The Idea of Progress

that in no period in the past had man's lot been happier than in the present. Such an inquiry was undertaken by the Chevalier de Chastellux. H

re Progress. It betrays the influence both of the Encyclopaedists and of the Economists. Chastellux is convinced that human nature can be indefinitely moulded by institutions

nality of Chastellux lay in concentrating attention on the eudaemonic issue, in examining each historical period for the purpose of discovering whether people on the whole were happy and enviable. Ha

rganised societies, and if we are to condemn modern civilisation and its prospects, we must find our term of comparison not in an imaginary golden age but in a known historical epoch. And we must be

"We are compelled to acknowledge that what is called the bel age of Greece was a time of pain and torture for humanity." And in ancient history, generally, "slavery alone sufficed to make man's condition a hundred times worse than it is at present." The miseries of life in the Roman period are even more apparent than in the Greek

ious or less sanguinary, peoples more patient or quiet, crimes rarer, punishments less cruel, treaties more faithfully observed, or wars

enlightenment of his own day, was a condition of social progress. But alone it would not have been enough, as is proved by the fact that the intellectual brilliancy of the great age of Greece exerted no beneficent effects on the well-being of the people. Nor indeed was there any perceptible improvement in the prospect o

ies, like organisms, have the care of self-preservation impressed upon them by pain; the human mind, hitherto exercised on agreeable objects, falls back with more energy on useful objects; a more succ

htenment would be ineffective without the co-operation of political events, and no

and 52): "Never did the world offer such a spectacle. Europe has reached such a high degree of power that history has nothing to compare with it. It is virtually a federative republic, composed of empires and kingdoms, and the most powerful that has ever existed."] All the powerful nations are burdened with debt. War, too, is a much more difficult enterprise than it used to be; every campaign of the king of Prussia has been more arduous than all the conquests of Attila. It looks as if the Peace of 1762-3 possessed elements of finality. The chief danger he discerns in the overseas policy of the English-auri sacra fames. Divination of this kind has never been happy; a greater thinker, Auguste Comte, was to venture on more dogmatic predictions of the cessation of wars, which the even

the greatest number of individuals." Now, for the first time in human history, intellectual enlightenment, other circumstances fortunately concurring, has brought about a condition of things, in which this object can no longer be ignored, and there is a

, to compare two states of society and determine that in one more happiness was enjoyed than in the other. The happiness of an individual requires a certain degree of harmony between his faculties and his environment. But there is always a natural tendency towards the e

rical foundation than Voltaire's Essay on Manners had supplied. It provided the optimists with new arguments against Rousseau, and must have done much to spread and confirm faith in perfectibility. [Footnote: Soon after the publication of the book of Chas