Part 17 (1/2)

Civilisation, he said, is the supreme fact so far as man is concerned, ”the fact par excellence, the general and definite fact in which all other facts merge.” And ”civilisation” means progress or development.

The word ”awakens, when it is p.r.o.nounced, the idea of a people which is in motion, not to change its place but to change its state, a people whose condition is expanding and improving. The idea of progress, development, seems to me to be the fundamental idea contained in the word CIVILISATION.”

There we have the most important positive idea of eighteenth century speculation, standing forth detached and independent, no longer bound to a system. Fifty years before, no one would have dreamed of defining civilisation like that and counting on the immediate acquiescence of his audience. But progress has to be defined. It does not merely imply the improvement of social relations and public well-being. France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was behind Holland and England in the sum and distribution of well-being among individuals, and yet she can claim that she was the most ”civilised” country in those ages.

The reason is that civilisation also implies the development of the individual life, of men's private faculties, sentiments, and ideas. The progress of man therefore includes both these developments. But they are intimately connected. We may observe how moral reformers generally recommend their proposals by promising social amelioration as a result, and that progressive politicians maintain that the progress of society necessarily induces moral improvement. The connection may not always be apparent, and at different times one or other kind of progress predominates. But one is followed by the other ultimately, though it may be after a long interval, for ”la Providence a ses aises dans le temps.”

The rise of Christianity was one of the crises of civilisation, yet it did not in its early stages aim at any improvement of social conditions; it did not attack the great injustices which were wrought in the world.

It meant a great crisis because it changed the beliefs and sentiments of individuals; social effects came afterwards.

The civilisation of modern Europe has grown through a period of fifteen centuries and is still progressing. The rate of progress has been slower than that of Greek civilisation, but on the other hand it has been continuous, uninterrupted, and we can see ”the vista of an immense career.”

The effects of Guizot's doctrine in propagating the idea of Progress were all the greater for its divorce from philosophical theory. He did not touch perplexing questions like fatality, or discuss the general plan of the world; he did not attempt to rise above common-sense; and he did not essay any premature scheme of the universal history of man. His masterly survey of the social history of Europe exhibited progressive movement as a fact, in a period in which to the thinkers of the eighteenth century it had been almost invisible. This of course was far from proving that Progress is the key to the history of the world and human destinies. The equation of civilisation with progress remains an a.s.sumption. For the question at once arises: Can civilisation reach a state of equilibrium from which no further advance is possible; and if it can, does it cease to be civilisation? Is Chinese civilisation mis-called, or has there been here too a progressive movement all the time, however slow? Such questions were not raised by Guizot. But his view of history was effective in helping to establish the a.s.sociation of the two ideas of civilisation and progress, which to-day is taken for granted as evidently true.

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The views of these eminent thinkers Cousin, Jouffroy, and Guizot show that--quite apart from the doctrines of ideologists and of the ”positivists,” Saint-Simon and Comte, of whom I have still to speak--there was a common trend in French thought in the Restoration period towards the conception of history as a progressive movement.

Perhaps there is no better ill.u.s.tration of the infectiousness of this conception than in the Historical Studies which Chateaubriand gave to the world in 1831. He had learned much, from books as well as from politics, since he wrote the GENIUS OF CHRISTIANITY. He had gained some acquaintance with German philosophy and with Vico. And in this work of his advanced age he accepts the idea of Progress, so far as it could be accepted by an orthodox son of the Church. He believes that the advance of knowledge will lead to social progress, and that society, if it seems sometimes to move backward, is always really moving forward. Bossuet, for whom he had no word of criticism thirty years before, he now convicts of ”an imposing error.” That great man, he writes, ”has confined historical events in a circle as rigorous as his genius. He has imprisoned them in an inflexible Christianity--a terrible hoop in which the human race would turn in a sort of eternity, without progress or improvement.” The admission from such a quarter shows eloquently how the wind was setting.

The notions of development and continuity which were to control all departments of historical study in the later nineteenth century were at the same time being independently promoted by the young historical school in Germany which is a.s.sociated with the names of Eichhorn, Savigny, and Niebuhr. Their view that laws and inst.i.tutions are a natural growth or the expression of a people's mind, represents another departure from the ideas of the eighteenth century. It was a repudiation of that ”universal reason” which desired to reform the world and its peoples indiscriminately without taking any account of their national histories.

CHAPTER XV. THE SEARCH FOR A LAW OF PROGRESS:

I. SAINT-SIMON

Amid the intellectual movements in France described in the last chapter the idea of Progress pa.s.sed into a new phase of its growth. Hitherto it had been a vague optimistic doctrine which encouraged the idealism of reformers and revolutionaries, but could not guide them. It had waited like a handmaid on the abstractions of Nature and Reason; it had hardly realised an independent life. The time had come for systematic attempts to probe its meaning and definitely to ascertain the direction in which humanity is moving. Kant had said that a Kepler or a Newton was needed to find the law of the movement of civilisation. Several Frenchmen now undertook to solve the problem. They did not solve it; but the new science of sociology was founded; and the idea of Progress, which presided at its birth, has been its princ.i.p.al problem ever since.

