the essential and permanent in history is conditioned by the nature and development of ideas.”
(Dierauer, quoted by Bock, op. cit. p. 13.) He believed in the progressive development of mankind as a whole, but as his learned brochures seem to have exerted no influence, it would be useless here to examine more closely his views, which are buried in the transactions of the Prussian Academy of Science. In Switzerland he came under the influence of Rousseau and d'Alembert. After he moved to Berlin (1765) he fell under that of Leibnitz. It may be noted (1) that he deprecated attempts at writing a universal history as premature until an adequate knowledge of facts had been gained, and this would demand long preliminary labours; (2) that he discussed the question whether history is an indefinite progression or a series of constant cycles, and decided for the former view. (Memoire sur le cours periodique, 1785).
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