CHAPTER I.

THEORIES OF SOCIAL PROGRESS.

"Yet I doubt not thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs,

And the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the suns."

TENNYSON.

Different Kinds of Progress.

THE belief that society is in a state of progressive improvement is either consciously or unconsciously mixed up with reasonings now widely prevalent, and influencing the conduct of men. But the conception of the nature of such improvement is rarely precise, and as rarely found in connection with a distinct hold of the grounds on which the belief in progression rests. Without going into metaphysical niceties, we may distinguish three ways in which either a particular nation or society generally may be progressive. It may advance in material wealth, and of course in the arts subservient to the creation of wealth, as has evidently happened, and is now happening, not only in England and the United States, but to a greater or less extent in all the countries of continental Europe. It may advance, not uniformly but still continuously, in the discovery of truth, as has been the case with European society from the earliest times to the present moment, in physical science. Lastly, men or nations may be conceived as capable of a moral advance, as showing, therefore, in their lives a continually growing ascendancy of the higher or moral over the lower or animal faculties; in a word, as becoming, from time to time, more veracious, more just, more pure, and more full of love.

The popular notions of progress are drawn from the immense advances which have been made in this country in wealth and the industrial arts, during the last century, and which do prove an enormous growth in the power of man to render nature subservient to his wants. This industrial progress is often regarded as necessarily involving in it all kinds of progress; and not only those whose minds are engaged in actively carrying it on, but those more studious persons whose attention has been chiefly fixed upon its principles, are apt to resent, as folly, or false humanity, or downright dishonesty, the doubts and criticisms of others, who fancy that the play of all this mighty mechanism is attended with a fearful increase of uncertainty and gnawing care, and, worse still, an unnatural stimulation of the animal passions, ruinous both to body and to mind. The popular belief in general progress is further confirmed by the authority of works in which the scientific advances of mankind are set forth, in a lucid and attractive form, by thinkers of eminence, such as Sir John Herschel's "Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy," Professor Whewell's "History of the Inductive Sciences"--works both of them certainly of the highest value, but still more perhaps by such a production as the "Kosmos" of Humboldt, in which all the treasures of human discovery are brought together in one grand and overwhelming combination, and in which speculative studies of the widest range, and a personal experience rich beyond parallel, concur in representing all the great men of our race, and all the families of which it consists, as consciously or unconsciously contributing to the attainment of one great and ever-growing yet harmonious result. In reading that wonderful work, which could scarcely have arisen anywhere but in Germany, in which physical science, in the whole of its wide extent, is taken up into the region of imagination, and by the transmuting power of genius reproduced as poetry, it is difficult for the mind, spell-bound and carried away by the charm, to avoid forgetting the fact that sin and unhappiness surround us— nay, are within us, and that this deified human intellect is still

the companion of low wants and unworthy aims, and its cry of anguish far sharper than was ever heard in those early days, when on the wide plains and under the clear skies of hither Asia, the founders of science first cast their eyes upwards to the ever-during stars.

The idea of a continued progress of mankind, not only in knowledge but in virtue, is comparatively modern. The earlier and long prevalent notion was that of a certain circular movement in the life of nations corresponding to the life of the individual in its successive stages of youth, maturity, and decline. Such, to go no earlier, was in substance the theory of Vico in his Scienza Nuova. A view somewhat similar was taken by Herder, in his great work on the "Philosophy of History," though the condition of the human race, considered as a whole, seemed to him to be progressive. In his mind, however, the two distinct conceptions of intellectual and moral progress were not separated with precision, and he generally assumes, without attempting to prove, that an increase of knowledge must bring with it an increase of virtue. But the idea of an indefinite moral progress has more immediately come to us, singularly enough, from a work written by a fugitive from the emissaries of Robespierre, and one who ultimately committed suicide in prison to avoid the guillotine. It is impossible not to admire the courage, and to lament the fate of Condorcet, but his sketch of the progress of the human race is a shallow performance. It was an attempt to expound a law manifesting itself amidst the most complex and multitudinous phenomena with which the human mind can deal, and Condorcet had scarcely even that imperfect acquaintance with the facts, which sometimes enables the intuitive glance of genius to anticipate the results of investigation. The way of thinking prevalent in France at the close of the last century was indeed a dogmatism as narrow as that of any theological sect, and Condorcet did little more than interpret the philosophical orthodoxy of his contemporaries.

Theory of Comte.

By later writers two great theories of social progress have been offered, which are of much higher pretension. One of these is from a French thinker, M. Comte; the other from Hegel, a German. In the brilliant history of French science, there is scarcely a greater name than that of M. Comte; but the character of the national mind is strong in him, and no thinker whose training has been either English or German will admit that the French mind occupies the highest level in the moral sciences. The French intellect developes not merely with completeness, but with rapidity and beautiful clearness, whatever is susceptible of demonstration. Along the various lines of the exact sciences, it flashes as it were from truth to truth, somewhat in the fashion of Newton, who is said to have often passed from theorem to theorem of Euclid in early life without going through the reasonings. This rapid mathematical movement of thought is apparent in everything. The French people work out general maxims deductively to their extreme results in morals and politics in the course of a year, whilst a century would hardly accomplish the same process in England. But this quickness in perceiving truths logically related is of no avail, but rather the contrary, when it becomes necessary to deal with the moral nature of man, of which the phenomena are wholly different; in which convictions are found firmly entertained by the best minds after very wide inquiry, which no dazzling fence of logic can disturb, and which hold their ground by a kind of calm self-assertion in the teeth of all possible logical summonses to disappear.

Gibbon, whose massive intellectual character, in spite of its defects, gives weight to his opinion, rejoiced that he had discontinued mathematical studies before they blunted his perception of the finer feelings of moral evidence. And Plato's famous requirement of geometry at the entrance to the Academy, evidently pointed to that science as merely a preparatory discipline, necessary for those who aspired to a higher kind of truth. I do