J. B. Bury

“ Feeling that he is personally doomed, he consoles himself with brooding on the time, however remote, when the sun will shine "on an earth of none but freemen, with no master save reason; for tyrants and slaves, priests and their stupid or hypocritical tools, will all have disappeared." He is not satisfied with affirming generally the certainty of an indefinite progress in enlightenment and social welfare. He sets himself to think out its nature, to forecast its direction, and determine its goal, and insists, as his predecessors had never done, on the prospects of the distant future. ”

“ If civilisation has been the curse of man, it might seem that the logical course for Rousseau to recommend was its destruction. This was the inference which Voltaire drew in Timon, to laugh the whole theory out of court. But Rousseau did not suggest a movement to destroy all the libraries and all the works of art in the world, to put to death or silence all the savants, to pull down the cities, and burn the ships. He was not a mere dreamer, and his Arcadia was no more than a Utopian ideal, by the light of which he conceived that the society of his own day might be corrected and transformed. ”

“ Jouffroy then presented the world with what he calls the FATALITY OF INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT, to take the place of Providence or Destiny. It is a fatality, he is careful to explain, which, so far from compromising, presupposes individual liberty. For it is not like the fatality of sensual impulse which guides the brute creation. What it implies is this: if a thousand men have the same idea of what is good, this idea will govern their conduct in spite of their passions, because, being reasonable and free, they are not blindly submissive to passion, but can deliberate and choose. ”

“ The variety of the phases of civilisation that have appeared on earth is due to the fact that the possible manifestations of human nature are very numerous and that they must all be realised. The lower forms are those in which the best, which means the most human, faculties of our nature are undeveloped. The highest has not yet been realised. "The flower of humanity, captive still in its germ, will blossom out one day into the true form of man like unto God, in a state of which no terrestrial man can imagine the greatness and the majesty." ”

“ We saw how the heliocentric astronomy, by dethroning man from his privileged position in the universe of space and throwing him back on his own efforts, had helped that idea to compete with the idea of a busy Providence. He now suffers a new degradation within the compass of his own planet. Evolution, shearing him of his glory as a rational being specially created to be the lord of the earth, traces a humble pedigree for him. And this second degradation was the decisive fact which has established the reign of the idea of Progress. ”

“ The world consists of a multitude of fools, and a mere handful of reasonable men. Men's passions will always be the same and will produce wars in the future as in the past. Civilisation makes no difference; it is little more than a veneer.
Even if theory had not stood in his way, Fontenelle was the last man who was likely to dream dreams of social improvement. He was temperamentally an Epicurean, of the same refined stamp as Epicurus himself, and he enjoyed throughout his long life—he lived to the age of a hundred—the tranquillity which was the true Epicurean ideal. ”

“ Condorcet, like all his circle, ignored the preponderant part which institutions have played in social development. So far as he considered them at all, he saw in them obstacles to the free play of human reason; not the spontaneous expression of a society corresponding to its needs or embodying its ideals, but rather machinery deliberately contrived for oppressing the masses and keeping them in chains. He did not see that if the Progress in which he believed is a reality, its possibility depends on the institutions and traditions which give to societies their stability. ”

“ Thus in the seventies and eighties of the last century the idea of Progress was becoming a general article of faith. Some might hold it in the fatalistic form that humanity moves in a desirable direction, whatever men do or may leave undone; others might believe that the future will depend largely on our own conscious efforts, but that there is nothing in the nature of things to disappoint the prospect of steady and indefinite advance. The majority did not inquire too curiously into such points of doctrine, but received it in a vague sense as a comfortable addition to their convictions. ”

“ This is a doctrine of Progress, but he distinctly opposes the hypothesis of a final and unique state of perfection as the goal of history, which would imply that earlier generations exist for the sake of the later and suffer in order to ensure the felicity of remote posterity—a theory which offends his sense of justice and fitness. On the contrary, man can realise happiness equally in every stage of civilisation. All forms of society are equally legitimate, the imperfect as well as the perfect; all are ends in themselves, not mere stages on the way to something better. ”

