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| ISBN-13: | 9780486780665 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dover Publications |
| Publication date: | 01/07/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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The Idea of Progress
An Inquiry Into Its Origin and Growth
By J. B. Bury
Dover Publications, Inc.
Copyright © 1960 William Beard and Mrs. Miriam B. VagtsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-486-78066-5
CHAPTER 1
SOME INTERPRETATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY: BODIN AND LE ROY
1
It is a long descent from the genius of Machiavelli to the French historian, Jean Bodin, who published his introduction to historical studies about forty years after Machiavelli's death. His views and his method differ widely from those of that great pioneer, whom he attacks. His readers were not arrested by startling novelties or immoral doctrine; he is safe, and dull.
But Bodin had a much wider range of thought than Machiavelli, whose mind was entirely concentrated on the theory of politics; and his importance for us lies not in the political speculations by which he sought to prove that monarchy is the best form of government, but in his attempt to substitute a new theory of universal history for that which prevailed in the Middle Ages. He rejected the popular conception of a golden age and a subsequent degeneration of mankind; and he refuted the view, generally current among medieval theologians, and based on the prophecies of Daniel, which divided the course of history into four periods corresponding to the Babylonian, Persian, Macedonian, and Roman monarchies, the last of which was to endure till the day of Judgement. Bodin suggests a division into three great periods: the first, of about two thousand years, in which the South-Eastern peoples were predominant; the second, of the same duration, in which those whom he calls the Middle (Mediterranean) peoples came to the front; the third, in which the Northern nations who overthrew Rome became the leaders in civilisation. Each period is stamped by the psychological character of the three racial groups. The note of the first is religion, of the second practical sagacity, of the third warfare and inventive skill. This division actually anticipates the synthesis of Hegel. But the interesting point is that it is based on anthropological considerations, in which climate and geography are taken into account; and, notwithstanding the crudeness of the whole exposition and the intrusion of astrological arguments, it is a new step in the study of universal history.
I have said that Bodin rejected the theory of the degeneration of man, along with the tradition of a previous age of virtue and felicity. The reason which he alleged against it is important. The powers of nature have always been uniform. It is illegitimate to suppose that she could at one time produce the men and conditions postulated by the theory of the golden age, and not produce them at another. In other words, Bodin asserts the principle of the permanent and undiminishing capacities of nature, and, as we shall see in the sequel, this principle was significant It is not to be confounded with the doctrine of the immutability of human things assumed by Machiavelli. The human scene has vastly changed since the primitive age of man; "if that so-called golden age could be revoked and compared with our own, we should consider it iron." For history largely depends on the will of men, which is always changing; every day new laws, new customs, new institutions, both secular and religious, come into being, and new errors.
But in this changing scene we can observe a certain regularity, a law of oscillation. Rise is followed by fall, and fall by rise; it is a mistake to think that the human race is always deteriorating. If that were so, we should long ago have reached the lowest stage of vice and iniquity. On the contrary, there has been, through the series of oscillations, a gradual ascent. In the ages which have been foolishly designated as gold and silver men lived like the wild beasts; and from that state they have slowly reached the humanity of manners and the social order which prevail to-day.
Thus Bodin recognises a general progress in the past. That is nothing new; it was the view, for instance, of the Epicureans. But much had passed in the world since the philosophy of Epicurus was alive, and Bodin had to consider twelve hundred years of new vicissitudes. Could the Epicurean theory be brought up to date?
2
Bodin deals with the question almost entirely in respect to human knowledge. In definitely denying the degeneration of man, Bodin was only expressing what many thinkers of the sixteenth century had been coming to feel, though timidly and obscurely. The philosophers and men of science, who criticised the ancients in special departments, did not formulate any general view on the privileged position of antiquity. Bodin was the first to do so.
Knowledge, letters, and arts have their vicissitudes, he says; they rise, increase, and flourish, and then languish and die. After the decay of Rome there was a long fallow period; but this was followed by a splendid revival of knowledge and an intellectual productivity which no other age has exceeded. The scientific discoveries of the ancients deserve high praise; but the moderns have not only thrown new light on phenomena which they had incompletely explained, they have made new discoveries of equal or indeed greater importance. Take, for instance, the mariner's compass which has made possible the circumnavigation of the earth and a universal commerce, whereby the world has been changed, as it were, into a single state. Take the advances we have made in geography and astronomy; the invention of gunpowder; the development of the woollen and other industries. The invention of printing alone can be set against anything that the ancients achieved.
