The Idea of Progress: An Inguiry into Its Origin and Growth

id before the Academy of Dijon a theory of historical Regress. This Academy had offered a prize for the best essay on the question whether the revival of sciences and arts had contribut

win the prize, though this second essa

me issue had been raised in England, though in a different form, by Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, the scandalous book which aimed at proving that it is not the virtues and amiable qualities of man that are the cement of civilised society, but the vices of its members wh

the best in this harmonious world. "The ideas he had formed," wrote Mandeville, "of the goodness and excellency of our nature were as romantic and chimerical

al goodness of man; he agreed with Mandeville that innocence of manners is incompatible with the conditions

is a real depravity beneath the fair semblance and "our souls are corrupted as our sciences and arts advance to perfection." Nor is this only a modern phenomenon; "the evils due to our vain curiosity are as old as the world." For it is a law of history that morals fall and rise in correspondence with the progress and decline of the arts and sciences as regularly as the tides answer to the phases of the moon. This "law" is exemp

es concessions which undo the effect of his impeachment. The essay did not establish even a plausible case, but it was paradoxical and suggestive, and attracted more attention than Turgot's th

oblem; and to solve it he had to consider the "state of nature" which Hobbes had conceived as a state of war and Locke as a state of peace. Rousseau imagines our first savage ancestors living in isolation, wandering in the forests, occasionally co-operating, and differing from the animals only by the possession of a faculty for improving themsel

iod, not the original state of nature, that Rousseau cons

as the least exposed to revolutions and the best for man; and that he can have left it only through some fatal chance which, for the common advantage, should never have occurred. The example of the savages who have almost all been found in this state seems to bear o

ure entailed the origin of property in land. Moral and social inequality were introduced by the man who first enclosed a

d have remained safe and content, he set out on the fatal road which led to the calamities of civilisation. We need not follow Rousseau in his description of those calamities which he attributes to wealth and the artificial conditions of society. His indictment was too general and rhetorical to make much impression. In truth, a more powerful and comprehensive case against civilised society was drawn up about the same time, though with a very different motive, by one whose thought represented all that was opposed to Rousseau's teaching. Burke's early work, A Vindication of Natural Society, [Footn

ousseau 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

of Progress had so far left the masses out of account. Rousseau contrasted the splendour of the French court, the luxury of the opulent, the enlightenment of those who had the opportunity of education, with the hard lot of the ignorant mass of peasants, whose toil paid for the luxury of many of the idle enlightened people who amused themselves at Paris. The horror of this contrast, which left Voltaire cold, was the poignant motive which inspired Rousseau, a man of the people, in constructing his new doctrine. The existing inequality seemed an injustice which rendered the self-complacency of the age revolting. If this is the result of progressive civilisation, what is progress worth? Th

doctrines see Guerrier's monograph, L'Abbe de Mably (1886), where it is shown that among "the theories which determined in advance the course of the events of 1789" the Abbe's played a role which has not been duly recognised.] They ascribed evils of civilisation to inequality arising from the existence of private property, but Morelly rejected the view of the "bold sophist" Rousseau that science and art were to blame. He thought that aided by science and learning man might reach a state based on communism, resembling th

acted by the idea of the simplification of society, and met Rousseau so far as

tion, a limit more conformable to the felicity of man in general and far less distant from the savage state than is imagined; but how to return to it, having left it, or how to remain in it, if we were there? I know not."

Bougainville was not seriously meant, but it illustrates the fact

ven the innate tendency of man to improve his lot. To return to the simpler life of the forests-or to any bygone stage-would be denaturer l'homme, it would be contrary to nature; and

practice of more refined luxury. The question, therefore, whether luxury is injurious to the general happiness occupied the attention of the philosophers. [Footnote: D'Holbach, ib. iii. 7; Diderot, art. Luxe in the Encylopaedia; Helvetius, De l'esprit, i. 3.] If it is injurious, does it not follow that the forces on which admittedly Progress depends are leading in an undesirable direction? Should they be obstru

Considerations on the lot of Men in the various Epochs of History, appeared in 1772 and had a wide circulation. [Footnote: There was a new edition in 1776 with an important additional chapter.] It is a survey of the history of the western world and aims at proving the certainty of future Progress. It betrays the inf

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