“ Progress, therefore, is natural and necessary, and to criticise or condemn it by appealing to nature is only to divide the house of nature against itself.
If d'Holbach had pressed his logic further, he would have taken a more indulgent and calmer view of the past history of mankind. He would have acknowledged that institutions and opinions to which modern reason may give short shrift were natural and useful in their day, and would have recognised that at any stage of history the heritage of the past is no less necessary to progress than the solvent power of new ideas. ”

“ The history of society presents a continuous alternation of light and darkness, reason and extravagance, humanity and barbarism; but in the succession of ages we can observe good gradually increasing in ever greater proportion. What educated man, if he is not a misanthrope or misled by vain declamations, would really wish he had lived in the barbarous and poetical time which Homer paints in such fair and terrifying colours? ”

“ A commission of eminent workers of each class will determine the place of every individual according to his capacities. Complete equality is absurd; inequality, based on merit, is reasonable and necessary. It is a modern error to distrust state authority. A power directing national forces is requisite, to propose great ideas and to make the innovations necessary for Progress. Such an organisation will promote progress in all domains: in science by co-operation, in industry by credit, and in art too, for artists will learn to express the ideas and sentiments of their own age. ”

“ 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. ”

“ From the exaltation of Greek and Roman antiquity to a position of unattainable superiority, especially in the field of knowledge, the degeneration of humanity was an easy and natural inference. If the Greeks in philosophy and science were authoritative guides, if in art and literature they were unapproachable, if the Roman republic, as Machiavelli thought, was an ideal state, it would seem that the powers of Nature had declined, and she could no longer produce the same quality of brain. So long as this paralysing theory prevailed, it is manifest that the idea of Progress could not appear. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As years go on, life in its widest sense offers more and more materials "which it is the province of the Poet to embody and combine." This is evidently true; and would it not seem to follow that literature is not excluded from participating in the common development of civilisation? One of the latest of the champions of the Moderns, the Abbe Terrasson, maintained that "to separate the general view of the progress of the human mind in regard to natural science, and in regard to belles-lettres, would be a fitting expedient to a man who had two souls, but it is useless to him who has only one." ”

“ Has a mysterious Deity pronounced a secret malediction against the earth?
In this disconsolate mood he is visited by an apparition, who unveils the causes of men's misfortunes and shows that they are due to themselves. Man is governed by natural invariable laws, and he has only to study them to know the springs of his destiny, the causes of his evils and their remedies. The laws of his nature are self-love, desire of happiness, and aversion to pain; these are the simple and prolific principles of everything that happens in the moral world. Man is the artificer of his own fate. ”

“ The illusion of finality is strong. The men of the Middle Ages would have found it hard to imagine that a time was not far off in which the Last Judgement would have ceased to arouse any emotional interest. In the sphere of speculation Hegel, and even Comte, illustrate this psychological limitation: they did not recognise that their own systems could not be final any more than the system of Aristotle or of Descartes. It is science, perhaps, more than anything else—the wonderful history of science in the last hundred years—that has helped us to transcend this illusion. ”

“ We are really the ancients, the Greeks and Romans were younger than we, in respect to the age of the world. And as we look to an old man for greater knowledge of the world than from a young man, so we have good reason to expect far greater things from our own age than from antiquity, because in the meantime the stock of knowledge has been increased by an endless number of observations and experiments. Time is the great discoverer, and truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.
Take the three inventions which were unknown to the ancients-printing, gunpowder, and the compass. ”

“ The equality of the sexes was only a logical inference from the general doctrine of equality to which Condorcet's social theory is reducible. For him the goal of political progress is equality; equality is to be the aim of social effort—the ideal of the Revolution.
For it is the multitude of men that must be considered—the mass of workers, not the minority who live on their labours. Hitherto they have been neglected by the historian as well as by the statesman. The true history of humanity is not the history of some men. ”