Part 16 (1/2)

Krause never attracted attention in England, but he exerted some influence in France and Spain, and especially in Belgium, notwithstanding the grotesque jargon in which he obscured his thoughts.

See Flint, Philosophy of History, pp. 474-5. Flint's account of his speculations is indulgent. The main ideas of his philosophy of history will be found in the Introduction a la philosophie (ed. 2, 1880) of G.

Tiberghien, a Belgian disciple.]

All these transcendent speculations had this in common that they pretended to discover the necessary course of human history on metaphysical principles, independent of experience. But it has been rightly doubted whether this alleged independence was genuine. We may question whether any of them would have produced the same sequence of periods of history, if the actual facts of history had been to them a sealed book. Indeed we may be sure that they were surrept.i.tiously and subconsciously using experience as a guide, while they imagined that abstract principles were entirely responsible for their conclusions. And this is equivalent to saying that their ideas of progressive movement were really derived from that idea of Progress which the French thinkers of the eighteenth century had attempted to base on experience.

The influence, direct and indirect, of these German philosophers reached far beyond the narrow circle of the bacchants or even the wandbearers of idealism. They did much to establish the notion of progressive development as a category of thought, almost as familiar and indispensable as that of cause and effect. They helped to diffuse the idea of ”an increasing purpose” in history. Augustine or Bossuet might indeed have spoken of an increasing purpose, but the ”purpose” of their speculations was subsidiary to a future life. The purpose of the German idealists could be fulfilled in earthly conditions and required no theory of personal immortality.

This atmosphere of thought affected even intelligent reactionaries who wrote in the interest of orthodox Christianity and the Catholic Church.

Progressive development is admitted in the lectures on the Philosophy of History of Friedrich von Schlegel. [Footnote: Translated into English in 2 vols., 1835.] He denounced Condorcet, and opposed to perfectibility the corruptible nature of man. But he a.s.serted that the philosophy of history is to be found in ”the principles of social progress.”

[Footnote: Op. cit. ii, p. 194, sqq.] These principles are three: the hidden ways of Providence emanc.i.p.ating the human race; the freewill of man; and the power which G.o.d permits to the agents of evil,--principles which Bossuet could endorse, but the novelty is that here they are arrayed as forces of Progress. In fact, the point of von Schlegel's pretentious, unilluminating book is to rehabilitate Christianity by making it the key to that new conception of life which had taken shape among the enemies of the Church.

7.

As biological development was one of the constant preoccupations of Goethe, whose doctrine of metamorphosis and ”types” helped to prepare the way for the evolutionary hypothesis, we might have expected to find him interested in theories of social progress, in which theories of biological development find a logical extension. But the French speculations on Progress did not touch his imagination; they left him cool and sceptical. Towards the end of his life, in conversation with Eckermann, he made some remarks which indicate his att.i.tude. [Footnote: Gesprache mit Goethe, 23 Oktober 1828.] ”'The world will not reach its goal so quickly as we think and wish. The r.e.t.a.r.ding demons are always there, intervening and resisting at every point, so that, though there is an advance on the whole, it is very slow. Live longer and you will find that I am right.'

”'The development of humanity,' said Eckermann, 'appears to be a matter of thousands of years.'

”'Who knows?' Goethe replied, 'perhaps of millions. But let humanity last as long as it will, there will always be hindrances in its way, and all kinds of distress, to make it develop its powers. Men will become more clever and discerning, but not better nor happier nor more energetic, at least except for limited periods. I see the time coming when G.o.d will take no more pleasure in the race, and must again proceed to a rejuvenated creation. I am sure that this will happen and that the time and hour in the distant future are already fixed for the beginning of this epoch of rejuvenation. But that time is certainly a long way off, and we can still for thousands and thousands of years enjoy ourselves on this dear old playing-ground, just as it is.'”

That is at once a plain rejection of perfectibility, and an opinion that intellectual development is no highroad to the gates of a golden city.

CHAPTER XIV. CURRENTS OF THOUGHT IN FRANCE AFTER THE REVOLUTION

1.

The failure of the Revolution to fulfil the visionary hopes which had dazzled France for a brief period--a failure intensified by the horrors that had attended the experiment--was followed by a reaction against the philosophical doctrines and tendencies which had inspired its leaders.

Forces, which the eighteenth century had underrated or endeavoured to suppress, emerged in a new shape, and it seemed for a while as if the new century might definitely turn its back on its predecessor. There was an intellectual rehabilitation of Catholicism, which will always be a.s.sociated with the names of four thinkers of exceptional talent, Chateaubriand, De Maistre, Bonald, and Lamennais.

But the outstanding fame of these great reactionaries must not mislead us into exaggerating the reach of this reaction. The spirit and tendencies of the past century still persisted in the circles which were most permanently influential. Many eminent savants who had been imbued with the ideas of Condillac and Helvetius, and had taken part in the Revolution and survived it, were active under the Empire and the restored Monarchy, still true to the spirit of their masters, and commanding influence by the value of their scientific work. M. Picavet's laborious researches into the activities of this school of thinkers has helped us to understand the transition from the age of Condorcet to the age of Comte. The two central figures are Cabanis, the friend of Condorcet, [Footnote: He has already claimed our notice, above, p. 215.]