An inference from all this, obvious to a modern reader, would be that in the future there will be similar oscillations, and new inventions and discoveries as remarkable as any that have been made in the past. But Bodin does not draw this inference. He confines himself to the past and present, and has no word to say about the vicissitudes of the future. But he is not haunted by any vision of the end of the world, or the coming of Antichrist; three centuries of humanism lay between him and Roger Bacon,
3
And yet the influence of medievalism, which it had been the work of those three centuries to overcome, was still pervasively there. Still more the authority of the Greeks and Romans, which had been set up by the revival of learning, was, without their realising it, heavy even upon thinkers like Bodin, who did not scruple freely to criticise ancient authors. And so, in his thoughtful attempt to find a clew to universal history, he was hampered by theological and cosmic theories, the legacy of the past. It is significant of the trend of his mind that when he is discussing the periodic decline of science and letters, he suggests that it may be due to the direct action of God, punishing those who misapplied useful sciences to the destruction of men. But his speculations were particularly compromised by his belief in astrology, which, notwithstanding the efforts of humanists like Petrarch, Aeneas Sylvius, and Pico to discredit it, retained its hold over the minds of many eminent, otherwise emancipated, thinkers throughout the period of the Renaissance. Here Bodin is in the company of Machiavelli and Lord Bacon. But not content with the doctrine of astral influence on human events, he sought another key to historical changes in the influence of numbers, reviving the ideas of Pythagoras and Plato, but working them out in a way of his own. He enumerates the durations of the lives of many famous men, to show that they can be expressed by powers of 7 and 9, or the product of these numbers. Other numbers which have special virtues are the powers of 12, the perfect number 496, and various others. He gives many examples to prove that these mystic numbers determine the durations of empires and underlie historical chronology. For instance, the duration of the oriental monarchies from Ninus to the Conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great was 1728 (= 123) years. He gives the Roman republic from the foundation of Rome to the battle of Actium 729 (= 93) years.
4
From a believer in such a theory, which illustrates the limitations of men's outlook on the world in the Renaissance period, we could perhaps hardly expect a vision of Progress. The best that can be said for it is that, both here and in his astrological creed, Bodin is crudely attempting to bring human history into close connection with the rest of the universe, and to establish the view that the whole world is built on a divine plan by which all the parts are intimately interrelated. He is careful, however, to avoid fatalism. He asserts, as we have seen, that history depends largely on the will of men. And he comes nearer to the idea of Progress than any one before him; he is on the threshold.
For if we eliminate his astrological and Pythagorean speculations, and various theological parentheses which do not disturb his argument, his work announces a new view of history which is optimistic regarding man's career on earth, without any reference to his destinies in a future life. And in this optimistic view there are three particular points to note, which were essential to the subsequent growth of the idea of Progress. In the first place, the decisive rejection of the theory of degeneration, which had been a perpetual obstacle to the apprehension of that idea. Secondly, the unreserved claim that his own age was fully equal, and in some respects superior, to the age of classical antiquity, in respect of science and the arts. He leaves the ancients reverently on their pedestal, but he erects another pedestal for the moderns, and it is rather higher. We shall see the import of this when we come to consider the intellectual movement in which the idea of Progress was afterwards to emerge. In the third place, he had a conception of the common interest of all the peoples of the earth, a conception which corresponded to the old ecumenical idea of the Greeks and Romans, but had now a new significance through the discoveries of modern navigators. He speaks repeatedly of the world as a universal state, and suggests that the various races, by their peculiar aptitudes and qualities, contribute to the common good of the whole. This idea of the "solidarity" of peoples was to be an important element in the growth of the doctrine of Progress.
These ideas were in the air. Another Frenchman, the classical scholar, Louis Le Roy, translator of Plato and Aristotle, put forward similar views in a work of less celebrity, On the Vicissitude or Variety of the Things in the Universe. It contains a survey of great periods in which particular peoples attained an exceptional state of dominion and prosperity, and it anticipates later histories of civilisation by dwelling but slightly on political events and bringing into prominence human achievements in science, philosophy, and the arts. Beginning with the advance of man from primitive rudeness to ordered society—a sketch based on the conjectures of Plato in the Protagoras—Le Roy reviews the history, and estimates the merits, of the Egyptians, Assyrians and Persians, the Greeks, Romans and Saracens, and finally of the modern age. The facts, he thinks, establish the proposition that the art of warfare, eloquence, philosophy, mathematics, and the fine arts, generally flourish and decline together.
But they do decline. Human things are not perpetual; all pass through the same cycle—beginning, progress, perfection, corruption, end. This, however, does not explain the succession of empires in the world, the changes of the scene of prosperity from one people or set of peoples to another. Le Roy finds the cause in providential design. God, he believes, cares for all parts of the universe and has distributed excellence in arms and letters now to Asia, now to Europe, again to Africa, letting virtue and vice, knowledge and ignorance travel from country to country, that all in their turn may share in good and bad fortune, and none become too proud through prolonged prosperity.
But what of the modern age in Western Europe? It is fully the equal, he assevers, of the most illustrious ages of the past, and in some respects it is superior. Almost all the liberal and mechanical arts of antiquity, which had been lost for about 1200 years, have been restored, and there have been new inventions, especially printing, and the mariner's compass, and "I would give the third place to gunnery but that it seems invented rather for the ruin than for the utility of the human race." In our knowledge of astronomy and cosmography we surpass the ancients. "We can affirm that the whole world is now known, and all the races of men; they can interchange all their commodities and mutually supply their needs, as inhabitants of the same city or world-state." And hence there has been a notable increase of wealth.
