Part 20 (1/2)

Marcellin-Berthelot (published in Dialogues et fragments philosophiques, 1876): ”Que sera Ie monde quand un million de fois se sera reproduit ce qui s'est pa.s.se depuis 1763 quand la chimie, au lieu de quatre-vingt ans de progres, en aura cent millions?” (p. 183). And again in the Dialogues written in 1871 (ib.), where it is laid down that the end of humanity is to produce great men: ”le grand oeuvre s'accomplira par la science, non par la democratic. Rien sans grands hommes; le salut se fera par des grands hommes” (p. 103).]

In 1890 there was nothing left of the sentimental socialism which he had studied in 1848; it had been blown away by the cold wind of scientific socialism which Marx and Engels created. And Renan had come to think that in this new form socialism would triumph. [Footnote: He reckoned without the new forces, opposed to socialism as well as to parliamentary democracy, represented by Bakunin and men like Georges Sorel.] He had criticised Comte for believing that ”man lives exclusively by science, or rather little verbal tags, like geometrical theorems, dry formulae.”

Was he satisfied by the concrete doctrine of Marx that all the phenomena of civilisation at a given period are determined by the methods of production and distribution which then prevail? But the future of socialism is a minor issue, and the ultimate goal of humanity is quite uncertain. ”Ce qu'il y a de consolant, c'est qu'on arrive necessairement quelque part.” We may console ourselves with the certainty that we must get somewhere.

6.

Proudhon described the idea of Progress as the railway of liberty. It certainly supplied motive power to social ideals which were repugnant and alarming to the authorities of the Catholic Church. At the Vatican it was clearly seen that the idea was a powerful engine driven by an enemy; and in the famous SYLLABUS of errors which Pope Pius IX. flung in the face of the modern world at the end of 1864, Progress had the honour of being censured. The eightieth error, which closes the list, runs thus:

Roma.n.u.s Pontifex potest ac debet c.u.m progressu, c.u.m liberalismo et c.u.m recenti civilitate sese reconciliare et componere.

”The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, be reconciled and come to terms with progress, with liberalism, and with modern civilisation.”

No wonder, seeing that Progress was invoked to justify every movement that offended the nostrils of the Vatican--liberalism, toleration, democracy, and socialism. And the Roman Church well understood the intimate connection of the idea with the advance of rationalism.

CHAPTER XVIII. MATERIAL PROGRESS: THE EXHIBITION OF 1851

1.

It is not easy for a new idea of the speculative order to penetrate and inform the general consciousness of a community until it has a.s.sumed some external and concrete embodiment or is recommended by some striking material evidence. In the case of Progress both these conditions were fulfilled in the period 1820 to 1850. In the Saint-Simonian Church, and in the attempts of Owen and Cabet to found ideal societies, people saw practical enterprises inspired by the idea. They might have no sympathy with these enterprises, but their attention was attracted. And at the same time they were witnessing a rapid transformation of the external conditions of life, a movement to the continuation of which there seemed no reason for setting any limit in the future. The spectacular results of the advance of science and mechanical technique brought home to the mind of the average man the conception of an indefinite increase of man's power over nature as his brain penetrated her secrets. This evident material progress which has continued incessantly ever since has been a mainstay of the general belief in Progress which is prevalent to-day.

England was the leader in this material progress, of which the particulars are familiar and need not be enumerated here. The discovery of the power of steam and the potentialities of coal revolutionised the conditions of life. Men who were born at the beginning of the century had seen, before they had pa.s.sed the age of thirty, the rapid development of steam navigation, the illumination of towns and houses by gas, the opening of the first railway.

It was just before this event, the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester railway, which showed how machinery would abbreviate s.p.a.ce as it had SIR THOMAS MORE, OR COLLOQUIES ON THE PROGRESS OF SOCIETY (1829).

