The Idea Of Progress | Page 5

value of such observations was determined, and must be estimated, by
the whole context of ideas in which they occurred. It is from its
bearings on the future that Progress derives its value, its interest, and its
power. You may conceive civilisation as having gradually advanced in
the past, but you have not got the idea of Progress until you go on to
conceive that it is destined to advance indefinitely in the future. Ideas
have their intellectual climates, and I propose to show briefly in this
Introduction that the intellectual climates of classical antiquity and the
ensuing ages were not propitious to the birth of the doctrine of Progress.
It is not till the sixteenth century that the obstacles to its appearance
definitely begin to be transcended and a favourable atmosphere to be
gradually prepared.
[Footnote: The history of the idea of Progress has been treated briefly
and partially by various French writers; e.g. Comte, Cours de
philosophie positive, vi. 321 sqq.; Buchez, Introduction a la science de
l'histoire, i. 99 sqq. (ed. 2, 1842); Javary, De l'idee de progres (1850);
Rigault, Histoire de la querelle des Anciens et des Modernes (1856);
Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartesienne (1854); Caro,
Problemes de la morale sociale (1876); Brunetiere, La Formation de
l'idee de progres, in Etudes critiques, 5e serie. More recently M. Jules
Delvaille has attempted to trace its history fully, down to the end of the
eighteenth century. His Histoire de l'idee de progres (1910) is planned

on a large scale; he is erudite and has read extensively. But his
treatment is lacking in the power of discrimination. He strikes one as
anxious to bring within his net, as theoriciens du progres, as many
distinguished thinkers as possible; and so, along with a great deal that
is useful and relevant, we also find in his book much that is irrelevant.
He has not clearly seen that the distinctive idea of Progress was not
conceived in antiquity or in the Middle Ages, or even in the
Renaissance period; and when he comes to modern times he fails to
bring out clearly the decisive steps of its growth. And he does not seem
to realise that a man might be "progressive" without believing in, or
even thinking about, the doctrine of Progress. Leonardo da Vinci and
Berkeley are examples. In my Ancient Greek Historians (1909) I dwelt
on the modern origin of the idea (p. 253 sqq.). Recently Mr. R. H.
Murray, in a learned appendix to his Erasmus and Luther, has
developed the thesis that Progress was not grasped in antiquity (though
he makes an exception of Seneca),--a welcome confirmation.]
I
It may, in particular, seem surprising that the Greeks, who were so
fertile in their speculations on human life, did not hit upon an idea
which seems so simple and obvious to us as the idea of Progress. But if
we try to realise their experience and the general character of their
thought we shall cease to wonder. Their recorded history did not go
back far, and so far as it did go there had been no impressive series of
new discoveries suggesting either an indefinite increase of knowledge
or a growing mastery of the forces of nature. In the period in which
their most brilliant minds were busied with the problems of the
universe men might improve the building of ships, or invent new
geometrical demonstrations, but their science did little or nothing to
transform the conditions of life or to open any vista into the future.
They were in the presence of no facts strong enough to counteract that
profound veneration of antiquity which seems natural to mankind, and
the Athenians of the age of Pericles or of Plato, though they were
thoroughly, obviously "modern" compared with the Homeric Greeks,
were never self- consciously "modern" as we are.
1.
The indications that human civilisation was a gradual growth, and that
man had painfully worked his way forward from a low and savage state,

could not, indeed, escape the sharp vision of the Greeks. For instance,
Aeschylus represents men as originally living at hazard in sunless caves,
and raised from that condition by Prometheus, who taught them the arts
of life. In Euripides we find a similar recognition of the ascent of
mankind to a civilised state, from primitive barbarism, some god or
other playing the part of Prometheus. In such passages as these we have,
it may be said, the idea that man has progressed; and it may fairly be
suggested that belief in a natural progress lay, for Aeschylus as well as
for Euripides, behind the poetical fiction of supernatural intervention.
But these recognitions of a progress were not incompatible with the
widely-spread belief in an initial degeneration of the human race; nor
did it usually appear as