and Destutt de Tracy. M. Picavet has grouped around them, along with many obscurer names, the great scientific men of the time, like Laplace, b.i.+.c.hat, Lamarck, as all in the direct line of eighteenth century thought. ”Ideologists” he calls them. [Footnote: Ideology is now sometimes used to convey a criticism; for instance, to contrast the methods of Lamarck with those of Darwin.] Ideology, the science of ideas, was the word invented by de Tracy to distinguish the investigation of thought in accordance with the methods of Locke and Condillac from old-fas.h.i.+oned metaphysics. The guiding principle of the ideologists was to apply reason to observed facts and eschew a priori deductions. Thinkers of this school had an influential organ, the Decade philosophique, of which J. B. Say the economist was one of the founders in 1794. The Inst.i.tut, which had been established by the Convention, was crowded with ”ideologists,” and may be said to have continued the work of the Encyclopaedia. [Footnote: Picavet, op. cit. p. 69. The members of the 2nd Cla.s.s of the Inst.i.tut, that of moral and political science, were so predominantly Ideological that the distrust of Napoleon was excited, and he abolished it in 1803, distributing its members among the other Cla.s.ses.] These men had a firm faith in the indefinite progress of knowledge, general enlightenment, and ”social reason.”

2.

Thus the ideas of the ”sophists” of the age of Voltaire were alive in the speculative world, not withstanding political, religious, and philosophical reaction. But their limitations were to be transcended, and account taken of facts and aspects which their philosophy had ignored or minimised. The value of the reactionary movement lay in pressing these facts and aspects on the attention, in reopening chambers of the human spirit which the age of Voltaire had locked and sealed.

The idea of Progress was particularly concerned in the general change of att.i.tude, intellectual and emotional, towards the Middle Ages. A fresh interest in the great age of the Church was a natural part of the religious revival, but extended far beyond the circle of ardent Catholics. It was a characteristic feature, as every one knows, of the Romantic movement. It did not affect only creative literature, it occupied speculative thinkers and stimulated historians. For Guizot, Michelet, and Auguste Comte, as well as for Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo, the Middle Ages have a significance which Frenchmen of the previous generation could hardly have comprehended.

We saw how that period had embarra.s.sed the first pioneers who attempted to trace the course of civilisation as a progressive movement, how lightly they pa.s.sed over it, how unconvincingly they explained it away.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the medieval question was posed in such a way that any one who undertook to develop the doctrine of Progress would have to explore it more seriously. Madame de Stael saw this when she wrote her book on Literature considered in its Relation to Social Inst.i.tutions (1801). She was then under the influence of Condorcet and an ardent believer in perfectibility, and the work is an attempt to extend this theory, which she testifies was falling into discredit, to the realm of literature. She saw that, if man regressed instead of progressing for ten centuries, the case for Progress was gravely compromised, and she sought to show that the Middle Ages contributed to the development of the intellectual faculties and to the expansion of civilisation, and that the Christian religion was an indispensable agent. This contention that Progress was uninterrupted is an advance on Condorcet and an antic.i.p.ation of Saint-Simon and Comte.

A more eloquent and persuasive voice was raised in the following year from the ranks of reaction. Chateaubriand's Genie du Christianisme appeared in 1802, ”amidst the ruins of our temples,” as the author afterwards said, when France was issuing from the chaos of her revolution. It was a declaration of war against the spirit of the eighteenth century which had treated Christianity as a barbarous system whose fall was demanded in the name of Progress. But it was much more than polemic. Chateaubriand arrayed arguments in support of orthodox dogmas, original sin, primitive degeneration, and the rest; but the appeal of the book did not lie in its logic, it lay in the appreciation of Christianity from a new point of view. He approached it in the spirit of an artist, as an aesthete, not as a philosopher, and so far as he proved anything he proved that Christianity is valuable because it is beautiful, not because it is true. He aimed at showing that it can ”enchanter l'ame aussi divinement que les dieux de Virgile et d'Homere.”

He might call to his help the Fathers of the Church, but it was on Dante, Milton, Racine that his case was really based. The book is an apologia, from the aesthetic standpoint of the Romantic school. ”Dieu ne defend pas les routes fleuries quand elles servent a revenir a lui.”

It was a matter of course that the defender of original sin should reject the doctrine of perfectibility. ”When man attains the highest point of civilisation,” wrote Chateaubriand in the vein of Rousseau, ”he is on the lowest stair of morality; if he is free, he is rude; by civilising his manners, he forges himself chains. His heart profits at the expense of his head, his head at the expense of his heart.” And, apart from considerations of Christian doctrine, the question of Progress had little interest for the Romantic school. Victor Hugo, in the famous Preface to his Cromwell (1827), where he went more deeply than Chateaubriand into the contrasts between ancient and modern art, revived the old likeness of mankind to an individual man, and declared that cla.s.sical antiquity was the time of its virility and that we are now spectators of its imposing old age.

From other points of view powerful intellects were reverting to the Middle Ages and eager to blot out the whole development of modern society since the Reformation, as the Encyclopaedic philosophers had wished to blot out the Middle Ages. The ideal of Bonald, De Maistre, and Lamennais was a sacerdotal government of the world, and the English const.i.tution was hardly less offensive to their minds than the Revolution which De Maistre denounced as ”satanic.” Advocates as they were of the dead system of theocracy, they contributed, however, to the advance of thought, not only by forcing medieval inst.i.tutions on the notice of the world but also by their perception that society had been treated in the eighteenth century in too mechanical a way, that inst.i.tutions grow, that the conception of individual men divested of their life in society is a misleading abstraction. They put this in extravagant and untenable forms, but there was a large measure of truth in their criticism, which did its part in helping the nineteenth century to revise and transcend the results of eighteenth century speculation.