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The three thinkers who claimed to have discovered the secret of social development had also in view the practical object of remoulding society on general scientific principles, and they became the founders of sects, Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Comte. They all announced a new era of development as a necessary sequel of the past, an inevitable and desirable stage in the march of humanity, and delineated its features.

Comte was the successor of Saint-Simon, as Saint-Simon himself was the successor of Condorcet. Fourier stands quite apart. He claimed that he broke entirely new ground, and acknowledged no masters. He regarded himself as a Newton for whom no Kepler or Galileo had prepared the way. The most important and sanest part of his work was the scheme for organising society on a new principle of industrial co-operation. His general theory of the universe and man's destinies which lay behind his practical plans is so fantastic that it sounds like the dream of a lunatic. Yet many accepted it as the apocalypse of an evangelist.

Fourier was moved by the far-reaching effects of Newton's discovery to seek a law which would coordinate facts in the moral world as the principle of gravitation had co-ordinated facts in the physical world, and in 1808 he claimed to have found the secret in what he called the law of Pa.s.sional Attraction. [Footnote: Theorie des quatre mouvements et des destinees generales. General accounts of his theories will be found in Charles Fourier, sa vie et sa theorie, by his disciple Dr. Ch.

Pellarin (2nd ed., 1843), and in Flint, Hist. of Philosophy of History in France, etc., pp. 408 sqq.] The human pa.s.sions have hitherto been sources of misery; the problem for man is to make them sources of happiness. If we know the law which governs them, we can make such changes in our environment that none of the pa.s.sions will need to be curbed, and the free indulgence of one will not hinder or compromise the satisfaction of the others.

His worthless law for harmonising the pa.s.sions without restraining them need not detain us. The structure of society, by which he proposed to realise the benefits of his discovery, was based on co-operation, but was not socialistic. The family as a social unit was to be replaced by a larger unit (PHALANGE), economically self-sufficing, and consisting of about 1800 persons, who were to live together in a vast building (PHALANSTERE), surrounded by a domain sufficient to produce all they required. Private property is not abolished; the community will include both rich and poor; all the products of their work are distributed in shares according to the labour, talents, and capital of each member, but a fixed minimum is a.s.sured to every one. The scheme was actually tried on a small scale near the forest of Rambouillet in 1832.

This transformation of society, which is to have the effect of introducing harmony among the pa.s.sions, will mark the beginning of a new epoch. The duration of man's earthly career is 81,000 years, of which 5000 have elapsed. He will now enter upon a long period of increasing harmony, which will be followed by an equal period of decline--like the way up and the way down of Herac.l.i.tus. His brief past, the age of his infancy, has been marked by a decline of happiness leading to the present age of ”civilisation” which is thoroughly bad--here we see the influence of Rousseau--and from it Fourier's discovery is the clue to lead humanity forth into the epoch in which harmony begins to emerge.

But men who have lived in the bad ages need not be pitied, and those who live to-day need not be pessimistic. For Fourier believed in metempsychosis, and could tell you, as if he were the private secretary of the Deity calculating the arithmetical details of the cosmic plan, how many very happy, tolerably happy, and unhappy lives fall to the lot of each soul during the whole 81,000 years. Nor does the prospect end with the life of the earth. The soul of the earth and the human souls attached to it will live again in comets, planets, and suns, on a system of which Fourier knew all the particulars. [Footnote: Details will be found in the Theorie de l'unite universelle, originally published under the t.i.tle a.s.sociation domestique-agricole in 1822.]

These silly speculations would not deserve even this slight indication of their purport were it not that Fourier founded a sect and had a considerable body of devoted followers. His ”discovery” was acclaimed by Beranger:

Fourier nous dit: Sors de la fange, Peuple en proie aux deceptions, Travaille, groupe par phalange, Dans un cercle d'attractions; La terre, apres tant de desastres, Forme avec le ciel un hymen, Et la loi qui regit les astres, Donne la paix au genre humain.

Ten years after his death (1837) an English writer tells us that ”the social theory of Fourier is at the present moment engrossing the attention and exciting the apprehensions of thinking men, not only in France but in almost every country in Europe.” [Footnote: R. Blakey, History of the Philosophy of Mind, vol. iv. p. 293 (1848). Fourier, born 1772, died in 1837. His princ.i.p.al disciple was Victor Considerant.]

Grotesque as was the theoretical background of his doctrines, he helped to familiarise the world with the idea of indefinite Progress.

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