Vice and suffering, indeed, are as grave as ever, and we are afflicted by the trouble of heresies; but this does not prove a general deterioration of morals. If that inveterate complaint, the refrain chanted by old men in every age, were true, the world would already have reached the extreme limit of wickedness, and integrity would have disappeared utterly. Seneca long ago made the right criticism. Hoc maiores nostri questi sunt, hoc nos querimur, hoc posteri nostri querentur, eversos esse mores.... At ista stant loco eodern. Perhaps Le Roy was thinking particularly of that curious book the Apology for Herodotus, in which the eminent Greek scholar, Henri Estienne, exposed with Calvinistic prejudice the iniquities of modern times and the corruption of the Roman Church.
But if we are to judge by past experience, does it not follow that this modern age must go the same way as the great ages of the past which it rivals or even surpasses? Our civilisation, too, having reached perfection, will inevitably decline and pass away: is not this the clear lesson of history? Le Roy does not shirk the issue; it is the point to which his whole exposition has led and he puts it vividly.
"If the memory of the past is the instruction of the present and the premonition of the future, it is to be feared that having reached so great excellence, power, wisdom, studies, books, industries will decline, as has happened in the past, and disappear—confusion succeeding to the order and perfection of to-day, rudeness to civilisation, ignorance to knowledge. I already foresee in imagination nations, strange in form, complexion, and costume, overwhelming Europe—like the Goths, Huns, Vandals, Lombards, Saracens of old—destroying our cities and palaces, burning our libraries, devastating all that is beautiful. I foresee in all countries wars, domestic and foreign, factions and heresies which will profane all things human and divine; famines, plagues, and floods; the universe approaching an end, world-wide confusion, and the return of things to their original chaos."
But having conducted us to this pessimistic conclusion Le Roy finds it repugnant, and is unwilling to acquiesce in it. Like an embarrassed dramatist he escapes from the knot which he has tied by introducing the deus ex machina.
"However much these things proceed according to the fatal law of the world, and have their natural causes, yet events depend principally on Divine Providence which is superior to nature and alone knows the predetermined times of events." That is to say, it depends, after all, on Providence whether the argument from past experience is valid. Who knows whether the modern age may not prove the exception to the law which has hitherto prevailed? Let us act as if it would.
This is the practical moral that Le Roy enforces in the last book of his dissertation. We must not allow ourselves to be paralysed or dismayed by the destinies of past civilisations, but must work hard to transmit to posterity all that has been achieved, and augment the discoveries of the past by newresearches. For knowledge is inexhaustible. "Let us not be so simple as to believe that the ancients have known and said everything and left nothing to their successors. Or that nature gave them all her favours in order to remain sterile ever after." Here Le Roy lays down Bodin's principle which was to be asserted more urgently in the following century—the permanence of natural forces. Nature is the same now as always, and can produce as great intellects as ever. The elements have the same power, the constellations keep their old order, men are made of the same material. There is nothing to hinder the birth in this age of men equal in brains to Plato, Aristotle, or Hippocrates.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
PREFATORY NOTE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION,INTRODUCTION,
INTRODUCTION,
I SOME INTERPRETATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY: BODIN AND LE ROY,
II UTILITY THE END OF KNOWLEDGE: BACON,
III CARTESIANISM,
IV THE DOCTRINE OF DEGENERATION: THE ANCIENTS AND MODERNS,
V THE PROGRESS OF KNOWLEDGE I FONTENELLE,
VI THE GENERAL PROGRESS OF MAN: ABBÉ DE SAINT-PIERRE,
VII NEW CONCEPTIONS OF HISTORY: MONTESQUIEU, VOLTAIRE, TURGOT,
VIII THE ENCYCLOPAEDISTS AND ECONOMISTS,
IX WAS CIVILISATION A MISTAKE? ROUSSEAU, CHASTELLUX,
X THE YEAR 2440,
XI THE FRENCH REVOLUTION: CONDORCET,
XII THE THEORY OF PROGRESS IN ENGLAND,
XIII GERMAN SPECULATIONS ON PROGRESS,
XIV CURRENTS OF THOUGHT IN FRANCE AFTER THE REVOLUTION,
XV THE SEARCH FOR A LAW OF PROGRESS: I. SAINT-SIMON,
XVI THE SEARCH FOR A LAW OF PROGRESS: II. COMTE,
XVII "PROGRESS" IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT (1830–1851),
XVIII MATERIAL PROGRESS: EXHIBITION OF 1851,
XIX PROGRESS IN THE LIGHT OF EVOLUTION,
EPILOGUE,
INDEX,