The Idea Of Progress | Page 6

a rival doctrine. The old legend of a "golden
age" of simplicity, from which man had fallen away, was generally
accepted as truth; and leading thinkers combined it with the doctrine of
a gradual sequence of social and material improvements [Footnote: In
the masterly survey of early Greek history which Thucydides prefixed
to his work, he traces the social progress of the Greeks in historical
times, and finds the key to it in the increase of wealth.] during the
subsequent period of decline. We find the two views thus combined,
for instance, in Plato's Laws, and in the earliest reasoned history of
civilisation written by Dicaearchus, a pupil of Aristotle. [Footnote:
Aristotle's own view is not very clear. He thinks that all arts, sciences,
and institutions have been repeatedly, or rather an infinite number of
times (word in Greek) discovered in the past and again lost.
Metaphysics, xi. 8 ad fin.; Politics, iv. 10, cp. ii. 2. An infinite number
of times seems to imply the doctrine of cycles.] But the simple life of
the first age, in which men were not worn with toil, and war and
disease were unknown, was regarded as the ideal State to which man
would lie only too fortunate if he could return. He had indeed at a
remote time ill the past succeeded in ameliorating some of the
conditions of his lot, but such ancient discoveries as fire or ploughing
or navigation or law-giving did not suggest the guess that new
inventions might lead ultimately to conditions in which life would be
more complex but as happy as the simple life of the primitive world.
But, if some relative progress might be admitted, the general view of
Greek philosophers was that they were living in a period of inevitable
degeneration and decay--inevitable because it was prescribed by the

nature of the universe. We have only an imperfect knowledge of the
influential speculations of Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and Empedocles, but
we may take Plato's tentative philosophy of history to illustrate the
trend and the prejudices of Greek thought on this subject. The world
was created and set going by the Deity, and, as his work, it was perfect;
but it was not immortal and had in it the seeds of decay. The period of
its duration is 72,000 solar years. During the first half of this period the
original uniformity and order, which were impressed upon it by the
Creator, are maintained under his guidance; but then it reaches a point
from which it begins, as it were, to roll back; the Deity has loosened his
grip of the machine, the order is disturbed, and the second 36,000 years
are a period of gradual decay and degeneration. At the end of this time,
the world left to itself would dissolve into chaos, but the Deity again
seizes the helm and restores the original conditions, and the whole
process begins anew. The first half of such a world-cycle corresponds
to the Golden Age of legend in which men lived happily and simply;
we have now unfortunately reached some point in the period of
decadence.
Plato applies the theory of degradation in his study of political
communities. [Footnote: Plato's philosophy of history. In the myth of
the Statesman and the last Books of the Republic. The best elucidation
of these difficult passages will be found in the notes and appendix to
Book viii. in J. Adam's edition of the Republic (1902).] He conceives
his own Utopian aristocracy as having existed somewhere towards the
beginning of the period of the world's relapse, when things were not so
bad, [Footnote: Similarly he places the ideal society which he describes
in the Critias 9000 years before Solon. The state which he plans in the
Laws is indeed imagined as a practicable project in his own day, but
then it is only a second-best. The ideal state of which Aristotle sketched
an outline (Politics, iv. v.) is not set either in time or in place.] and
exhibits its gradual deterioration, through the successive stages of
timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and despotism. He explains this
deterioration as primarily caused by a degeneration of the race, due to
laxity and errors in the State regulation of marriages, and the
consequent birth of biologically inferior individuals.
The theories of Plato are only the most illustrious example of the
tendency characteristic of Greek philosophical thinkers to idealise the

immutable as possessing a higher value than that which varies. This
affected all their social speculations. They believed in the ideal of an
absolute order in society, from which, when it is once established, any
deviation must be for the worse. Aristotle, considering the subject from
a practical point of view, laid down that changes in an established
social order are undesirable, and should be as few and slight as