Progress and History. Various

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СКАЧАТЬ mainly of progress in the arts, and especially of the arts as they affect man's happiness. There is no mention of increase in knowledge or in love. As in the famous parallel passage in Sophocles' Antigone, it is man's strength and skill which most impressed the poet, and his skill especially as exhibited in the arts. Compared with what we shall see as typical utterances of later times, it is an external view of the subject. The absence of love as an element of progress carries with it the absence of the idea of humanity. There is no conception here, nor anywhere in classical thought before the Stoics, of a world-wide Being which has contributed to the advance and should share fully in its fruits. Still less do we find any hint of the possibilities of an infinite progress. The moral, on the contrary, is that we should limit our desires, banish disturbing thoughts, and settle down to a quiet and sensible enjoyment of the good things that advancing skill has provided for us. It is, of course, true that thoughts can be found in individual writers, especially in Plato and Aristotle, which would largely modify this view. Yet it can hardly be questioned that Lucretius here represents the prevalent tone of thoughtful men of his day. They had begun to realize the fact of human progress, but envisaged it, as was natural in a first view, mainly on the external side, and, above all, had no conception of its infinite possibilities.

When we turn to typical utterances of the next great age in history the contrast is striking. Catholic doctrine had absorbed much that was congenial to it from the Stoics, from Plato and Aristotle, but it added a thing that was new in the world, a passionate love and an overpowering desire for personal moral improvement. This is so clear in the greatest figures of the Middle Ages, men such as St. Bernard and St. Francis, and it is so unlike anything that we know in the world before, that we are justified in treating it as characteristic of the age. To some of us, indeed, it will appear as the most important element in the general notion of progress which we are tracing. It so appeared to Comte.[2] Of numberless passages that might be quoted from fathers and doctors of the Church, a few words from Nicholas of Cusa must suffice. He was a divine of the early fifteenth century, true to the faith, but anxious to improve the discipline of the Church. To him progress took an entirely spiritual form. 'To be able to understand more and more without end is the type of eternal wisdom. … Let a man desire to understand better what he does understand and to love more what he does love and the whole world will not satisfy him.'

      Here is a point of view so different from the last that we find some difficulty in fitting it into the same scheme of things. Yet both are essential elements in Western civilization; both have been developed by the operations of similar forces in the world civilized and incorporated by Greece and Rome.

      The Catholic divine looks entirely inward for his idea of progress, and his conception contains elements of real and permanent validity, of which our present notions are full. His eyes are turned towards the future and there is no limit to his vision. And though the progress contemplated is within the soul of the individual believer, it rests on the two fundamental principles of knowledge and love which are both essentially social. The believer may isolate himself from the world to develop his higher nature, but the knowledge and the love which he carries with him into his solitude are themselves fruits of that intercourse with his fellows from which an exclusive religious ideal temporarily cuts him off.

      Nor must we forget that Catholic doctrine and discipline, though aiming at this perfection of the individual rather than of the race, was embodied in an organization which carried farther than the Roman Empire the idea of a united civilization and furnished to many thinkers, Bossuet as well as Dante, a first sketch of the progress of mankind.

      But it is clear that this construction was provisional only, either on the side of personal belief and practice, or of ecclesiastical organization; provisional, that is, if we are looking for real unity in the mind of mankind. For we need a doctrine, a scheme of knowledge, into which all that we discover about the world and our own nature may find its place; we need principles of action which will guide us in attaining a state of society more congruent with our knowledge of the possibilities of the world and human nature, more thoroughly inspired by human love, love of man for man as a being living his span of life here and now, under conditions which call for a concentration of skill and effort to realize the best. The breaking of the old Catholic synthesis, narrow but admirable within its limits, took place at what we call the Renascence and Reformation; the linking up of a new one is the task of our own and many later generations. Let it not be thought that such a change involves the destruction of any vital element in the idea of progress already achieved; if true and vital, every element must survive. But it does involve an acceptance of the fact that progress, or humanity, or the evolution of the divine within us—however we prefer to phrase it—is a larger thing than any one organization or any one set of carefully harmonized doctrines. The truth, and the organ in which we enshrine it, must grow with the human minds who are collectively producing it. The new unity is itself progress.

      It must give us confidence in facing such a prospect to observe that at each remove from the first appearance of the idea of progress in the world man's use of the word has carried more meaning and, though sometimes quieter in tone, as in recent times, is better grounded in the facts of life and history. Such an advance in our conceptions took place after the Renascence. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the art and science of the ancient world had been recovered, the word and the idea of progress started on a fresh course of unexampled vigour. The lines were closer to those of the pre-Christian than of the Catholic world, but it would be by no means true to call them pagan. When Bacon and Descartes begin to sound the modern note of progress, they think primarily of an advance in the arts and sciences, but there is a spiritual and human side to their ideal which could not be really paralleled in classical thought. The Spirit of Man is now invoked, and this, not in the sense of an élite, the builders of the Greek State or the rulers of the Roman Empire, but of mankind as a whole. This is Christian, or perhaps we should say, Stoical-Christian. Thus Descartes tells us that he looks to science to furnish us ultimately with an art which will make us 'masters and possessors of nature … and this not solely for the pleasure of enjoying with ease the good things of the world, but principally for the preservation and improvement of human health which is both the foundation of all other goods and the means of strengthening the spirit itself' ('Discours de la Méthode'). It is significant that the two words Progress and Humanity come into use in their modern sense side by side. The latter is the basis and the ideal of the former.

      But the new thing which had come into the world at this point, and gives a fresh impulse and content to the idea of progress, is the development of science. The Greeks had founded it and, as we shall see in a later chapter, it was the recovery of the Greek thread which gave the moderns their clue. But no one before the sixteenth century, before the marvels revealed by Galileo's telescope and knit up by Newton's synthetic genius, could have conceived the visions of human regeneration by science which light up the pioneers of the seventeenth century and are the gospel of the eighteenth.

      We turn to the eighteenth century, and primarily to the school of thinkers called 'philosophes' in France, for the fullest and most enthusiastic statement of progress as a gospel. It is, of course, European, as all the greatest advances of thought have been; and German thinkers, as well as English, stand with the French in the vanguard. Kant and Herder, from different points of view, thought it out perhaps more thoroughly than any one else at that time; but the French believed in it as a nation and were willing to stake their lives and souls on the belief. Thus Turgot, before the Revolution, declared that 'the total mass of the human race marches continually though sometimes slowly towards an ever-increasing perfection'. And Condorcet, in the midst of the Revolution, while himself under its ban, painted a picture 'of the human race, freed from its chains, and marching with a firm tread on the road of truth and virtue and happiness'.

      Here is the gospel in its purest and simplest form, and when we are inclined to think that the crimes and the partial failure of the Revolution discredit its principles, it is well to remember that the man who believed in them most systematically, expounded his belief with perfect calmness and confidence as he lay under sentence of death from a revolutionary tribunal.

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