There we see the effect of the new force on his imagination. ”Steam,” he says, ”will govern the world next,... and shake it too before its empire is established.” The biographer of Nelson devotes a whole conversation to the subject of ”steam and war.” But the theme of the book is the question of moral and social progress, on which the author inclines to the view that ”the world will continue to improve, even as it has. .h.i.therto been continually improving; and that the progress of knowledge and the diffusion of Christianity will bring about at last, when men become Christian in reality as well as in name, something like that Utopian state of which philosophers have loved to dream.” This admission of Progress, cautious though it was, circ.u.mscribed by reserves and compromised by hesitations, coming from such a conservative pillar of Church and State as Southey, is a notable sign of the times, when we remember that the idea was still a.s.sociated then with revolution and heresy.

It is significant too that at the same time an octogenarian mathematician of Aberdeen was composing a book on the same subject.

Hamilton's PROGRESS OF SOCIETY is now utterly forgotten, but it must have contributed in its day to propagating the same moderate view of Progress, consistent with orthodoxy, which Southey held. ”The belief of the perfectibility of human nature and the attainment of a golden age in which vice and misery have no place, will only be entertained by an enthusiast; but an inquiry into the means of improving our nature and enlarging our happiness is consistent with sober reason, and is the most important subject, merely human, that can engage the mind of man.” [Footnote: P. 13. The book was published posthumously by Murray in 1830, a year after the author's death.] [Footnote: ”Progress of Society.” The phrase was becoming common; e.g. Russell's History of Modern Europe (1822) has the sub-t.i.tle A view of the Progress of Society, etc. The didactic poem of Payne Knight, The Progress of Civil Society (1796), a very dull performance, was quite unaffected by the dreams of Priestley or G.o.dwin. It was towards the middle of the nineteenth century that Progress, without any qualifying phrase, came into use.]

2.

We have been told by Tennyson that when he went by the first train from Liverpool to Manchester (1830) he thought that the wheels ran in grooves.

”Then I made this line:

Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.”

[Footnote: See Tennyson, Memoir by his Son, vol. i. p. 195.]

LOCKSLEY HALL, which was published in 1842, ill.u.s.trates how the idea of Progress had begun to creep into the imagination of Englishmen. Though subsidiary to a love story, it is the true theme of the poem. The pulsation of eager interest in the terrestrial destinies of humanity, the large excitement of living in a ”wondrous Mother-age,” dreams of the future, quicken the pa.s.sion of the hero's youth. His disappointment in love disenchants him; he sees the reverse side of civilisation, but at last he finds an anodyne for his palsied heart in a more sober version of his earlier faith, a chastened belief in his Mother-age. He can at least discern an increasing purpose in history, and can be sure that ”the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.” The novelty of the poem lay in finding a cathartic cure for a private sorrow, not in religion or in nature, but in the modern idea of Progress. It may be said to mark a stage in the career of the idea.

The view of civilisation which Tennyson took as his MOTIF had no revolutionary implications, suggested no impatience or anger with the past. The startling prospect unfolding itself before ”the long result of time,” and history is justified by the promise of to-day:

The centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed.

Very different was the spirit in which another great poet composed, nearly twenty years later, a wonderful hymn of Progress. Victor Hugo's PLEIN CEIL, in his epic LA LEGENDE DES SIECLES,[Footnote: A.D. 1859.]

announces a new era of the world in which man, the triumphant rebel, delivered from his past, will move freely forward on a glorious way. The poet is inspired not by faith in a continuous development throughout the ages, but by the old spirit of the Revolution, and he sees in the past only a heavy chain which the race at last flings off. The horrible past has gone, not to return: ”ce monde est mort”; and the poem is at once a paean on man's victorious rebellion against it and a dithyramb on the prospect of his future.

Man is imagined as driving through the heavens an aerial car to which the four winds are harnessed, mounting above the clouds, and threatening to traverse the ether.

Superbe, il plane, avec un hymne en ses agres; Et l'on voit voir pa.s.ser la strophe du progres.